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.
Ben, to recap a bit what people have said: working as a software engineer at an EA organization
This probably applies more to EA organizations like CEA and 80,000 Hours. Give Directly may be different since you probably work with Mpesa, similar to Wave; and maybe New Incentives too since they do conditional cash transfers.
And Wave is basically like a regular tech company in the above aspects (and probably better because it's a startup hence work could be more challenging and interesting than say at Google). They pay less than Google. So it's a good example that when you have to make sacrifices in 1 dimension, out of the 3 I mentioned above, you can still find really good EA-type software engineers to join.
But for EA organizations like CEA and 80,000 Hours, you need to make sacrifices in all 3 dimensions (and pay is probably less than Wave) -- no wonder it's harder.
That being said, there's no reason it can't work. Just think about people doing similar jobs to the IT positions you want to hire for at CEA/80k -- there are plenty of people doing them at other companies or organizations. In this sense, the EA organizations may pay less than the alternative but offers the opportunity to work for an EA organization, so the EA-types among these people would be attracted to such jobs, like EA-type Google engineers would be attracted to Wave.
If the job isn't the most technically challenging/engaging, you probably shouldn't be looking for people who value these too much, since they already need to take a pay cut which is a sacrifice even for EA-types, and asking people to make sacrifices on more than one dimension makes it harder to attract them. Look for people who are EA-types working in similar jobs in non-EA places, or people who would be at least indifferent between working these jobs at a non-EA org with lower pay and working these jobs at another place with higher pay.
(But maybe the jobs ARE technically challenging/engaging and great for future career prospect.. I don't know, you should probably ask actual engineers for their views on these!)
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.