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This is: Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations, published by Ardenlk on the Effective Altruism Forum.
intend to start working at 80,000 Hours this September, and in the meantime they're contracting me to write some articles about careers and doing good, including this one. Nonetheless, this article represents my personal opinions only, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the 80,000 Hours team.
An EA Forum post from earlier this year demonstrated the difficulty of getting a job in effective altruism organisations, the frustration many people feel as a result, and the sense that other ways of doing good are not as highly valued by the EA community as they should be. People in the community have published a number of thoughtful responses.
I am currently doing some part-time contract work for 80,000 Hours, and I plan to start working there full-time in the fall. As such, I’ve been thinking a lot about 80,000 Hours’ research. And I wanted to add to the discussion a few ways I think that 80,000 Hours content might have inadvertently contributed to these problems, as well as some ideas for how people can get more out of their advice.
The main takeaways are:
Roles outside explicitly EA organizations are most people’s best career options.
Sometimes these roles aren’t as visible to the community, including to 80,000 Hours, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t highly impactful.
Many especially impactful roles require specific skills. If none of these roles are currently a great fit for you, but one could be if you developed the right skills, it can be worth it to take substantial time to do so.
You should use 80,000 Hours to figure out what your best career is and how to get there, not what “the” best careers are.
I haven’t seen people talk that much about the last point, so I spend the most time on it.
Over-representation of EA organizations in 80,000 Hours content
Given unlimited resources, 80,000 Hours could catalog every job opportunity that might be someone's best option, and then direct that person toward it. But 80,000 Hours is a small team, and has only been around for 7 years. Because of this, their ideas and recommendations should be treated as tentative and growing over time.
Not only that, they are growing outward from the knowledge most central to EA. This means that 80,000 Hours is less likely to know about, and thus less likely to recommend, opportunities that are less familiar within the EA community.
It will be rare for an opportunity at an EA organization to escape their notice. But many great jobs in the wider world never come to 80,000 Hours' attention, and when they do, there may be no time to look into them.
Thus, opportunities at EA organizations are more likely to be featured -- in write-ups, in the job-board, in coaching advice -- than opportunities at unaffiliated organizations that are less familiar to the EA community. And this will be the case even if the roles at the less familiar organizations have higher potential impact.
The contrast between career paths that 80,000 Hours explicitly recommends and those it doesn't often reflects differences in those paths’ effectiveness, but sometimes it just reflects differences in how much they've been vetted. Just as GiveWell's recommendations might be missing an effective nonprofit because they haven't yet looked into it, so might the 80,000 Hours job board be missing many promising roles for high-impact work. And this is more likely when the role or the problem it addresses is less familiar to the EA community, and so less likely to be researched by the 80,000 Hours team.
Talk of talent gaps
One thing the original Forum poster emphasized is that because they had heard there were “talent gaps” in the EA community, they thought getting a job at an EA organization would ...
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