Survey of EA org leaders about what skills and experience they most need, their staff/donations trade-offs, problem prioritisation, and more.

Hi Peter,

It sounds like you mostly agree with our take on earning to give in the high impact careers article. That article is fairly new but it will become one of the central pages on the site after a forthcoming re-organisation. Let us know if there are other articles on the site you think are inconsistent with that take - we can take a look and potentially bring them into line.

We agree with you that earning to give can be a genuinely great option and don’t intend to demoralize people who choose that path. As we write in that article, we believe that “any graduate in a high income country can have a significant impact” by earning to give.

That said, we do stand by our recommendation that most people who might be a good fit to eventually enter one of our priority paths should initially pursue one of those paths over earning to give (though while maintaining a back-up option). Those paths have higher upside, so it’s worth testing out your potential, while bearing in mind that they might not work out.

Many of the best options on these paths require substantial career capital, so often this won’t mean starting a direct impact job today. Instead, we think many readers should consider acquiring career capital that can open up these paths, including graduate school in relevant disciplines (e.g. AI/ML, policy, or international relations) entry level policy jobs (e.g. as a Congressional staffer, or working as an early employee at a startup to gain skills and experience in operations. We hope to release an article discussing our updated views on career capital soon.

Of course, these paths aren’t a good fit for everyone, and we continue to believe that earning to give can be a great option for many.

It’s also worth emphasizing that our advice is, of course, influenced by our views on the highest priority problems. We tried to make that clear in “high impact careers” by including a section on how our recommendations would change if someone is focused on global health or factory farming. In that case, we believe “earning to give, for-profit work and advocacy become much more attractive.”

I personally feel much more funding constrained / management capacity constrained / team culture “don’t grow too quickly” constrained than I feel “I need more talented applicants” constrained. I definitely don’t feel a need to trade away hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in donations to get a good hire...

Something about this phrasing made me feel a bit 'off' when I first read this comment, like I'd just missed something important, but it took me a few days to pin down what it was.

I think this phrasing implicitly handles replaceability significantly differently to how I think the core orgs conventionally handle it. To illustrate with arbitrary numbers, let's say you have two candidates A and B for a position at your org, and A you think would generate $500k a year of 'value' after accounting for all costs, while B would generate $400k.

Level 0 thinking suggests that A applying to your org made the world $100k per year better off; if they would otherwise earn to give for $50k they shouldn't do that, but if they would otherwise EtG for $150k they should do that.

Level 0 thinking misses the fact that when A gets the job, B can go and do something else valuable. Right now I think the typical implicit level 1 assumption is that B will go and do something almost as valuable as the $400k, and so A should treat working for you as generating close to $500k value for the world, not $100k, since they free up a valuable individual.

In this world and with level 1 assumptions, your org doesn't want to trade away any more than $100k to get A into the applicant pool, but the world should be willing to trade $500k to get A into the pool. So there can be a large disparity between 'what EA orgs should recommend as a group' and 'what your org is willing to trade to get more talented applicants', without any actual conflict or disagreement over values or pool quality, in the style of your (1) / (2) / (3).

That being said, I notice that I'm a lot less sold on the level 1 assumptions than I used to be. I hadn't noticed that I now feel very differently to say 24 months ago until I was focusing on the question to write this reply, so I'm not sure exactly what has changed my mind about it, but I think it's what I perceive as a (much) higher level of EA unemployment or under-employment. Where I used to find the default assumption of B going and doing something almost as directly valuable credible, I now assign high (>50%) probability that B will either end up unemployed for a significant period of time, or end up 'keeping the day job' and basically earning-to-give for some much lower amount than the numbers EA orgs generally talk about. I feel like there's a large pool of standing applicants for junior posts already out there, and adding to the pool now is only worth the difference between the quality of the person added and the existing marginal person, and not the full amount as it was when the pool was much smaller.

