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.
Hey Greg,
I think that's a fair concern but it's not quite as bad as you worry.
Wave is a for-profit, and pays market salaries. The other orgs pay typical non-profit salaries.
They're all growing very fast, so I think the career progression is good. You also get a great network from these roles. (Exactly what you'll do in the future is unclear though, so the career progression feels bad due to ambiguity aversion.) Salaries are also increasing at a decent rate.
I also think the career capital is strong - many of these are elite organisations, mostly YC-backed etc. I think most people would learn a lot from working at them.
In our own hiring, we haven't often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong). Interestingly it seems to be more of an issue with engineers than others. I'm not sure exactly why that is - maybe just because the counterfactual is so obvious (even though engineers don't actually earn as much as law and finance, which non-engineers working at these firms could pursue otherwise).
We're pretty attentive to the importance of salary in hiring, and I plan to raise salaries if they do turn into a bottleneck (insofar as we're able to raise funding). We increased salaries significantly in Dec 2014 for this reason.
These are also not junior roles for the most part. New Incentives and GiveDirectly and 80k are looking for a senior engineer, who would ideally lead the engineering team in the future.
Of course, much of this is predicated on future growth actually happening, but that's the same at a for-profit startup.
Again, you have to consider counterfactuals here. If I could work at either Google or 80K, will I learn as much from working at 80K as I would learn from Google? Probably not. Or if I prefer the sort of learning you get at a smaller company, I would do better to work at a good startup than at 80K.
Like what Gregory said, if you're claiming that your job is great for software developers, but th... (read more)