Thread by @TaliaRinger

I keep telling myself to blog about the job search process last year, in service of those of you applying next year, but I rarely have the motivation to blog. So I'm going to try to put together a quick Tweet thread and add to it as ideas come to me.🧵

I was applying only for research-focused tenure-track positions. I started thinking about the job search really, really early in grad school, way earlier than most people do, like maybe third year or so. So I felt ready.

And then a pandemic happened.

I guess that's life for you? In any case, the economy collapsed, and that was really terrifying. Schools started to enact hiring freezes. I remember crying to my parents over the summer and saying there would be no more jobs. I felt extra pressure to get my POPL paper in.

But also, like, I looked at the world around me, and it was awful. I hated every second I spent doing research that summer; it made me feel like a bad person. I wanted to be helping.

I went to meetings with local politicians, volunteered with food banks, distributed masks and voter registration forms at Black Lives Matter protests. I couldn't get myself to work hard on my research, and ADHD made working from home really really difficult to begin with.

I still tried to submit a paper, and it was incredibly stressful and the paper was fairly good, but reviewers weren't quite happy with it. I felt so, so angry that expectations hadn't changed at all, even though millions of people were dying? Hello? Compassion, anyone?

It was a bad summer. But after processing this a bit, I took an honest look at the economy and I knew something would have to budge in my expectations. I could 1) apply for some postdocs as a backup, 2) apply much more broadly than I'd planned, or 3) wait another year.

I really didn't want to do (1) at all. It made forming new sustainable relationships too difficult, and I was already almost 30 and single.

Around this time, for this reason, I chose to freeze my eggs. If I needed a postdoc, I wanted to feel OK about that.

(I want to have kids in the next few years.)

I accepted that (3) might happen. I talked through that scenario with my advisor. I'd stay and do a postdoc funded by a grant we'd applied for, if we got it. At least, then, I could keep dating in Seattle.

But I decided to go with (2). I'd been planning to apply to about 30 different schools. My advisor estimated that there would be about half as many jobs. So I decided to try to apply for 60 different schools. I was much less picky about places I applied to.

If I thought there was even a chance I'd be happy at a place for a few years, I applied. I accepted that this might mean leaving the US, or living in the middle of nowhere. (heh)

In practice, there weren't quite 60 schools that fit these criteria that had open calls for applications. It looks like I applied to 50 different departments (sometimes multiple departments at the same school).

One thing that was really hard about this past year, and that probably applies to many recession years, is that the number of schools with calls for applications didn't necessarily map reasonably to the number of slots. Many places had just one, very specific slot.

To make things worse, it is honestly impossible to tell from the outside whether a school is serious about keeping that slot specific, or whether a school can conjure other slots for you or whatever. (UIUC was one of those schools with one slot, and yet they hired several of us)

OK, so I applied to 50 different departments. I kept one private spreadsheet with my preferences, which I updated throughout the year. I kept another with upcoming deadlines, which I shared with letter writers.

Writing my materials was, dare I say, fun? I looked at a whole bunch of examples from other folks and used those to inspire my own. They're still online:

dependenttyp.es/materials/rese…
dependenttyp.es/materials/teac…
dependenttyp.es/materials/dive…

I started my job talk very early, too; I'd had a draft from a seminar at a school the year before. I did another pre-interview, which I think was a net negative (though the other was a net positive, so it's too hard to know ahead of time)

And I kept working on my POPL rejection, which I turned into a PLDI submission and posted on arXiv. I linked to it in my research statement, hoping maybe some schools would at least look at the recent work and like it.

It was a weird year, but things rolled in really, really slowly. Like, I heard from two schools about interviews, then had radio silence for way too long. And I was really nervous there were no more coming. But actually not even all of the applications had been posted yet!

OK, so my first interview as at Caltech. This was super, super, super cool. I hadn't expected to get an interview at Caltech, and it was really fun! Virtual was hard; I needed captions in all interviews that followed after this. Planning to have food around was hard.

For papers, for each school I interviewed at, what I did was look at my schedule and, for each faculty member I met with, print two papers from the last few years that sounded cool to me. I read each of them until I had a single interesting thought, wrote that down, and moved on

I didn't get an offer from Caltech. But it was a really fun interview, and I mean that. I had never really thought seriously about machine learning for proofs until that interview, but I read some papers about inverse problems for that interview

It occurred to me that decompilation is an inverse problem, and inverse problems are approximate decompilation. This was cool because I was working on a decompiler, and it was hard to get human-friendly results! So I actually pitched this in a 1:1 and refined it

The whole interview went well, I think, just Caltech wasn't the right fit for me---too scary to be the almost-lone programming languages researcher, and I think they sensed that from me in my answers.

So basically, I got rejected from Caltech, but I think I got rejected for the right reasons.

I was still really sad. Who wouldn't be?

UCLA interviewed me, but in pandemic style, had specific criteria for whom they could hire---they were competing with the entire engineering department for just a few slots. It went OK, but I never heard from them, and eventually reached out and found out I had almost no chance

Schools that had recruited me rejected me without even interviewing me, which really crushed me for like a day until I moved on because that's how these things work

OK, but things got better. I interviewed at UMass Amherst, Aarhus, and Vermont after that. I got a couple of offers! After the first offer I really knew things were going to be OK. (To negotiate, I made heavy use of the amazing CS-wide faculty candidates Slack.)

And then I thought things were done. Except a Virginia interview eventually rolled in. And UIUC posted their call for applications pretty much when I thought the season was over and was almost ready to make a decision.

