It often seems like software engineering is the most over-represented career in the community. On this ground, at 80,000 Hours we've discouraged more people from going into the area, in order to increase the diversity of skills in the community.
However, recently the following organisations have been trying to hire EA-aligned software engineers:
- Wave
- New Incentives (given a seed grant by GiveWell)
- GiveDirectly
- 80,000 Hours
- CEA
And I don't think any of these groups have found it particularly easy.
Might this mean we're actually short of software engineers after all? It's a bit hard to tell at this point, but if these positions continue to be unfilled, then it'll look that way.
If we are short of engineers, what's the explanation? Some ideas:
- Lots of people in the community have entered the path, but few have become skilled enough to take these positions. In our hiring, it seemed like the choice was between an experienced non-EA or an EA with under a year of experience.
- A large fraction of the community are in the path, but the skill is so useful that we're still short of it.
- Lots of people are in the path, but they prefer to earn to give, either because they believe it's higher impact, or switching to direct work would involve too much sacrifice.
Are you an engineer with over 2yr experience who's involved in effective altruism, and interested in switching to direct work? Get in touch with these organisations.
Following up on this more than a year later, I can vouch for some but not all of these conclusions based on my experience at the high-impact organization I work for, the Human Diagnosis Project (www.humandx.org).
We've found it very difficult to recruit high-quality value-aligned engineers despite the fact that none of the above items really apply to us.
On problem I can identify right now is that I've attempted to recruit from the EA community a few times with very limited success. Perhaps I've gone about this via the wrong fora or have made other mistakes, but I've found that generally any candidates I did find were not good fits for the roles that we have to offer.
This problem continues to this day. Given that we don't have the issues identified above (to my knowledge), my best hypothesis right now is that we're simply unable to reach the right people in the right way - and I'm not sure how to fix that. If anyone has any particular ideas on this front, I'd love to hear them.
That said, if anyone wants to help us out, we're still actively recruiting for a host of roles, including a lot of engineering positions. To learn more, take a look at https://www.humandx.org/team