Wow Tristan, Wow! Thanks for putting this together, I read it carefully and it’s incredibly useful for career planning. A fully structured overview like this is rare.
I especially appreciated the split between career choice (aptitudes > causes) and job search (treating rejections as normal, building capital outside EA), and how clearly you highlight ops/management as a real gap.
The “no sorting hat”, “fit first”, and “apply widely but expect slow vetting” framing is spot‑on. It also matches what we see locally in terms of timelines and expectations.
I’ll be using this as a reference in intro sessions and advising conversations here in Madrid, it’s one of the clearest maps of career landscape I’ve seen. 🥳
Wow Tristan, this is impressive! Thank you for taking the time and dedicaiton in organizing all of these resources and frameworks. As someone who's felt often overwhelmed by the sheer amount of info on EA careers, I think this post gives much clarity and saves newcomers (and veterans) a toooon of work. I really appreciate how you broke down the processes and even included some actionable advice. Great job (no pun intended) and thanks again!
1 - EA orgs skipping tests/trials on candidates and instead using candidate performance on tests/trials from other EA orgs? The closest I get is the "top candidate" tag in the HIP database that some EA orgs send 2 - Have you seen hints of top talent applying to less positions due to "test/trial burn-out"? I think this might potentially especially severe for top talent, as they often get to test/trial stages, and might be doing back-to-back tests and trials for weeks or months on end (and for mid career professionals in between care work and other life commitments).
Asking as I am considering if we are losing talent due to this, that it might be fixable by emulating the "one funding application to many funders" model to EA hiring - the tests and trials often test for the same thing, such as prioritization under constraints and judgement under uncertainty. Maybe it is possible to make at least some fraction of trials/tests standardized so candidates do not have to do similar tests/trials over and over again (or shorten them down). Also might be important as e.g. AI field building is quite constrained - I think one might be willing to pay quite a lot for not losing promising talent (and maybe save org time on candidate evaluation).
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Why building and backing Welfare Tech companies may be one of the most promising things we can do for billions of animals.
I used AI to assist in writing this post, but I’ve rewritten it extensively and endorse it.
* Announcing the launch of Spring Innovation Fund, a not-for-profit venture philanthropy studio and fund built specifical...
The “Career Choice” section walks through: different career frameworks (how to go about making a career), career factors (aspects specific to yourself which change what sort of career you might have), cause area advice (focusing on how one might make a career in various causes), graduate school and career advice (what studies or careers might be pathways to impact, and what working in them looks like), and community experiences (how others have made career choices and lessons learned). The “Job Search” section walks through searching, applying, and getting rejected from jobs, as well as a section on how EA recruitment works (to better understand the process), and on the EA job market (how it’s looking now and how it has changed over time).
Introduction
Behold! After trudging in the hellscape of tabs for many hours (see my atrocious window below) and trying to craft an overarching structure within which to fit all the advice, the herald post is here! I’ll answer a couple of questions quickly, and then we’ll get underway with the resources.
How did I sort the relevant posts from the others? I mostly sorted out types of posts in these tags that wouldn’t be helpful to someone undergoing the career choice/job search process (old posts announcing open positions, stuff that is tagged but doesn’t fit there, etc.)
Why do this? As someone undergoing both of these processes now, it’s hard to sort through all the noise on the forum to find these, and took me over a year to understand the differences of opinion on how to best build your career (e.g. whether to focus on aptitudes vs a cause). It’s my hope that those new to EA can skip some of that and use this post to more quickly get a bird's eye view and figure out more precisely what they want to learn about, rather than just generally read through everything tagged career choice. This post serves as a test of this framework to get useful input and refine it to be even better[3] such that once we’ve settled on something, this can hopefully be incorporated into the EA Forum tagging system so that people have a clutter free, well defined, way to navigate the EA career advice space. So it both acts as a temporary repository, and as an introduction of a framework or high level view of the space that should help people undertaking this journey.
How did I create the framework here? I first introduced a distinction between what I’ll call career career choice and job search. Career choice I take to be the sort of thing 80k specializes in: the generation of a life scale career goal or plan that looks something like deciding “I want to work on AI”. Job search occurs at the next level of specificity, the part of the process where you know where you want to go but are simply having trouble getting there (i.e. “I want to be a technical AI researcher that works somewhere like Anthropic”). From there the subsections were mostly just intuitive and developed from trying to find useful commonalities between posts.
How should you interact with this? Hell if I know! Just kidding, but I think I might highlight a strand present in some of these readings, which is: read and think, but make sure to take action fairly early on. If this is all new to you, I’d suggest maybe reading 5 or 6 of the posts that stand out here to you, if somewhat experienced in EA thought, maybe 3 or 4. Then, I would begin doing by making a plan, starting a course, talking to people or applying to jobs. Another way to think about this is that focusing on career choice is super important, but it's only one side of a coin. Job search may be more painful and less interesting, but it is what will ultimately allow you to reorient your 80,000 hours in the way that you would like.
A brief note on extensions of this and cause prioritization: My basic take is that a little bit of cause prio is great, but that generally focusing too much on this early on isn’t that useful. Even so, I did some of this early on myself to identify the areas I was most interested in, and did consider some of that quite useful, so a way to extend this work here would be to dig through the cause prioritization tag (1518 posts as of writing) and pull out the relevant posts there for someone trying to do EA career choice.
Random housekeeping notes: I generally tried to include a summary for everything, but if a summary was either not needed or hard to render quickly, I decided to forgo. “[question]” means that you probably want to read the replies, generally even more so than reading the original post. If I included a year “ex. (2015)” beside an article, it's an indication that it is at least partially dated and generally less useful. Finally, a highlight means I’ve read that article and found it insightful, such that it might be worth reading first[4].
Some advice: If I were to try to summarize what I’ve read quickly, thinking particularly of those just learning about EA and still thinking about what to do with their career, I’d say[5] “apply to lots of stuff, figuring out your career is hard and 80k nor EA is going to do it for you, focus on building aptitudes rather than working on a specific cause, probably start outside EA orgs unless you’re from an ivy or incredibly talented, and be patient (accept that this is a process that can take years to get right).”
Finally, thank you to all of those who took the time to write these posts, your work is greatly appreciated. All that said, onto the post itself!
General Advice
How to have an impact when the job market is not cooperating: As an advisor, I now speak with lots of people who have indeed considered it and very much want it – they don't need persuading. What they need is help navigating a tough job market. I want to use this session to spread some messages I keep repeating in these calls and create common knowledge about the job landscape.
There is No EA Sorting Hat: My sense is some EAs act like/hope they will be assigned the perfect impactful career by some combination of 80,000 Hours recommendations (and similar) and ‘perceived consensus views in EA’. But, your life is full of specific factors, many impactful jobs haven’t yet been spotted by other EAs and career advice is importantly iterative. Instead of simply deferring, I recommend a combination of: Your own hard work figuring out your path to impact. // (Still) Integrating expert advice. // Support from the community, and close connections who know your context.
Avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career: Namely: Taking 80,000 Hours’ rankings too seriously, Not trying hard enough to fail, Feeling like you need to optimise for having the most impact now, Feeling like you need to work directly on AI immediately, Not taking a role because you think you’ll be replaceable, Constantly considering other career options, Overthinking or over-optimising career choices, Being unwilling to think things through for yourself, Ignoring conventional career wisdom, Doing community work even if you’re not suited to it.
SHOW: A framework for shaping your talent for direct work: If your career as an EA has stalled, you’ll eventually break through if you do one (or more) of four things: gaining skills outside the EA community, assisting the work of more senior EAs, finding valuable projects that EAs aren’t willing to do, or finding projects that no one is doing yet.
When to get off the train to crazy town?: In this post, I want to use this metaphor to clarify a couple of problems that I often encounter regarding career choice and other moral considerations.
Be grateful
Grateful for Job Choice: When we look across all jobs globally, many of us in the EA community occupy positions that would rank in the 99.9th percentile or higher by our own preferences within jobs that we could plausibly get. Be grateful.
On taking breaks
I went on a (very) long walk, and it was a great career decision: I was hesitant to embark on this epic journey, because I was concerned about what it would do to my career. How it might stall my professional journey. How it might even make it regress. I could not have been more wrong. This post is about why taking a break from your career, to do something that doesn’t seem at all related to your career, could be great for it.
The Impact Case for Taking a Break from Your Non-EA Job: More professionals should consider taking a leave of absence - a paid or unpaid break from their day job. Leaves of absence provide space to reflect on life, recharge, explore EA, and evaluate high-impact career opportunities in a low-risk and intentional way. We know a few people who’ve found these breaks to be useful in their careers and think they could be useful for more people in similar situations.