At that point, my PLDI paper had finally been accepted! Cool! But UIUC's call for applicants actually said they were only recruiting in quantum? And they said they'd recruit "exceptional candidates" beyond that, and I was like, "pfft, I'm not exceptional"

Anyways I don't know why but I impulsively decided that I'd just try to apply anyways, since a man in a similar position would probably apply. (That was mostly my guiding principle for negotiating, too, and I sometimes polled the men in the faculty candidates Slack.)

Surprisingly, I got an interview. But I was already doing second visits when they were still evaluating candidates for offers. (Second visits were in person, pretty much solely outdoor masked meetings, which I was extremely grateful for)

So at my second visits I basically asked questions as if I'd get a UIUC offer. It was weird and places thought it was weird. But I wanted to be ready to make that decision.

I'm glad I did that, since I got an offer that surprised the hell out of me. But the decision was hard!!!

I AGONIZED over the decision and felt so much guilt and sadness even though I knew it was a really, really amazing problem to have, a problem lots of people would love to have, especially during a recession. It made me feel meta-bad to feel bad despite the situation being good

I spoke to lots and lots of people, and ultimately made a call I think I'm sure I tried to justify objectively, but probably it was something arbitrary, some intuition or feeling. As my mom said, "whatever decision you make is the right one"

Okay, now backing up a bit.

Throughout all of this, I was dealing with a serial harasser. Do you all remember that?

Pedro had recently bullied Anima (whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Caltech) off of Twitter. Now he was going for Timnit. Seeing his behavior and knowing what he was like at UW, I wrote about it so people would know not to engage.

Then a serial harasser Pedro had been talking to off of Twitter targeted me for this. He found my diversity statement, which wrote about my experiences with mental illness. He Tweeted it probably dozens of times and said I wasn't fit for employment and needed help.

I was not fully out yet about my experiences with depression and PTSD. I had always planned to wait until I had job security. My diversity statement, I figured, would be read only by the people who care most about diversity, with whom that knowledge is likely safe.

But he found it on my website and weaponized it against me, during the time when I was most vulnerable about job security. I cannot begin to describe the agony and terror I felt during that time.

He also emailed me and threatened to contact potential employers and tell them I'm mentally ill and not fit for employment. I told him to never contact me again, and contacted a lawyer.

I don't keep many secrets. One of the reasons I don't keep secrets is because I think secrets leave you vulnerable to blackmail. I'd spent a lot of time thinking about what I'd do if someone blackmailed me, and I'd known ahead of time I'd own the narrative. Bezos dick pic style.

So I did that. I Tweeted openly to the entire world that I had depression and PTSD from abuse. During the most vulnerable part of my job search. I showed what the serial harasser was doing to weaponize this against me.

It went viral. Oops

OK so now 30,000 people knew I was mentally ill, surely that was eno---oh, just kidding, also it found its way into newspaper articles. I was in the news. OK, I guess that's a thing, now I'm suddenly a mental health advocate, I guess I'll own that

OK so during my job search I got famous for being harassed and being mentally ill. Also the harasser was contacting Timnit and others, and I tried to help them neutralize the threat. I also worked with others to try to neutralize Pedro's abusive tactics

I spent many nights panicking, terrified, sometimes immediately before interviews. I got in pretty serious arguments with people who are much more powerful than I am about this, some of them during interviews. I got extremely emotionally invested in the Google fiasco.

After all, sharing a harasser is a really nice way to make friends very, very, very quickly.

I don't want to know how many hours I put into that Google fiasco, the harasser, and neutralizing other abusive threats on Twitter. Probably hundreds during my job search. Most of it I can't even talk about, and that makes me really sad sometimes

Timnit retweeted my diversity statement, though, in a show of support. And I think this really made me feel a lot better. And it got me positive attention, not just harassment. And I'm happy I made new friends, even if the circumstances were objectively awful

It's hard to think of a good takeaway for that part of the story. My personal takeaway was to be more power cognizant on Twitter. I'd thought I could publicly fight abusive faculty, but it turns out I was actually vulnerable in ways I hadn't considered.

If I could do it differently, I'd have found a white dude with tenure to write about Pedro's abusive tactics within UW for me, so that folks would still know not to engage and would be safe, but I would also be safe until I landed a job.

Still, it turns out hiring committees these days are totally cool with you being famous for being mentally ill. And will ignore creeps. So, that's really promising. Not everything is bad

OK, so that's my nutty job search season in a nutshell

@ZJAyres does anyone ever become a mental health advocate on purpose

That awful summer was also when I co-chaired PLMW and started @SigplanM. People kept suggesting that I stop doing so much service, but service was the only work-related thing that felt worthwhile in a world that was objectively terrible

https://twitter.com/TaliaRinger/status/1437915193690963972?s=19

Oh I forgot about a couple of other things that happened during my job search.

For one, there was an insurrection attempt. At that point it just felt surreal.

For another, pretty much my entire family except for me tested positive for COVID at some point. My parents actually withheld information about this from me the night before my UCLA interview, then revealed it shortly after.

They were fine, but I spent a whole week panicking that they were going to get really sick and die.

My sister asked if she got sick if I would come and take care of the kids so that our parents wouldn't expose themselves. I agreed. So every time one of the kids was exposed, I prepared myself to drop all interviews and go to Maryland to take care of my niece and nephew

Luckily, my sister never got sick, but this was also weighing on my mind the whole time

My housemate traveled for Christmas, too, and the whole time I was panicking that I'd get sick and miss all of my interviews

I kind of wish hiring committees would do something to extend extra compassion to folks interviewing during a pandemic, though I'm not sure exactly what. Extra flexibility, maybe. (The Caltech gift basket was amazing, though, as was the UMass one)