How good it is to donate and how hard it is to get a job

I’d be very surprised if you can’t get a job that pays much more than the sub teacher role- the gap between that and ~any EA org job is massive and inability to get the latter is only very weak evidence of inability to earn more.

Sorry if I missed this but this does depend a lot on location/willingness to move. The above assumes If you’re in the US and willing to move cities.

Also, living frugally to donate more is of course very virtuous if you take your salary to be a given, but from an altruistic perspective, insofar as they trade off, it’s probably much better to spend effort on finding a way to earn more.

This is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine but this could look like “found a startup with a 5% chance of earning $10M” in addition to or instead of searching for higher salaried roles

I admire your drive to help others!
I do think early in my life I underweighted shopping around because I was so focused on frugality (and it's easy to be discouraged when job searches take a long time). Best wishes as you explore the options.

Thanks for writing this, Elijah. I agree that it’s really difficult to get an “EA job” (it took me five years). I wish this felt more normalized, and that there was better scoped advice on what EA jobseekers should do. I wrote about this last year and included a section on ways to contribute directly to EA projects even without an EA job. I'd also recommend Aaron Gertler's post on recovering from EA job rejection, probably my favorite ever EA Forum post.

On Aaron Bergman's comment about finding a higher paying role, certain tipped positions can be surprisingly lucrative and require very little training. Dealing poker pays $40-60/hour (tips + min wage) in the Seattle area, and I’ve heard that some high stakes baccarat dealing jobs in the greater Seattle area pay $200-400k/year (also tips + min wage) for 40 hour weeks. I imagine bartending jobs at pricey/busy bars would be a similar story, as would waiting tables at expensive restaurants (perhaps an upscale vegetarian/vegan spot).

You may find that substitute teaching and working special education students is more fulfilling than these types of jobs; I think it was a great decision to withdraw your application from a job that may have triggered loneliness-induced depression. You shouldn’t feel compelled to take a job you’ll dislike in order to give more, but hopefully there are small steps you can take to grow your lifetime impact without sacrificing your happiness. Some ideas could be:

• Looking at higher education, certifications, coding bootcamps, training programs or apprenticeships to have a better shot at more lucrative or impactful work.
  • It may be tough to afford the fees or time off work right now. If so, consider investing in yourself by saving up some money you would have donated. In expectation, you’ll be able to help more animals in the long run by doing so.   
     
• Reaching out to Probably Good or 80,000 hours for careers advising. It’s completely OK if this doesn’t lead to a career call, it's still a good idea to apply in expectation.
   
• Talking to friends and family who have jobs or connections to jobs you would be interested in and seeing what they’d recommend.

You might set a goal of making a little progress each month, be that applying to a few jobs, asking for advice from other EAs, or getting closer to a new skill or credential, as an intermediate step to growing the impact you'll be able to have five years from now. If you want someone to spitball with to kick things off, I'm happy to be that person https://calendly.com/sam-anschell/30min

Careers are long, and the impact one can have at the beginning of their career is usually a rounding error compared to what they can do later in their career anyway. I hope you remain ambitious about the difference you can make for animals, and proud of the good you've already done :)

I found your section on frugality and donating very inspiring, and I hope you appreciate how impressive it is!

only 10% of non-student respondents worked at an Effective Altruism organization...

Donations are an amazing opportunity, and I think they are underemphasized

Our 2022 survey offers further illustration of this. Only 10% of respondents have earning to give as their career plan. And that masks a stark divide between highly engaged EAs, for whom less than 6% plan to pursue earning-to-give, compared to closer to 16% of less engaged EAs.

Thank you for sharing your story! I am working already for 5/6 years after graduating. Now I am getting more and more into EA and tried to find a meaningful job. It turns out that changing into a really meaningful position in another company is really hard.. Maybe comparable to your situation. As I have a specific experience now and most meaningful companies are having specific requirements of experiences (of course different than the ones I have) I got rejected in the first round some times already. So, rather than changing the job, I try to work on my bosses now so that I can deal with impactful things.

The donation is at least something that is giving me the feeling of having an impact.

When reading your text I remembered the career capital chapter in the 80,000hours book. Maybe that helps you to value also smaller impact now. As we have 80,000hours you don’t have to have the extraordinary impact now and live a perfect frugal live as in later stages of your career you will have a much higher impact. And knowing that you are preparing for that might get you through this situation in a better mood?

All the best!!

Thank you for this inspiring post!
I really admire your dedication and consistency with estimating the value an expense brings you against what that same amount could do for animal advocacy.

I'd like to share a few of my perspectives, since I actually had very different takeaways from some of the information you provide:

> Having a job that helps others might be overemphasized

I'm not very active in the community, but my impression is that when I was first introduced to EA, donating effectively was the main thing the movement was known for. So it might be that the focus on either of the 2 main ideas (having an effective job and donating effectively) just shifts continuously. 

> Although there is a lot of focus on impactful careers, Rethink Priorities' 2020 Effective Altruism survey found that around only 10% of non-student respondents worked at an Effective Altruism organization.

I believe only looking at respondents who work at an EA organization does not give you the full picture. If you look into the other categories, the motivation for people to pursue those careers is probably also to have an impactful career (e.g., Academia, Government, Think tanks / lobbying / advocacy, Work at a non-profit (not an EA organization). Those responses together add up to more than 45% of non-student respondents.

In my opinion, there are also some careers that do not get a lot of attention from EA (possibly because they don't fit the target audience or the requirement for neglectedness as well as the cause-area-specific ones do). 
One of those careers is working in education (there might be a substantial amount of confirmation bias here, since this is the path I am currently pursuing). My rationale here is that if as a (substitute) teacher you succeed in inspiring at least 2 students to eventually have an effective career in animal advocacy (or any other cause area or donate effectively), you possibly already had a bigger impact then you could have had in your entire (hypothetical other effective) career yourself.

Finally, it often seems like dichotomy to either have a meaningless but well-paying career or to have an impactful low-paying career, but I don't believe it always is. I would be very curious to read research about whether it is more effective to focus more on one of those goals instead of optimizing for a combination of the two.

I guess what I am trying to say is, if you have found a fulfilling job that allows you to have some positive impact while still earning enough to donate effectively through being frugal, that sounds like a sustainably effective position to be in.
Thank you for sharing!

Executive summary: The post discusses the challenges of finding meaningful employment in the Effective Altruism (EA) community and the importance of donations, arguing that donations are often underemphasized compared to impactful careers.

Key points:

1. There is social pressure within the EA community to have a meaningful job that helps others, but the reality is that only around 10% of non-student respondents in the 2020 EA survey worked at an EA organization.
2. The author found that the applicant pools for animal welfare jobs were larger than expected, with the researcher position at Animal Charity Evaluators receiving 375 applicants.
3. The author decided to pursue a job as a substitute teacher, which allows them to live frugally and donate around $300 per month to animal charities, despite not finding their desired animal welfare job.
4. The author argues that donations are an "amazing opportunity" and are often underemphasized compared to impactful careers, with the median donation among respondents in the 2020 EA survey being close to $500 per year.
5. The author's attempts to find a job that would allow them to donate $30,000 per year have been disappointing, as they have faced challenges in the job market, including a negative interview experience for a custodian position.
6. The author concludes that it is important to be realistic about the difficulty of finding a job in the EA community and that donating is better than many other ways people use their money, even if it doesn't meet the author's initial goal.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

Is harder to find an EA job if you are from LATAM? Considering there are more opportunities for the USA and Europe in EA.

I'm starting my search as a Project Management Professional in EA Jobs. 

I try it!