Self-doubt
Have You Ever Doubted Whether You're Good Enough To Pursue Your Career?: I interviewed eleven people I thought were particularly successful, relatable, or productive. We discussed topics ranging from productivity to career exploration to self-care. The Peak behind the Curtain interview series is meant to help dispel common myths and provide a variety of takes on success and productivity from real people.
EA Career Advising Ecosystem Mapping: This post provides a summary mapping of the EA / EA-adjacent career advising ecosystem as well as a list of various career resources, developed by the Career Advising Meta Forum.
An easy win for hard decisions. There are a lot of things about this community that I really love, but possibly my favourite is a thing people often do when they're trying to make a difficult and/or important decision: Write out your current thinking in a google doc. Share it with some people you think might have useful input, asking for comments. Profit.
More like 88,000 hours? In defence of “career longtermism” – a personal perspective: If I had to provide one takeaway from this post and my experiences, it would be - don’t be so hard on yourself. Some people need more time, more life experience and to make more career twists and turns (not mistakes) until they find what they want to do and/or do something more impactful. Unless you are very unfortunate, the likelihood is that you’ll have the opportunity for a long and hopefully successful career, provided you maintain some motivation to make a difference one day. You might just have to be a bit patient first.
How to make career decisions and have impact: Want an insider's view into what successful career exploration looks like? Want to understand why particular approaches fail? Read on!
For the non-elite
Career Advice For The Everyday Effective Altruist: There are many organizations which give career advice to effective altruists, but their advice can be intimidating for many people (80,000 Hours in particular is targeting a relatively small elite). So in this post, I will try to give some general guidance for the average person.
Vocational Career Guide for Effective Altruists: Hello, I’m Kyle, and I’ve written this guide to help anyone find an EA career. In particular, it is aimed at people who do not have or intend to pursue a 4-year college degree. Some people aim to pursue trade school, or work right after high school / GED. If that sounds like you, keep reading.
On factors relevant to career choice
Critique of the notion that impact follows a power-law distribution: In this essay, I argue that it is not always useful to think about social impact from an individualist standpoint. I argue that the claim that there are massive differences in impact between individual interventions, individual organisations, and individual people is complicated and possibly problematic.
What are you getting paid in?: You can pay people in lots of currencies. Among other things, you can pay them in quality of life, prestige, status, impact, influence, mentorship, power, autonomy, meaning, great teammates, stability and fun.
Flexibility and dedication: EAG Boston 2023 talk: On the tension between dedicating yourself to one project and being flexible enough to switch to another more effective opportunity if it were to come along.
Problem areas beyond 80,000 Hours' current priorities: But even if some issue is 'the most pressing'—in the sense of being the highest impact thing for someone to work on if they could be equally successful at anything—it might easily not be the highest impact thing for many people to work on, because people have various talents, experience, and temperaments. Moreover, the more people involved in a community, the more reason there is for them to spread out over different issues. Many of our advisors guess that it would be ideal if 5-20% of the effective altruism community's resources were focused on issues that the community hasn't historically been as involved in, such as the ones listed below. We think we're currently well below this fraction, so it's plausible some of these areas might be better for some people to go into right now than our top priority problem areas.
A model about the effect of total existential risk on career choice: Which existential risk cause should you focus on? The cause where you have the largest impact on decreasing total existential risk. That's not the same as working on the cause where you have the largest impact when seen in isolation. What follows is a super math heavy demonstration of this concept.
Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations: Roles outside explicitly EA organizations are most people’s best career options. Sometimes these roles aren’t as visible to the community, including to 80,000 Hours, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t highly impactful. Many especially impactful roles require specific skills. If none of these roles are currently a great fit for you, but one could be if you developed the right skills, it can be worth it to take substantial time to do so. You should use 80,000 Hours to figure out what your best career is and how to get there, not what “the” best careers are.
Monetary and social incentives in longtermist careers: In this post I talk about several strong non-epistemic incentives and issues that can influence people to pursue longtermist career paths (and specifically x-risk reduction careers and AI safety) for EA community members. I'm worried that these incentives lead people to feel (unconscious & conscious) pressure to pursue (certain) longtermist career paths even if it may not be the right choice for them.
What I would do if I wasn’t at ARC Evals: I list 9 projects that I would work on if I wasn’t busy working on safety standards at ARC Evals, and explain why they might be good to work on.
Reasoning Against
The case against “EA cause areas”: While cause prioritization is extremely important and should continue, having the EA movement identified with specific cause areas has negative consequences. The one I’m mostly worried about is the feeling that if I work on a cause that is not particularly prioritized by the movement (like feminism) then what I do "is not really EA", even if I use evidence and reason to find the most impactful avenues to tackle the problem they try to solve
Towards Better EA Career Advice (see comments also): Making thoughtful and informed career choices in order to have a more positive impact on the world is a core part of the practice of Effective Altruism. New and existing EAs are usually directed to the 80,000 Hours website for career advice, but it has a number of issues and gaps that make it poorly-suited for this purpose in many or most cases.
Career choice: Evaluate opportunities, not just fields: 80,000 Hours has a lot of great research on promising career fields for effective altruists. But one thing I've discovered while doing my own career planning is that the difference between opportunities in a single field seems to matter just as much as the difference between fields. Opportunity-level analysis of job prospects is a great complement to looking at field-level overviews, and I think it can significantly improve career decisions.
Plan Your Career on Paper: I used to expect 80,000 Hours to tell me how to have an impactful career. Recently, I've started thinking it's basically my own personal responsibility to figure it out. I think this shift has made me much happier and much more likely to have an impactful career.
Test fit for roles / job types / work types, not cause areas: I think rather than testing fit for particular cause areas, students should test fit for different roles / job types / work types, such as entrepreneurship / operations, policy / advocacy and a range of different types of research.
By Career Aptitudes ala Holden
My current impressions on career choice for longtermists: 80,000 Hours tends to emphasize "paths'' to particular roles working on particular causes; by contrast, I emphasize "aptitudes" one can build in a wide variety of roles and causes (including non-effective-altruist organizations) and then apply to a wide variety of longtermist-relevant jobs (often with options working on more than one cause). Example aptitudes include: "helping organizations achieve their objectives via good business practices," "evaluating claims against each other," "communicating already-existing ideas to not-yet-sold audiences," etc.
Career Suggestion: Earning to Skill: Something I am not hearing really at all, though it has been advocated before, is that people seek out regular industry jobs where they will grow and learn a lot. My name for this is Earning to Skill. Skills definitely matter. There's a lot you don't get from university degrees that you will learn from spending a few years in an at least moderately functional workplace with good mentorship.
[exercise] Reflect on Your Career Aptitudes: Holden Karnofsky's aptitudes framework has been one of my favorite ways to think about career decisions. I led a career aptitude reflection exercise targeted at students and early-career folks interested in longtermism. The goal is to make thinking about career aptitudes more interactive and get people applying the aptitudes framework to their own lives/careers and it takes about 45-60 minutes. You can access the Google Doc version or see the text below.
What skills would you like 1-5 EAs to develop?: You can also contribute to the EA community by developing rarer skills. There are many particular skillsets which would be very useful for a few EAs to develop. Although these skills may never turn into full-time jobs, I'd like to see people develop them because I think they could be quite useful.
How to increase your odds of starting a career in charity entrepreneurship: We’re often asked what you can do to increase your odds of starting a career as a charity entrepreneur. While each person’s answer will be different given their background and traits, here are the three most common things people can do: do a self-initiated project with no oversight, teach yourself and practice good decision-making, and become an expert in Effective Altruism.
How to manage up using these delegation tips: Managing up can be worth the investment if you want to demonstrate or practice your management skills but don’t have direct reports of your own, or if you’re currently not getting what you need from your own manager.
Taking prioritisation within 'EA' seriously: For any given person, their best future ‘EA career paths’ are at least an order of magnitude more impactful than their median ‘EA career path’. For over 50% of self identifying effective altruists, in their current situation: Thinking more carefully about prioritisation will increase their expected impact by several times. // There will be good returns to thinking more about the details of prioritising career options for yourself, not just uncritically deferring to others or doing very high-level “cause prioritisation”. // They overvalue personal fit and prior experience when determining what to work on.
A guided cause prioritisation flowchart: The flowchart would ideally be accompanied by guidance assisting making informed decisions throughout the flowchart. I haven’t finalised this guidance, although present a sample for one particular decision in the flowchart. At this point I am attempting a proof of concept rather than delivering a final product, and so would welcome feedback on both the idea and the preliminary attempt.