How much this matters in practice obviously depends on what fraction of someone's total value to an org is 'excess' value relative to the next marginal hire, but my opinion based on private information about just who is in the 'can't get a junior job at an EA org' pool is that this pool is pretty high quality right now, and so I'm by-default sceptical that adding another person to it is hugely valuable. Which is a much more precise disagreement with the prevailing consensus than I previously had, so thanks for pointing me in a direction that helped me refine my thoughts here!

TLYCS’s experience is very consistent with Peter’s. Money is overwhelmingly the constraining factor, with more funding we’re confident we can get high quality candidates.

Personally, I see large differences in the expected impact of potential new hires. I'm surprised you don't, especially at the startup stage, and am not sure what's going on there. I would guess you should be more picky for some of the reasons listed in Rob's post.

I also feel very constrained by management capacity etc. This drives the value of past hires up even further, which is what the survey was about (as also in Rob's post).

We've written a new post in part to address this question: Many EA orgs say they place a lot of financial value on their previous hire. What does that mean, if anything? And why aren't they hiring faster?

I personally feel much more funding constrained / management capacity constrained / team culture “don’t grow too quickly” constrained than I feel “I need more talented applicants” constrained.

I feel like part of the definition of "talented applicant" is that they don't stretch your management capacity, don't mess up your culture, etc. For example, if there was someone who had volunteered at Rethink for a while, you had a lot of trust in them, they knew your projects intimately and could hit the ground running etc., my guess is that you would value that person much more highly than someone who had "general" competency.

And the next level up would be candidates who not only don't stretch your management capacity or culture but actually add to it.

My experience is that there are lots of people who are good at research or programming or whatever but fewer who have those skills and can add value to the organization without subtracting from other limited resources.

One possibility is because the EA organizations you hire for are focused on causes which also have a lot of representation in the non-profit sector outside of the EA movement, like global health and animal welfare, it's easier to attract talent which is both very skilled and very dedicated. Since a focus on the far-future is more limited to EA and adjacent communities, there is just a smaller talent pool of both extremely skilled and dedicated potential employees to draw from.

Far-future-focused EA orgs could be constantly suffering from this problem of a limited talent pool, to the point they'd be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to find an extremely talented hire. In AI safety/alignment, this wouldn't be weird as AI researchers can easily take a salary of hundreds of thousands at companies like OpenAI or Google. But this should only apply to orgs like MIRI or maybe FHI, which are far from the only orgs 80k surveyed.

So the data seems to imply leaders at EA orgs which already have a dozen staff would pay 20%+ of their budget for the next single marginal hire. So it still doesn't make sense that year after year a lot of EA orgs apparently need talent so badly they'll spend money they don't have to get it.

"Does the answer refer to high impact opportunities in general in the world"

That question is intended to look at the highest-impact jobs available in the world as a whole, in contrast with the organisations being surveyed. Given the top response was government and policy experts, I think people interpreted it correctly.

I had written the same comment, but then deleted it once I found out that it wasn't quite as true as I thought it was. In Nick's writeup the grants come from different funds according to their purpose. (I had previously thought the most recent round of grants granted money to the exact same organisations.)

Tackling just one part of this:

"It may be worth having a separate survey trying to get opinions considering talent gaps in priority areas whether they are led by people involved in EA or not."

Ultimately our goal going forward is to make sure that we and our readers are highly informed about our priority paths (https://80000hours.org/articles/high-impact-careers/). About six out of ten of our current priority paths get direct coverage in this survey, while four do not.

I agree in future we should consider conducing different surveys of other groups - including people who don't identify as part of the EA community - about opportunities they're aware of in order to make sure we stay abreast of all the areas we recommend, rather than just those we are closest to.

I think it's that none of the existing EA organizations would want to hire government and policy experts to their own orgs, but would very much like to see people with an EA approach working in government.

Hi Evan,

Responses to the survey do help to inform our advice but it’s only considered as one piece of data alongside all the other research we’ve done over the years. Our writeup of the survey results definitely shouldn’t be read as our all-things-considered view on any issue in particular.

Perhaps we could have made that clearer in the blog post but we hope that our frank discussion of the survey’s weaknesses and our doubts about many of the individual responses gives some sense of the overall weight we put on this particular source.