jonw's mayhem academy

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a trained philosopher and economist and he’s written one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read titled Everybody Lies. The theme of the book is to debunk “common wisdom” through the use of empirical data to show that the answers people give to things like surveys and polls are lies. Stephens-Davidowitz uses internet data, primarily Google Trends, as evidence.

While the topics of the book range from US elections to individual health, the chapter that interested me the most was about doppelgangers. In the context of the book, Seth shows us that many professions, from doctors to sports agents, aren’t actually plying their trade as we see it. They’re really searching for doppelgangers, albeit in an educated and experienced way. The doctor isn’t diagnosing you. Rather, she’s looking for a doppelganger— other people that are like you in age, gender, and lifestyle to see if any of them have your symptoms and became ill. If you’re a close enough match, then you probably have the same illness, and treatment begins. Similarly, the sports agent can’t tell how well a player will be performing in a few years. He uses doppelgangers as a prediction method and is looking for other people that are like the successful players he has now. The 2011 movie Moneyball was about just that.

In short: in the absence of any proper data about what works, we devolve into a cargo cult mentality of just looking for things that are familiar without necessarily understanding the underlying cause.

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I recently wrote an article about getting a job in infosec (information security). I chose that topic because the internet is polluted with articles on the same topic, but there’s no set path for someone to take to end up in an infosec job. It’s a relatively new technology discipline that a lot of people are interested in, and it is evolving rapidly. Consequently, there is no perfect way to become an infosec professional.

I wrote the article anyhow because I have an advantage in that I actually do work in infosec. So, I provided the information that worked for me in the hopes that it might help some other inspiring White Hatter to join the good guys.

Shortly after publishing that article I realized I had just demonstrated what Stephens-Davidowitz proposed. The way I ended up infosec was a long and winding road including stints in the military, college, and working in non-infosec roles in many industries. It was hardly what a new graduate with student loans wants to hear and it would be very hard to duplicate.

I realized that through my article I had offered myself up as a doppelganger. I essentially said that nobody knows how to end up in infosec, really, so just copy people who are in infosec now and hope for the best.

Do doppelganger searches work as a career move?

Employers seem to think so. Read any job ad, especially in technology, and you’ll see a list of requirements the employer is looking for. A degree in this, several years experience in that, and then some soft skills like “self-starter”. The truth is that the employer doesn’t really know why they want some of those skills; they just know that the employees that are working out are the ones with those skills. Or, possibly, those employees don’t have that exact skill set, but they were hired from the same job ad and worked out. If something works, just keep doing it, right?

On the other side of the coin, we have the job searcher. Does it make sense to emulate someone who is successful in the desired field to get hired in that field? I can give you a solid probably on that one. Even though employers probably aren’t all that sure why they require some of the skills they’ve listed, they have decided that is what they want. And we can assume they reached that decision for the reasons in the preceding paragraph. Workers are de-facto subscribers to the theory simply by applying for the job. They are presenting themselves as the doppelganger the hiring agent is looking for.

Can career doppelganger lead you stray?

I will give you a 100% yes answer to this one. I am the worst possible career doppelganger, as I alluded to earlier. Of the people I graduated with that are still working in IT, they’re almost all higher up the food chain than me. They are managers and CEOs by this time, while I remain a lowly systems engineer. While my schoolmates were doing things like upgrading their education and taking progressively more complex roles at work, I was busy sailing the ocean in the Navy and consulting for myself out of my home office. But, at the end of the day, I did end up in infosec.

There are many faster routes to get where I am. In my article about working in infosec, I state that the best way to become a competent infosec worker is to spend a few years in some other technology discipline that has entry-level positions. Become a competent developer, network administrator, or systems administrator and then pivot into infosec. Note that I said a few years. I spent about 15 years to get to the same place. But, to be fair, I wasn’t aiming for a career in infosec, specifically. I just follow interesting work and infosec is the holy grail of interesting work.

Searching for a career doppelganger is a good strategy, but make your choice carefully.

How to choose a career doppleganger

I adhere to the “5-year spoiler rule”. If a movie or show was released over 5 years ago, there’s no such thing as a spoiler. But, if you don’t want know how the 2011 movie Moneyball ends, don’t read the next paragraph.

The movie Moneyball contains a very useful strategy for choosing a doppelganger. The movie tells a story where baseball players had been drafted based solely on gut feel by team scouts. There was no science to it all; the scouts just felt that was the right player. After a sudden loss, the Oakland Athletics team is forced to repopulate with a very limited budget, leaving it unable to afford good players. Enter economist Peter Brand (Paul DePodesta in real life). Brand had developed a system to choose players based almost solely on how their On Base Percentage (OBP) compares with current players. A lot of these players weren’t doing so well and were passed up for the draft. But, many of the good players today also weren’t doing so well at that time in their career. Using OBP, Brand recommended doppelgangers of the current cadre of successful players for draft, and the A’s and broke the league all-time winning streak that year.

Somewhere in there is the answer. You are almost certainly going to be junior to anyone you consider to be a decent doppelganger in your field. So, don’t worry about their qualifications or job title now , ask them where they were 5 years ago. Or, pick one particular thing they are known for that you also want to be known for — their “On Base Percentage”, if you will. Emulating your doppelganger’s path is probably the best way to end up where they are now: in your present.

my shorter content on the fediverse: https://the.mayhem.academy/@jdw

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