Important Between-Cause Considerations: things every EA should know about: In this post I claim that, to make the best choice on preferred cause area, EAs should have at least a high-level understanding of various ‘Important Between-Cause Considerations’ (IBCs). An IBC is an idea that a significant proportion of the EA community takes seriously, and that is important to understand (at least at a high-level) in order to aid in the act of prioritising between the potentially highest value cause areas, which I classify as: extinction risk, non-extinction risk longtermist, near-term animal-focused, near-term human-focused, global priorities research and movement building. I provide illustrations of the concept of an IBC, as well as a list of potential IBCs.
Many Undergrads Should Take Light Courseloads: When I started undergrad, I decided to take almost as many classes as I could that term. I spent that whole term hunched over books and stressing over how behind I was (so, not meeting people, not getting research or job experience, not figuring out what problems to prioritize, not getting others into high-impact careers), only to later realize my classes had taught me little of value.
Asking for important college major advices- should I study medicine?: Hello, I'm actually only a 17 year-old-boy living in Taiwan. Most of you would want me to focus on studying for now, but in Taiwan, we need to decide and prepare for exams for college majors. I'm considering if I should study medicine+ basic CS or a CS-specialized route plus some basic biology.
Early Career
Maybe let the non-EA world train you: It can be really hard to get that first job out of university. If you don’t get your top picks, your less exciting backup options can still be great for having a highly impactful career. If those first few years of work experience aren’t your best pick, they will still be useful as a place where you can ‘learn how to job’, save some money, and then pivot or grow from there.
How to Signal Competence in Your Early-Stage Career: This post highlights alternative methods for early career professionals to demonstrate competence beyond relying solely on academic credentials. As we evaluate applications to our programs, these are the things we consider.
When Planning Your Career, Start Early: In my experience, many aspiring EAs don’t start career planning until fairly late in their undergraduate degree, and many don’t start until they’ve completely finished their studies. A lot of first and second year undergraduates feel like their graduation is far away and that they can worry about their career later — but I think that there are a lot of big wins people can capture early on. Additionally, these first and second year undergraduates likely don’t have many friends who are thinking about their career so early on, and so career planning may not even be on their radar (even if they are involved in EA).
Stop procrastinating on career planning: Rationally, I really should have applied to speak to 80000 hours 2+ years ago! If I had done this 2 years ago, I probably could have made more progress in whichever direction I'd settled on. If like me you're procrastinating on career planning, take this as a nudge to apply to 80000 hours. I've had a career planning Google Doc for a long time, but I was shocked by how much more carefully I was thinking about things when I knew that I'd be sharing the plan with someone else.
Lifeguards: People often ask us for advice as they consider next steps in their careers. Sometimes, we suggest ambitious things that go beyond someone’s default action space. The issue is that she assumes that someone else more qualified than her is going to do it. In EA, that’s often just not the case. It’s good to check, of course. Sometimes, there are competent teams who are taking care of things. But sometimes, there is not an imaginary team with years of experience that is coming to save us. There is just us.
More undergraduate or just-graduated students should consider getting jobs as research techs in academic labs: A lot of EA advice seems to presume that the reader is already a top-tier student or young professional who just needs to have their endless font of potential pointed in the right direction. This is not most people. This is not even most EAs. This is certainly not me. By the time I figured out what I wanted to be doing with my life, I had to claw and scrape and jump on whatever bus was heading vaguely in the direction I wanted to go. I wasn’t in that bad shape. I could code, kind of, and my mediocre state school had an excellent physics department. But I just didn’t look that good on paper. If you are an undergraduate or recently-graduated student and this sounds like you, and you aren’t really sure where to go next, consider working as a research assistant at a university.
Unsolicited Career Advice: Get technical: compete for roles with smaller pools of qualified candidates. Get experience: become one of the people who meet the unwritten bar, elsewhere. Stay elsewhere: in the context of the whole economy, there are not many EAs, and there is much left undone.
Middle Career
Challenges from Career Transitions and What To Expect From Advising: Leading over 400 advising sessions with more than 200 mid-career and senior professionals, we, at Successif, have observed some common patterns and practices that supported a majority of advisees in their transition success. This article aims to normalize the common struggles of career transitions, set realistic expectations for the journey ahead, and illuminate how a collaborative advising relationship can empower you to navigate this exciting, yet demanding, new chapter.
Mid-career people: strongly consider switching to EA work: In this post I want to provide encouragement and information for mid-career people who are sympathetic to EA ideas but haven’t seriously tried doing EA work. Basically, I think there’s tons of amazingly impactful, fun, well-compensated work that skilled mid-career people could do, and that this is maybe much less obvious from the “outside” than it is for a relative EA-insider like me.
Successif: helping mid-career and senior professionals have impactful careers: Successif, previously known as EA Pathfinder and created over a year ago, is an organization designed to support mid-career and senior professionals transition into high-impact work. We adopt a holistic approach focused on cause prioritization, personal fit, and aptitude building. We offer collective workshops, one-on-one mentoring, women leadership workshops, peer support groups, and match-making.
Getting into an EA-aligned organisation mid-career: In this article, I'll share my journey of joining an effective altruism (EA) organisation in the middle of my career. I'll talk about the misconceptions I initially held, how I came to understand the fundamental ideas of EA, increased my involvement in the community, and started connecting with more experienced members. I will also share how I became more active through volunteer work and then intentionally worked towards transitioning my career to have more impact.
You should join an EA organization with too many employees: value that is harder to capture by the market is more neglected, so actually, there's a lot of opportunities of helping more people per employee in altruistic sectors, so not doing that is an opportunity cost.
On feeling overqualified
Thoughts on being overqualified for EA positions: The most important is that it equivocates between "an analogous profit maximizing entity might not hire a senior person" and "senior people don't provide much benefit". It's basically always possible to do things faster/cheaper/with fewer errors/with a better user experience/etc.
Late Career
From Comfort Zone to Frontiers of Impact: Pursuing A Late-Career Shift to Existential Risk Reduction: This updates my March 2025 post about pursuing a late-career shift to existential risk reduction. I did it! On June 3, 2025, I became the new Operations Director for MATS. To do this, I had to step out of my comfort zone, build new relationships, and constantly seek opportunities that felt directionally correct. I persisted, was open to serendipity, and continually tested where my existing strengths could make the greatest impact.
A do-gooder's safari: lays out different archetypes in a highly readable format that helps gain a bit of clarity on what archetype you most identify with (and where you might need improvement).
My bargain with the EA machine: I plan to make a career decision. When doing so, what will I be optimizing for? The EA answer is that I should pick the career that would allow me to have the most positive impact on the world. This will be part of my calculation, but it won’t be everything. I intrinsically value enjoying my life and career – not just as a means to the end of generating impact, but for its own sake.
Comparative advantage does not mean doing the thing you're best at: Are you the best in the world at a specific task, such as optimising your company's database? This still might not be the highest impact thing for you to do because sometimes the world needs a 40th percentile graphic designer at an EA organisation more than a 99.999th percentile obscure-proprietary-database-optimizer at some other organisation.
Comparative advantage in the talent market: EAs should prioritise personal fit for deciding what to work on, even if this means working in a cause area that they don’t consider a top priority. Finally, I’ll consider some common objections to this.
Be Specific About Your Career: It doesn't matter whether meta-EA is better than biosecurity research in general; what matters is whether biosecurity research is better than meta-EA for Alice. An analysis of Alice's individual impact screens off any analysis of average impact. I often see people think about their careers from the perspective of abstract cause prioritization. Besides such broad analysis, they should construct specific narratives linking potential career paths to impact.
Location
Advice
EA career guide for people from LMICs: Individuals from Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) engaging with EA often find that existing EA career advice does not address various frequently arising questions and challenges. This post attempts to address that gap by sharing the tentative outcomes of discussions between the authors (who are all from LMICs) on the pros and cons for various career paths.
Considerations
Moving to a hub, getting older, and heading home: This post is about something I haven’t seen discussed on the EA forum but I often talk about with my friends in their mid 30s. It’s about something I wish I'd understood better ten years ago: if you are ~25 and debating whether to move to an EA Hub, you are probably underestimating how much the calculus will change when you’re ~35, largely related to having kids and aging parents.
Working Outside vs. Inside EA
Why outside
We need EA people working for non-EA orgs: This forum—and the EA community surrounding it—is a bit of an echo chamber. We need people who care about EA values in the rest of the world for several reasons: influence and evangelism, cross-pollination, reality checks, and pragmatism.
