Nanashi, this actually looks really cool. I initially thought that the entire functionality of the tool was contained within the "Job Categories" table and didn't click on the blue links until I had written the below because I expected them to be from Wikipedia or something similarly useless. My top bit of feedback is to make the functionality of the links clear (so at least people know to click on one!) I'm preserving my original thoughts for reference below the dashed line. Current thoughts:

• Quartiles are good; I would be curious about deciles as well.
• When I mouseover a line on the salary vs. age graph, the numbers are shown with the lowest salary on top. This is visually disconcerting as the lowest salary line is the bottom-most one on the graph.
• My point about how many years the data is drawn from (see more detail below) is still relevant.
• It's a bit confusing that the y-axis on the salary vs. age graph rescales to the occupation, especially since the lines are shown "rising up" from the x-axis. If I see the lines go up, it unintuitively does not mean that the salary is higher.
• There seem to be lots of duplicate categories at the "Individual Job" level, so less unique rows fit on a screen. Might be an easy way to filter these out.
• I'm confused whether "entry level" means "no degree" and "post-grad" means "bachelors", or whether entry level is bachelors and post-grad is if one has a graduate or doctorate. (I have seen many jobs that require a bachelors referred to as "entry level".
• It would be nice to have a link on the "Individual Jobs" level to the definition of each job category used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (For example, I don't see why Chief Executives get paid lots more than Top Executives, and a description may resolve my confusion.)

Overall, great work and thanks.

Thanks for doing this; some thoughts:

• How many years are you taking this from? Larger n makes things more robust but makes the data less relevant to the current job market. Larger n also necessitates inflation adjustment. May want to say if you've done this or not. Fine either way, but good to know so someone doesn't double-adjust or fail to adjust.
• I'd like to know the salaries of the top and bottom deciles for each job. Yes, data is harder to get, but would be nice to be able to convert competence-delta (relative to others in similar jobs) into an income delta. Perhaps especially useful for people with spiky competence profiles.
• I don't really know why i would care about the Category ID. It seems to be an unnecessary column. It is also confusing that it starts at 11 (not 1) when I sort in descending order.
• I initially misinterpreted the "Entry Level Jobs" and "Post-Grad Jobs" as salaries (for long enough that i wondered whether something had gone screwy with your tool.) I don't know if the failure mode of not reading header text is common or not; if so, may want to display units or something in the table for clarity.

I think that this emphasis on explicit, built-from-scratch mathematical proofs runs counter to your previously expressed suggestion that learning via pattern matching is more efficient than learning via explicit reasoning.

I've found that the emphasis on first principles is often symptomatic of someone who is speaking for their own benefit rather than that of their audience. After all, you're making the unwarranted assumption that A.) your audience wants first principles rather than a practical application, and B.) your audience is, for lack of a better word, too dumb to derive these principles for themselves. It's very easy to convince yourself that you are giving the audience the tools they need to understand what you're saying, when in fact, you're using the audience as a sounding board to help yourself better understand what you're actually saying.

(By the way, I'm using the "royal You" rather than specifically singling out you, Jonah. You caution against this very thing in another post of yours. ).

I was planning on doing similar work for my next, next project. I love what you're doing and agree with the mission (although, I think both the "which career" and the "how to get the career" are about equally taught, and horribly so).

As far as this specific implementation goes, I can tell you what I'd like for my clients. I'd rather have them start with a target income, then only consider jobs above that income... I believe BLS has ways to filter by the salary number, rather than job title, and I think it's essential for what you're trying to do.

I like the graph that shows salary progression at every age. Often career advice just gives you the average entry figure and the average and peak senior figures, which kinda seems predicated upon the 'Career for life' mentality which locks people into professions they dislike. Suggestions, to do or not do with as you see fit, no reply necessary:

Ability to compare multiple jobs simultaneously. Make a note saying the graph will appear once you pick a job, or have it pop up by default on a default job. Center the numerical figures in their cells.

Make the list of jobs and/or the list of categories searchable and associate search keywords to jobs. For example, if I want to find 'Professor', it seems to come under postsecondary teachers, which wouldn't have been something I would have thought of without trawling the list of educators, but I would have found it if I could search by 'Professor' and get the result returned.

'Actuaries', 'Statisticians', 'Mathematicians' seem to have a duplicate entries. Check database for other duplicates by querying for where job names coincide. Have the graph update to say which job you're currently looking at, so the user can be sure it's updated. When hovering on the graph, have the box say e.g. 'Age 40' rather than just '40' to make it obvious what '40' refers to. When hovering on the graph, have the order of the figures in the box correspond to the order on the graph, i.e. give the upper, then median, then bottom figures rather than opposite as it currently is. Track down the figures where you don't have data, or establish that there is not enough data, and let the user know which is the case so they know the provenance of researched or omitted figures.

In general, I think a lot of the time the user will want to come in from an angle of having relatively specific jobs in mind and going from there, rather than working from broad categories to increasingly specific jobs. I'm not immediately sure if or how this should cash out into specific suggestions, though. But maybe something to bear in mind while you're developing the product. Perhaps you could have a mode like the current one and a 'wandering' mode where you start with a specific job then have it compared and linked to related or similar jobs (where the relational and similarity data would have to be put into the database somehow). Maybe a graph interface with nodes?

In the United States the kind of job you can get is strongly correlated with the college you graduate from and to a lesser extend your college grades, so high school students (especially before they determine what college they will go to) face enormous uncertainty over their future job market value.

Are you familiar with 80,000 Hours, which provides career guidance with an emphasis on earning power?

I don't think colleges put anywhere near enough time and resources into, as you say, "how to get a job on your chosen field." Professors don't have the background to really help job-seeking students who don't want to be professors. Just telling students the basics of networking could be of great value to many of them. Summer internships are a huge deal now for students who want to go into business. Work visa issues can be a big deal for many international students. I'm an econ professor at Smith College.

It is a truism that learning takes time. The issue is that we punish people for taking time to learn thoroughly. Our training/education regimes are largely designed to turn out large numbers of semi-numerate engineers in a short time rather than to produce any number of fluent scientists of any period of time.