After working as a professional programmer for fourteen years, primarily in ads and web performance, I switched careers to biosecurity. It's now been a bit over a year: how has it gone?
In terms of my day-to-day work it's very different. I'd been at Google for a decade[1] and knew a lot of people across the organization. I was tech lead to six people, managing four of them, and my calendar was usually booked nearly solid. I spent a lot of time thinking about what work was a good fit for what people, including how to break larger efforts down and how this division would interact with our promotion process. I read several hundred emails a day, assisted by foot controls, and reviewed a lot more code than I wrote. I tracked design efforts across ads and with the web platform, paying attention to where they might require work from my team or where we had relevant experience. I knew the web platform and advertising ecosystem very well, and was becoming an expert in international internet privacy legislation. Success meant earning more money to donate.
Now I'm an individual contributor at a small academically affiliated non-profit, on a mostly independent project, writing code and analyzing data. Looking at my calendar for next week I have three days with no meetings, and on the other two I have a total of 3:15. In a typical week I write a few dozen messages and 1-3 documents writing up my recent work. I help other researchers here with software and system administration things, as needed. I'm learning a lot about diseases, sequencing, and bioinformatics. Success means decreasing the chance of a globally catastrophic pandemic.
Despite how different these sound, I've liked them both a lot. I've worked with great people, had a good work-life balance, and made progress on challenging and interesting problems. While I find my current work altruistically fulfilling, I was also the kind of person who felt that way about earning to give.
I do feel a bit weird writing this post: while the year has had its ups and downs and been unpredictable in a lot of ways, this is essentially the blog post I would have predicted I'd be writing. What wouldn't I have written in Summer 2022?
A big one is that the funding environment is very different. This both means that earning to give is more valuable than it had been and it's harder to stay funded. I think my current work is enough more valuable than what I'd been donating that it was still a good choice for me, but that won't be the case for everyone. If you've been earning to give and are trying to decide whether to switch to a direct role, a good approach is to apply and ask the organization whether they'd rather have your time or your donations.
I do also have more knowledge about how my skills have transferred. My skills in general programming, data analysis (though more skills here would have been better), familiarity with unix command line tools, technical writing, experimental design, scoping and planning technical work, project management, and people management have all been helpful. But I'm not sure this list is that useful to others: it's a combination of what I was good at and what has been useful in my new role, and so will be very situation- and person-dependent.
Happy to answer questions!
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Except for ~six months in 2017 when I left to join a startup and then came back after getting laid off.
I wrote some about this at the time but my biggest motivation was that, given the situation with funding and talent, I thought it was pretty likely that organizations would rather have my time than my money? This is not what I thought earlier on: in, say, 2013, there were a ton of really important things people could have been doing if they had the money, and very little funding available.
My sense of where I would be most altruistically useful, earning versus doing, changed around 2016, but for a long time I continued earning to give because I couldn't find projects that I thought were were a good fit for my interests, abilities, and constraints.
This is tricky to answer, because the main impact of my new line of work comes from helping flag a pandemic earlier than we would otherwise, plus some deterrence. We don't yet have a system up that could flag anything, let alone a system that has flagged anything, so there's a sense in which my impact so far in my new role has been zero. But I think my impact in expectation is still much more substantial than it would have been had I continued with my previous approach.
That's great!
What is your background within medical microbiology?
I'm not sure where you are along in your process of considering this, so I may be offering advice that is not at the right level, but my normal advice here would be to start with the 80,000 hours problem profile and start by thinking about whether you're a better fit for biosecurity policy or concrete technical work. Happy to answer more detailed questions if you've already narrowed your search down some!
I haven't directly funded very much: most of my donations have been via funds, where smaller donors pool their money and a grantmaker reviews applications and makes decisions.