The career and the community: for the first few years of their careers, and potentially longer, most effective altruists should focus on building career capital (which isn’t just 'skills’!) rather than doing good or working at EA organisations. However, there are social dynamics which push new grads towards working at EA orgs, which we should identify and counteract. Note that there are a lot of unsubstantiated claims in this post, and so I’d be grateful for pushback on anything I’m incorrect about (throughout the post I’ve highlighted assumptions which do a lot of work but which I haven’t thoroughly justified).
The availability bias in job hunting: EA talent is currently suboptimally allocated, resulting in lower impact for the movement due to availability bias around certain jobs.
EA is a Career Endpoint: The movement doesn't have to invest in training neophytes into the highly capable people it needs. Instead, the neophytes can go make a difference in the world beyond EA, then return to the movement ready to make a big EA impact with the skills and resources they've gained along the way.
More EAs should consider “non-EA” jobs: I argue that working in certain non-neglected fields is undervalued as a career option for EA-aligned individuals and that working at EA-organizations is potentially overvalued. I argue that by bringing an EA-perspective to non-EA spaces, EA-aligned folks can potentially have a substantial impact.
Consider a wider range of jobs, paths and problems if you want to improve the long-term future: My impression is that many people whose top career goal is 'improve the long-term future of humanity' are overly focused on working at a handful of explicitly EA/longtermist/AI-related organizations. There are additional problems, additional careers and additional jobs to be focused on, mentioned in this article.
High absorbency career paths: Some career paths may be highly impactful but are limited in the number of positions available before they reach saturation. Other career paths have a far greater capacity for involving more people. This factor could be considered the “scale” of the career path, or to use a less commonly used phrase in EA, it could be considered to have high absorbency. I think the importance of a career path’s absorbency has been undervalued in the EA movement thus far. Career choice is often framed from an individual viewpoint, but when the needs of the broader movement are considered, you sometimes end up with a different perspective.
Recap - why do some organisations say their recent hires are worth so much? (Link): [from link] Nonetheless, for other reasons, I do think (i) some of the organizations in the survey have a lot of impact and (ii) there are large differences in productivity between hires, such that some staff have a very high value-add. This means that at least some positions at these organizations are likely to have a very large impact. This would suggest that, if these jobs are among your shortlist, it’s valuable to find out if you might be able to end up as one of these high value-add staff. However, it’s important to do this while bearing in mind that the highest impact positions are not all in these organizations. It’s also important to keep in mind that the base rate for any application being accepted is under 10% – sometimes well under, with only 20 to 40 positions opening a year. This means that even someone who has promising fit can’t be confident of landing a position. In the same way that no-one looking for their first consulting job would plan their career around working at one specific firm, no-one should plan their career around getting a job at these 20 or so organizations, which between them have fewer job openings than a large consulting firm.
Paths to Impact for EA Working Professionals: The EA movement needs several career paths which can absorb a large number of people that have clear paths to impact and are highly regarded by the community. We also believe that having support for those career paths can lead to EA having a bigger tent and generally allowing healthier community norms. The goal of this post is to provide some inspiration to people in the private sector on possible ways to make a difference and support them on their journey to maximize their impact.
(Incorrectly) Overemphasizing Effective Careers: Effective careers are great, but making them the only "real" way to be an Effective Altruist should be strongly rejected. The mistaken analysis goes as follows; if we are balancing priorities, and take a consequentialist view, we should prioritize our decisions on the basis of overall impact. However, effective altruism has shown that different interventions differ in their impact by orders of magnitude. Therefore, if we give any non-trivial weight to improving the world, then it is such a large impact, it will overbalance other considerations. I think that many people who are new to EA, and those who are very excited about it don't pay enough attention to their own needs and priorities for their careers. Having a normal job and giving 10% of your income is a great choice for many Effective Altruists. Having a job at an effective organization is a great choice for many other Effective Altruists.
The case for not pursuing a career in an EA organization: I think the focus on having an EA career (employment in EA, founding something EA) might be the wrong advice for most people. I think the other two major options are earning to give, which is no longer prioritized, and raising awareness. So, simplifying, it comes down to having an EA career or convincing others to have it. I think we have much better options that are practical and don’t require you to change pathways. I think having 1% of humanity lightly engaged in EA-related activities is more valuable than having 0,0001% deeply engaged.
EAs working at non-EA organizations: What do you do?: There has been discussion recently (sparked by Denise Melchin, here) that EAs might not recognize the kinds of impactful opportunities at non-EA organizations. I think one contributing factor is that it's easier to see how you'd have an impact at a "mainstream EA organization" than at a non-EA organization. As a result, I think it could be useful to hear some examples of EAs who decided to work at/for non-EA organizations.
Getting People Excited About More EA Careers: A New Community Building Challenge (read comments): The discussion around the current EA org hiring landscape has highlighted that some people may disproportionately favor working at explicit EA organizations over other EA careers. Strengthening ‘core’ community building within professional groups and finding new signals to quickly demonstrate EA commitment and understanding may help to make a larger variety of careers exciting to committed EAs and thus reduce the effect.
Working at EA organizations series: Why work at an EA organization?: Three main reasons. People tend to underestimate how much career capital work at EA organizations brings you. Jobs are high in exploration value and skill-building. The replaceability argument may be overstated.
A subjective account of what it's like to join an EA-aligned org without previous EA knowledge: We (Healthier Hens (HH), a CE-incubated EA-aligned animal welfare charity) have hired a mid-career Country Manager for our operation in Kenya. He had no previous EA knowledge or experience. We asked him 15 questions about his experience entering the EA world, learning about the key concepts and the community in general. This post is an overview of his subjective experiences including overarching themes such as what seemed common and different. Some of the benefits felt upon entering EA and his perspective on EA awareness and community. Finally, we reflect on the above from the organisation’s standpoint.
Other relevant factors
[question] How valuable is ladder-climbing outside of EA for people who aren't unusually good at ladder-climbing or unusually entrepreneurial?: Suppose somebody is fairly talented in an EA-important area, and would be a decent but not stellar fit for work within movement-EA organizations. Suppose they are approximately average at ladder-climbing. Suppose further that they aren’t very entrepreneurial and have no plans/ability/stability to acquire that ability/motivation (so making their own company/nonprofit is right out). Given that they can’t start their own thing, should we in general advise them to work in an existing EA org, or is it better to recommend people seek out existing ladder climbing opportunities elsewhere?
[question] Can anyone reassure me about EA work culture? (read replies): I've been quite eager to explore operations because I have enjoyed operations style work in the past, but I'm concerned that there are no/very few roles at EA-aligned orgs that don't lead to you feeling like you're working all the time.
Should young EAs really focus on career capital?: Gaining career capital and doing good are not mutually exclusive. Thus, for making decisions, what matters is the marginal career capital one option offers over others.
My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career: An example of a working parent who also thinks a lot about 80,000 Hours’ advice and discussion of some of the ways having kids is likely to affect the impact you have in your career, for people who want to consider that when deciding whether to have kids.
Timing
Does most of your impact come from what you do soon?: Over the last couple months I’ve noticed myself flipping back and forth between two mindsets: “I should try to be useful soon” and “I should build skills so that I am more useful in 5+ years.” I’ve compiled arguments for each view in this post. Note that a lot of this is specific to undergrads who want to reduce AI risk.
Crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations: Should you try to influence “current” events that affect the future “directly”? E.g., improve the chances that, if AGI is developed in the next decade, that transition goes well. Or should you try to build your ability to do “direct work” later in your life? E.g., gain networks and skills that position you for reducing risks from AGI development decades from now Or should you try to “punt to the future”? E.g., engage in movement-building or abstract strategic research. This post will overview the crucial questions that we (Convergence) believe do or should influence different longtermists’ views and choices regarding the best timing of work and donations.
Cause Area Advice
Animal Welfare
Resources
Careers (to help animals) in politics, policy, and lobbying: By reading this profile we hope that you can build a better understanding of whether seeking to develop politics, policy, and lobbying expertise seems like one of the best ways for you to use your time in order to help animals
Why Many EAs May Have More Impact Outside of Nonprofits in Animal Welfare: For years, much of the career advice in the Effective Altruism community has implicitly (or explicitly) suggested that impact = working at an EA nonprofit. That narrative made sense when the community and its talent pool were smaller. But as EA grows, it’s worth reassessing whether we’re overconcentrating on nonprofit careers, a trend that may be limiting our community’s impact and leaving higher-leverage opportunities on the table.
What I wish I knew when I started out in animal advocacy: I identified 15 pieces of advice that I wish knew earlier in my animal advocacy career, and provided personal stories to show how they were relevant in my life. This article will be most useful for early career professionals
Personal fit is extremely important when assessing animal advocacy career paths: Just as it would be mistake to choose your career path by only following where your passion lies or what you like or what you seem to be good at, and ignoring the impact of the work you would be doing; it would also be a mistake to consider the impact of career paths in isolation and not taking into account whether these are the right fit for you.
Difficult to get a job in EA not living in the West? Animal advocacy careers can impact millions of animals anywhere in the world: We think that a considerable number of effective altruists who couldn’t or didn’t even try to get a job in EA organisations (due to high competition, lack of expertise, or distant location) may be overlooking extremely impactful career opportunities in animal advocacy. In this post, we’ll show how these career opportunities might be a good fit for many effective altruists that experience similar difficulties and bottlenecks in their career.
Aspiring AI Safety Researchers: Consider “Atypical Jobs” in the Field Instead.: Non-research roles in AI safety don't appear to get enough attention, despite a lot of professional benefits that they offer (e.g. skillbuilding in neglected-yet-important skills like people management; higher impact). People who might otherwise be interested in AI safety research careers could consider more atypical roles (and many of these can still feel "research adjacent"!)
Protesting Now for AI Regulation might be more Impactful than AI Governance and Policy Research: There are already many skilled and highly capable people working directly on these issues, making it increasingly difficult for newcomers to have a significant impact. For all the AI safety laypeople, wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on activism, which is currently almost nonexistent, and begin protesting Jody Williams style?
Rethinking the Value of Working on AI Safety: EAs seeking to maximize their expected impact should reconsider working on AI safety directly. We don’t know how effective working in this area might be and adopting a worldview diversification strategy might offer a more robust approach to address this issue, especially for early-career individuals. In addition to diversifying on a community level, there are two promising pathways to achieve this: pursuing a meta career and earning to give.
AGI safety career advice: People often ask me for career advice related to AGI safety. This post summarizes the advice I most commonly give. I’ve split it into three sections: general mindset, alignment research and governance work. For each of the latter two, I start with high-level advice aimed primarily at students and those early in their careers, then dig into more details of the field.
On whether or not to work at frontier AI companies:
Should you work at a frontier AI company?: If you want to help reduce catastrophic risks from AI, working at a frontier AI company is an important option to consider, but the impact is hard to assess. These roles often come with great potential for career growth, and many could be (or lead to) highly impactful ways of reducing the chances of an AI-related catastrophe. However, there's also a risk of doing substantial harm, and there are roles you should probably avoid.
AI Governance Needs Technical Work: People who want to improve the trajectory of AI sometimes think their options for object-level work are (i) technical safety work and (ii) non-technical governance work. But that list misses things; another group of arguably promising options is technical work in AI governance, i.e. technical work that mainly boosts AI governance interventions. This post provides a brief overview of some ways to do this work—what they are, why they might be valuable, and what you can do if you’re interested.
What is it like doing AI safety work?: How do you know if you’ll like AI safety work? What’s the day-to-day work like? What are the best parts of the job? What are the worst? To better answer these questions, we talked to ten AI safety researchers in a variety of organizations, roles, and subfields.
Governance
A personal take on longtermist AI governance: In this post, I: briefly recap the key points of my previous post, explain what I see as the key bottlenecks in the space, and share my current opinions about how people sympathetic to longtermism and/or AI existential risk mitigation can best contribute today.
Advice to junior AI governance researchers: This summer, I’m supervising some research fellows through Cambridge’s ERA AI Fellowship. In this post, I’ll highlight a few pieces of advice I’ve found myself regularly giving to research fellows.
Aptitudes for AI governance work: I outline 8 “aptitudes” for AI governance work. For each, I give examples of existing work that draws on the aptitude, and a more detailed breakdown of the skills I think are useful for excelling at the aptitude.
Current paths to impact in EU AI Policy: I am someone well-versed in EU AI policy, having spent considerable time in the field and building a strong network. I am posting anonymously because discussing policy paths openly could affect my reputation.
How Europe might matter for AI governance: This post explores which levers exist in Europe for influencing the governance of AI. The scope includes potential actions taken by bodies/offices/agencies of the EU, its constituent member countries, or some other potentially relevant European countries like Switzerland.
Talent Needs of Technical AI Safety Teams: Breaking profiles within research into three archetypes (Connectors / Iterators / Amplifiers) and describing how you develop each skillset.
More people getting into AI safety should do a PhD: Doing a PhD is a strong option to get great at developing and evaluating research ideas. These skills are necessary to become an AI safety research lead, one of the key talent bottlenecks in AI safety, and are helpful in a variety of other roles. By contrast, my impression is that currently many individuals with the goal of being a research lead pursue options like independent research or engineering-focused positions instead of doing a PhD. This post details the reasons I believe these alternatives are usually much worse at training people to be research leads.
(Even) More Early-Career EAs Should Try AI Safety Technical Research: I claim that since AISTR seems like the highest-EV path for ambitious and smart people early in their careers, most the plurality of early-career EAs should at least try this path for a few months (or until they get good firsthand information that they aren’t suited for it).
Advice on Pursuing Technical AI Safety Research: This applies to both aspiring research scientists and research engineers, with a focus on the importance of machine learning (ML) programming.
Reflections on my 5-month AI alignment upskilling grant: Five months ago, I received a grant from the Long Term Future Fund to upskill in AI alignment. As of a few days ago, I was invited to Berkeley for two months of full-time alignment research under Owain Evans’s stream in the SERIMATS program. This post is about how I got there.
Concerns about AI safety career change: I'm a software engineer interested in working on AI safety, but confused about its career prospects. I outlined all my concerns below.
On-Ramps Into Biosecurity - A Model: I propose a model to think about on-ramps into biosecurity & provide a few use cases for it depending on the background you are coming in with.
Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists: Expertise in engineering physical systems is critically needed for some of the most important and neglected biosecurity interventions, including improved PPE and designing pandemic-safe buildings.
Why You Should Become a University Group Organizer: I’ve been an organizer at UChicago for over a year now with my co-organizer, Avik. I also started the UChicago Rationality Group, co-organized a 50-person Midwest EA Retreat, and have spoken to many EA organizers from other universities. A lot of this post is based on vibes and conversations with other organizers, so while it's grounded in experience, some parts are more speculative than others.
Community building can be a great early career move: My central claim is that running an EA or cause area group at a top university can provide very useful career capital for individuals in the early stages of their careers.
EA Group Organizer Career Paths Outside of EA: There are a wide variety of career paths available in community building, and prospective group organizers should not feel that their career success is completely tied to the success of EA.
Lessons from Running Stanford EA and SERI: There’s an incredible amount of low-hanging fruit in this area. The payoffs to doing good community-building work are huge. We still have so much to learn, but I think we got some things right. What’s the sEAcret sauce? I try to distill it in this post, as a mix of mindsets, high-level goals, and tactics.
E2G help available: If you’re interested in having a meaningful EA career but your experience doesn’t match the types of jobs that the typical white collar, intellectual EA community leans towards, then you’re just like me. I have been earning to give as a nuclear power plant operator in Southern Maryland for the past few years, and I think it’s a great opportunity for other EA’s who want to make a difference but don’t have a PhD in philosophy or public policy.
10 years of Earning to Give: A couple of peers interned at Giving What We Can. At the same time, I did my own internship in finance, and my estimate of my earning potential quadrupled. One year after that, I graduated and took the Giving What We Can pledge myself. While my pledge form read that I had committed to donate 20% of my income, my goal was to hit far higher percentages. How did that go?
Earn To Give $1M/year or Work Directly?: Many people aren’t sure if it would be more impactful for them to earn to give or to work at an EA aligned org. I suggest a solution to solve this problem quickly: Ask the org you are applying to.
Earning to give may be the best option for patient EAs: The upshot of this is that ETG may well be the highest impact thing for many EAs to do, conditional on them finding one or more of the arguments for patient altruism compelling and having personal fit for ETG
Bringing back earning to give: ETG is underemphasized as a career path due to three factors: Entrepreneurship requires significant risk appetite and overcoming of inertia; It’s a fairly lonely path with looser bonds to the rest of community; and There’s no clear roadmap on how to acquire enough the requisite skills and professional networks required to substantially increase odds of success. Solutions are discussed.
Finance Careers for Earning to Give: Many altruists are interested in earning to give, but don’t know where to start. Finance is an attractive option, and with good reason. It offers very high expected earnings, opportunities to use a wide variety of skillsets, and a wide range of career possibilities with different combinations of competitiveness, demandingness and compensation. Finance can be a good fit for someone who is good at analytical thinking, works well with other people, and willing to work hard in a serious environment.
Should Earners-to-Give Work at Startups Instead of Big Companies?: Effective altruist earners-to-give might be able to donate more money if, instead of working at big companies for high salaries, they work at startups and get paid in equity. Startups are riskier than big companies, but EAs care less about risk than most people. Working at a startup is easier than starting one. It doesn't pay as well, but based on my research, it looks like EA startup employees can earn more than big company employees in expectation.
Entrepreneurship ETG Might Be Better Than 80k Thought: In 2014, Ryan Carey estimated that YCombinator-backed startup founders averaged $2.5M/year. I repeat his analysis, and find that this number is now substantially higher: $3.8-9.9M/year. These numbers seem fairly high, and may indicate that earning to give through entrepreneurship is a good path for those who have solid personal fit.
[Unendorsed] — An update in favor of trying to make tens of billions of dollars: Since this post was written, it has come out that SBF has committed large-scale fraud, though the details are still unclear. In the process, he's also lost the large majority of his net worth. Original key points: Sam Bankman-Fried was able to make over $20 billion in just 4 years. By staying in quant trading, he’d have made several orders of magnitude less money over that period. Presumably, (way?) fewer than 100 EAs tried something similar. If that’s our base rate, then maybe more EAs should try to found multi-billion dollar companies.
GCR Reduction
Common Points of Advice for Students and Early-Career Professionals Interested in Global Catastrophic Risk: GCRI runs a recurring advising and collaboration program in which we connect with people at all career points who are interested in getting more involved in global catastrophic risk.The post covers the following themes: Seek a mix of advice; There are many paths to success in global catastrophic risk; Get the right balance between specialization and generalization; Work across the divide between (A) humanities-social science-policy and (B) engineering-natural science; Know your allies; Some graduate school options; Some fellowship programs; Advice for graduate students; Professional networking and etiquette
[video] Joan Gass: How to build a high-impact career in international development: Members of the EA community who want to work in global development should adopt a “venture capital” approach, looking for opportunities to make bets on the cause areas with the highest expected value. Fostering economic growth in emerging markets and building state capability are high-value areas.
What is meta Effective Altruism?: Meta Effective Altruism is one of the main focus areas of the Effective Altruism movement. It can include research to help direct efforts (Global Priorities Research) and efforts to build or support the EA movement and its members (EA Movement Building).
Building charities
Why EA meta, and the top 3 charity ideas in the space: This post goes over why we think Effective Altruism meta could be highly impactful, why CE is well-positioned to incubate these charities, why 2021 is a good time, differences in handling EA meta compared to other causes, and potential concerns. We finish by introducing our three top recommendations for new charities in the space: exploratory altruism, earning to give +, and EA training.
Help with the Forum; wiki editing, giving feedback, moderation, and more: Ways you can help: Editing and adding to the EA Forum Wiki, Giving feedback on drafts of Forum posts, Forum upkeep (Deleting spam and approving non-spam, Adding relevant tags to new posts), Moderation, General expression of interest
Improving the EA-aligned research pipeline: Sequence introduction: In this sequence, I try to: Provide a clearer description of what I see as the “problem”, its drivers, and its consequences. Outline some goals we might have when designing interventions to improve the EA research pipeline, Overview 18 interventions options that seem worth considering, and Describe one of those intervention options in more detail, in hopes that that leads to either a good argument against that option or to someone actually building it.
Intervention options for improving the EA-aligned research pipeline: In a previous post, I highlighted some observations that I think collectively demonstrate that the current processes by which new EA-aligned research and researchers are “produced” are at least somewhat insufficient, inefficient, and prone to error. In this post, I’ll briefly discuss 19 interventions that might improve that situation.
Can the EA community copy Teach for America? (Looking for Task Y): Below, I make the case for the importance of thinking about "Task Y", a way in which people who are interested in EA ideas can usefully help, without moving full time into an EA career. The most useful way in which I am now thinking about "Task Y" is as an answer to the question "What can I do to help?".
What to do with people?: I would like to offer one possible answer to the ongoing discussion in the effective altruism community, centered around the question about scalable use of the people (“Task Y”).
Profiting-to-Give: harnessing EA talent with a new funding model: Given the huge amount of talent in EA and how it often tends to pool together geographically, there is a third option that comes to mind: individual EAs could doing meaningless work together in companies that they control and give of their excess to EA charities. Or as I'm labelling: profiting-to-give.
Nuclear
Nuclear weapons safety and security - Career review: Nuclear weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity. Reducing the risk means getting nuclear countries to improve their actions and preventing proliferation to non-nuclear countries. We’d guess that the highest impact approaches here involve working in government (especially the US government), researching key questions, or working in communications to advocate for changes.
How to apply for a PhD: Here's the advice I give to all the undergrads who contact me asking about how to get into graduate school (currently completing a PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University)
Advice for current / potential PhD students: Here are some things I wish I knew at the start of my PhD. Better routines and knowing when to stop a project would have made me more effective. For background, I’ve just finished a PhD at the intersection of Bayesian statistics and infectious disease epidemiology, based at the University of Cambridge, UK.
How to PhD: These are a few thoughts on how to approach graduate school effectively. This is not a guide or anything of the sort. Just an attempt to write down a set of considerations I use when thinking about my own grad school, and what seems to be helpful from convos I’ve had with other EA PhD-seekers. I have not tried to make this generally applicable.
Thoughts on doing good through non-standard EA career pathways: I think that there are many people who do lots of good through pursuing a career that they were a particularly good fit for, rather than by trying to fit themselves into a top-rated EA career. But I also think it’s pretty easy to pursue such paths in a way that isn’t very useful. In this post I’m going to try to build on this advice to describe some features of how I think these nonstandard careers should be pursued in order to maximize impact.
EA Projects I'd Like to See: If you could see yourself actually working on one of these, please do let me know. I might be able to connect you to other people who could work with, elaborate on details, or help you find funding.
Building EA Projects While Working an Unrelated Full-Time Job: These observations come from my personal experience trying to advance a specific idea (Profit for Good) while working full-time as a lawyer on unrelated work. I'm sharing my impressions and frustrations, which may or may not generalize to others developing EA-aligned projects outside traditional pathways.
Deciding What Project/Org to Start: A Guide to Prioritization Research: If you’re deciding what (research) project, organization or intervention to go for, analyzing your options through prioritization research can be invaluable. I used it to settle on founding Catalyze, an AI Safety field-building non-profit. In this post, I will share my blueprint and learnings from this process.
Possible gaps in the EA community: I’m interested in having a better sense of what new kinds of projects should be set up within the EA community so I thought I’d have a go at writing out a few ideas which seem promising to me. To provide a nudge towards others producing such lists, I’ve also shared some of the prompts I used to come up with the thoughts below.
Experiences
From a Side Project to a Funded Organisation: My Story and What I’ve Learned: In this talk, I’ll share the story of how Hive grew from a side project into a funded organization—and what I’ve learned along the way. While this is just one path, I hope it helps others navigating early-stage charity work, especially in meta animal advocacy.
Maximizing impact during consulting: building career capital, direct work and more: In this article we describe several ways in which you can optimize your consulting career both for immediate impact and for building career capital to have more impact in the future. We are comparing possible options within consulting once you are already in the field, rather than arguing that any of these are the most impactful things you could be doing out of all possible options.
EA needs consultancies: EA organizations like Open Phil and CEA could do a lot more if we had access to more analysis and more talent, but for several reasons we can't bring on enough new staff to meet these needs ourselves, e.g. because our needs change over time, so we can't make a commitment that there's much future work of a particular sort to be done within our organizations. Consultancies are one solution.
Management Consulting
Considerations and advice on entering management consulting: In this article, we will cover the key considerations when thinking about entering the management consulting career path if you’re trying to maximize the social impact you have in your career. We also outline the steps needed to enter the consulting field and provide some practical advice.
Exit opportunities after management consulting: As a management consultant, you will likely have acquired a broad range of skills that are useful in different sectors and roles. Consulting can provide some great exit opportunities, so it’s important to consider how to leverage your career capital to have more impact when you leave.
All About Operations & Careers: I’ve decided to write about the operations profession - what it is, who is a good candidate, and some core philosophies about what makes operations important.
Doing Ops in EA FAQ: before you join (2022): This guide was written by the Pineapple Operations team with inputs from several operations staff at various organizations to provide an overview of considerations for entering operations work at EA orgs. We think it'll be especially useful for people new to EA and/or operations who are considering working in this space.
Senior EA 'ops' roles: if you want to undo the bottleneck, hire differently: EA is bottlenecked by 'good senior ops people'; we hear this a lot. But my experience hiring, building and running teams myself and engaging with EA organisations, has made me think that there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to attracting and hiring these people. So these are personal reflections on what I think a lot of EA orgs get wrong when it comes to hiring these roles and what I think can change to unblock the bottleneck.
What is Operations Management?: I'm going to provide a brief overview of what operations is and what operations management is, mention some gentle critiques of how operations is viewed in EA, give several examples of operations management in different contexts
4 lessons from EAs working in European policy: The four key takeaways: policy advocates struggle to hire good people for crafting realistic policies, aspiring policymakers should consider a career in party politics, civil servants can specialise in topics important to top EA cause areas, explore the policy space before choosing a single path.
Ideological tensions between Effective Altruism and The UK Civil Service: My main motivation for writing this is to articulate a real frustration. One the one hand, I argue that being a (UK) civil servant can have an immense impact - arguably more than relevant alternatives. One the other hand, there are serious ideological clashes between civil service and EA principles that need to be reconciled.
Becoming a Member of Parliament: potential routes & impact: The objective of this post is to inform readers about: What being an MP involves, How it can have an impact, What experience and skill set are required or desirable, and What the risks are (personal and wider)
How to change a system from the inside: The linked post is focused on the UK civil service yet I think much of it would be applicable to people in other contexts, organisations and countries
Working in Parliament: How to get a job & have an impact: The objective of this post is to inform readers about: What working in Parliament involves, How it can have an impact, What experience and skill set are required or desirable, Future career opportunities after working in Parliament, and What the risks are (personal and wider).
Working in US policy as a foreign national: Immigration pathways and types of impact: Given the importance of US policy across many cause areas — AI, biosecurity, nuclear security, etc. — it is not uncommon for EAs who are not US citizens to wonder whether they should still try to work in US policy. This post provides immigration-related information to foreign nationals considering US policy work (though much of it will be relevant beyond policy work as well).
Government
Congress
Apply to fall policy internships (we can help): Many U.S. congressional internship applications are closing in the next few weeks for Fall (Sep- Dec) internships. This is a relatively low-effort, high reward thing to do if you you’re interested in testing your fit for policy.
U.S. EAs Should Consider Applying to Join U.S. Diplomacy: This article provides a brief overview of the U.S. Foreign Service, including a description of the hiring process, the opportunities, and the challenges of being a diplomat. Given the opportunity for building expertise in shaping government decision-making and a low but considerable probability of shaping important policies early in your career, we conclude more EAs should consider diplomacy even if they might not pursue a life-long diplomatic career.
Advice for Undergraduates Interested in US Policy: Many undergraduates consider pursuing a career in US policy but are uncertain about how to test their fit and get a foot in the door. This post provides advice and highlights opportunities for undergraduates interested in US public policy, complementing 80,000 Hours’ more general college advice.
Job search
How I got an entry-level role in Congress: In this post I will share my job search and application process. I hope this will be helpful to people who are considering Congressional work as a career option. Because I am early in my career, I imagine this will be most helpful/applicable for people who are in undergrad or earlier.
One Year in DC: I think this post captures a lot of important features of the US policymaking system. Pulling out a few especially relevant/broadly applicable sections.
Report on careers in politics and policy in Germany: Careers in and around the German federal government can be very influential, as Germany has significant international weight. I recommend that students considering such a career should get involved in party politics, apply for scholarships from party-affiliated foundations, complete relevant internships, and study law.
Research
Interested in EA/longtermist research careers? Here are my top recommended resources: These resources should hopefully help you have an impact, build your career capital (e.g., knowledge, skills, connections, and credentials), & test your personal fit for various roles, and find other good advice or valuable opportunities for doing those things.
5 possibly impactful career paths for researchers: In this post, CE discusses possible long-term career paths for researchers and a gap assessment of what skills people might want to prioritize to pursue those.
How to succeed as an early-stage researcher: the “lean startup” approach: My argument: At the early stage of your research career, you should think of yourself as an entrepreneur trying to build products (i.e. research outputs) that customers (i.e. the broader community) want to consume. You might be thinking: but I thought I was trying to maximise my impact? Sure, but at this stage in your career, you don’t know what’s impactful. You should be epistemically humble and responsive to feedback from people you respect. You should be opportunistic, willing to pivot quickly.
Why EAs researching mainstream topics can be useful: I think there are four main, broad, potential paths to impact from such work: 1. The research could improve behaviours and decisions made within the EA community. 2. The research could improve behaviours and decisions made within other communities (e.g., slightly improving the allocation of large peacebuilding and security budgets). 3. Doing this research could allow the researchers to build networks between the EA community and other communities, which could help with things like recommending non-EA organisations, projects, job-seekers, experts, etc. for EAs to fund, work for, hire, get advice from, etc., and vice versa. 4. Doing this research could equip the researchers with the knowledge, skills, connections, and credibility they need to later get and effectively use influential roles in other communities
Feedback I've been giving to junior x-risk researchers: The CERI and SERI summer research fellowships are each coming to a close. My roles – co-leading CERI, and leading SERI's nuclear risk cause area – involve giving feedback to fellows on their research. I found myself giving similar-ish feedback to different fellows, and so I'm writing up some of the feedback I gave
Some advice on independent research: I had some great experiences with independent research but not everyone does. I think the variance for independent research is large and I'm worried that people get disheartened by bad experiences. So here are some considerations in which situations independent research might be a good idea and some tips that will hopefully improve your experience.
Consider starting a for-profit company instead: Argues that there are a number of reasons (Scalability, Capital counterfactuals, Standards, Learning potential and Earning to give potential) that favor this over starting a non-profit.
Some promising career ideas beyond 80,000 Hours' priority paths: We compiled this list by asking 6 advisers about paths they think more people in the effective altruism community should explore, and which career ideas they think are currently undervalued—including by 80,000 Hours. In particular, we were looking for paths that seem like they may be promising from the perspective of positively shaping the long-term future, but which aren't already captured by aspects of our priority paths.
Spitballing EA career ideas: I think it would be interesting to see some wider-ranging career thinking, considering more possible fields and more different types of skillsets. So I’ve made a list of as many jobs as I could think of that sound potentially interesting from an EA perspective.
Coaching: Reduce Struggle and Develop Talent: Coaching is a service that empowers the coachee to achieve what they want and provides a relationship for support and growth. We believe that coaching is a promising way to develop the talent within the EA community and thus contribute to a more thriving and impactful community.
To PA or not to PA?: PA work in EA is probably more impactful, slightly better paid and in much higher demand than you thought. Indications of personal fit: support mindset, organised, conscientious, detail-oriented and big-picture-oriented, communication skills, social skills, non-judgemental, discreet (and sometimes: proactive, creative, flexible, okay with some disorder)
Gaps and opportunities in the EA talent & recruiting landscape: In this post, we give an overview of what we see as currently happening in the space in order to try and create common knowledge, share our perceptions of potentially neglected areas of EA recruitment which we would be excited to see more people working on, and outline potential project ideas people could pursue, as well as risks that might come with working on them.
Should more EAs become technical sales professionals?: Sales is rarely discussed as a career path in EA. This post explores whether technical sales roles — especially B2B Sales Engineering — might be a fast, high-leverage path for building career capital. It compares sales to other roles, and makes the case that sales deserves more serious attention from EA students and professionals.
Predictors of success in hiring CEA’s Full-Stack Engineer: None of the factors we looked at were statistically significant. Having previously worked at a Big Tech “FAANG” company was the only factor which had a consistently positive central estimate, although with confidence intervals that comfortably included both positive and negative effect sizes. Years of experience, typographical errors, and the level of university qualification seemed to have little predictive power.
From rave websites to AI risk: 30 years of career lessons: After three decades spanning startups, consulting, banking, entrepreneurship, and impact nonprofits, I'm sharing lessons that might be useful for others navigating career decisions.
Lessons from my time in Effective Altruism: I think this has all worked out well for me, despite my mistakes, but often more because of luck than my own decisions. So while I’m not sure how much I would change in hindsight, it’s worth asking what would have been valuable to know in worlds where I wasn’t so lucky. Here are five such things.
Astronaut Ambitions, Leaving Clinical Medicine, & Eliminating Lead Exposure: An Interview With Bal Dhital: Bal Dhital currently works as a program manager for the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, a charity that aims to eliminate lead-based paint and products in countries around the world. But over the years, he’s worn many hats: doctor, clothing company founder, and briefly, aspiring space physician.
My circuitous, undirected path to an EA job: I recently started a full-time position at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, and I’ve been reflecting on how convoluted and indirect my path was. I thought that journey might be worth sharing.
How good it is to donate and how hard it is to get a job: In this post, I hope to inspire other Effective Altruists to focus more on donation and commiserate with those who have been disappointed in their ability to get an altruistic job.
My mistakes on the path to impact: Doing a lot of good has been a major priority in my life for several years now. Unfortunately I made some substantial mistakes which have lowered my expected impact a lot, and I am on a less promising trajectory than I would have expected a few years ago.
How I torched my biggest career opportunity so far: I probably could have worked for a US Cabinet-level appointee, with an annual budget in the $10 billion order of magnitude, in a capacity where I would have had routine daily access to this person and influence on this person's decisions, if I had made a better decision at a key time several years prior.
My Mid-Career Transition into Biosecurity: 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?
To the Bat Mobile!! My Mid-Career Transition into AI Safety: After over a decade of leading purpose-driven projects in social business, education, and impact consulting, I'm diving into something completely different – AI safety and alignment. Because apparently, managing humans wasn't complicated enough.
People trying to decide between paths:
My Career Decision-Making Process: In this post I share my career decision-making process. I hope that it will help others in their career decisions, by serving as a detailed case study. I believe that the general framework I used can be useful to a wide audience. Furthermore, in the last section, I detail all of the options that I considered, many of which are not frequently discussed in EA, and I believe they will be particularly relevant for people with technological or scientific background.
A tough career decision: Take a good post PHD job that works well with a significant other’s life, or work to cobble together a direct work AI EA job that would mean less career security and a tough situation with a significant other? Also see Meditations on careers in AI Safety.
Leaving Google, Joining the Nucleic Acid Observatory: In 2017 I rejoined Google to earn money to donate. At the time I thought earning to give was probably not where I could have the most impact, but I wasn't able to find other options that were a good fit for me personally. Over the last five years a few things have changed
[Question] Exploring a Career Pivot from Big Tech: I’m an EA working at a large tech company, with several years of experience in a niche technical stack (kept vague for anonymity). Over the past six months, I’ve been reflecting deeply on how to make my career more impactful.
[Question] FIRE and doing good: Having worked in development for 7 years, reached what I believe to my ceiling, and being unhappy about having too many managerial responsibilities, I am looking to retire early from this line of career. What should I do once I start living off passive income?
[question] Should I go straight into EA community-building after graduation or do software engineering first?: I'm a fourth-year undergrad in the United States majoring in computer science and I'm graduating after next semester. I'm also a group organizer for an EA university group which I started this semester. My current job plans are: do software engineering for two years, and then transition into EA community-building. Another option is to jump straight into EA community-building after graduation.
[question] Help Me Choose A High Impact Career!!!: Hi everyone!! I currently live in Los Angeles and am trying to figure out if I should stay here, get a Master of Social Entrepreneurship degree at USC, and feel a little more confident and prepared or move to the San Francisco Bay Area, go directly into working, saving money, and doing work that has a positive impact
[question] Career uncertainty: Medicine vs. AI: My initial thoughts were that a medical career could lead me to opportunities in public health, research, or clinical practice, which seem to have high potential for doing good. But there's this nagging feeling that maybe I'd make a bigger impact if I pursued a career in AI policy or AI technical research instead.
Thoughts on Post-PhD Jobs: I'm a PhD student at an American Grad school, studying authoritarian politics. The academic job market has more PhD students than openings in the US. My school does not have a strong placement record. First, I'll list my most valuable qualifications. Second, I'll list 6 candidate paths as backup jobs. Finally, I'll describe the three questions I need to answer for each one, before I pick my thesis plan.
[question] Give Me Career Advice: I’m a software developer with 14+ years of professional experience, recently quit my job hoping to work on something EA related, currently trying out a few side projects, considering a specific job, but also open to waiting for better opportunities to come up.
Systemic change, global poverty eradication, and a career plan rethink: am I right?: I wanted to be a social entrepreneur, but the social impact of systemic changes to the global economy through policy seems much greater than that of even the best entrepreneurship due to the global economy's current inequity. As a result, I think I should become some sort of economist / economic policy adviser instead. Am I correct?
[question] Career Investments vs Giving in the short-term: I’m writing the story starting from a relatively well-paid mid-career perspective but I think the thinking could potentially be generalized to anyone who is relatively well-positioned financially (e.g. having significant runway or other source of financial resources e.g. from family, etc.) but I did not put much thinking into this yet. The dilemma arises when such a person is both willing to make a change in career plans and is also either already donating a significant part of income or now willing to take a significant “pay cut” (at least on a short term).
Four pieces of career planning advice: Namely: talk to more people, apply to more opportunities, write more and collect feedback, and quantitatively weigh your options.
Cheap tests and expensive signals to develop professionally: Do you want to find something to spend your professional development time on or improve your chances of getting a job? Look for cheap tests that tell you what it’s like doing the skill you’re practicing and expensive signals that demonstrate you have that skill.
How Unofficial Work Gets You Hired: Building Your Surface Area for Serendipity: This post offers a tactical roadmap to the hidden layer of hiring: small, often unpaid but high-leverage actions that build visibility and trust before a job ever opens. The general principle is simple: show up consistently where your future collaborators or employers hang out — and let your strengths be visible.
Try working on something random with someone cool: Matching people to high-impact work is really hard. Hiring by work trust network is the only cheat code I know. While working together on a very real project very extensively is most informative, working on a random thing is still probably informative. Working with people on some random thing is relatively easy. Time spent on the counterfactual-more casual introduction-y conversations- is comparatively less valuable.
Digital Networking for Dummies: If you're a (young) student or lack social capital, reaching out to people on the internet is one of the highest ROI things you can do. Actively choosing to broaden my social horizons has led to having some of the most valuable experiences and meeting some amazing, interesting people I wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
Things to be aware of
Things to check about a job or internship: A lot of great projects have started in informal ways: a startup in someone’s garage, or a scrappy project run by volunteers. Sometimes people jump into these and are happy they did so. But I’ve also seen people caught off-guard by arrangements that weren’t what they expected, especially early in their careers.
The experience
Eukaryote Skips Town - Why I'm leaving DC: I’ve spent the past 7 years living in the DC area. I moved out there from the Pacific Northwest to go to grad school – I got my masters in Biodefense from George Mason University, and then I stuck around, trying to move into the political/governance sphere. That sort of happened. But I will now be sort of doing that from rural California rather than DC, and I’ll be looking for something else – maybe something more unusual – do to next.
My impact-focused career: you can create your own roles (?): This is a post about my impact-focused career journey, with a few tentative, interrelated lessons drawn out: Unofficial work gets you hired // Even if an organisation has a need, they don’t always advertise it // You can create your own roles.
Why You Should Build Your Own EA Internship Abroad: I am writing this to reflect on my experience interning with the Fish Welfare Initiative, and to provide my thoughts on why more students looking to build EA experience should do something similar.
Don’t think, just apply! (usually): Don’t spend too long thinking about the pros and cons of applying to an opportunity (e.g., a job, grant, degree program, or internship). Assuming the initial application wouldn’t take you long, if it seems worth thinking hard about, you should probably just apply instead.
Advice I've Found Helpful as I Apply to EA Jobs: As I apply to EA jobs (i.e., jobs at organizations that are explicitly aligned with the effective altruism movement), I am finding it helpful to keep in mind the following three pieces of advice: Be radically honest (don’t present the “best” version of myself– present the most accurate version of myself). Meet people (don’t assume that EA is a perfect meritocracy– recognize that many jobs result from networking). Be critical (don’t assume that every EA job is highly impactful– take time to compare the expected impact of different roles/orgs).
A guide to improving your odds at getting a job in EA: Every EA organization will have different specific hiring criteria, but I do think there are some general trends that, if focused on, would help candidates get more EA jobs (and spend less time applying for ones that are not a good fit).
Beware Premature Introspection: Thus, for a job application, especially a very competitive one like many EA jobs are, I would propose the following heuristic: If you think about it for a few minutes and haven’t decisively made up your mind on whether you would want to take the job if it were offered to you, just go ahead and submit an application.
Rejected from all the “EA” Jobs you applied for? - What to do now?: Hi, have you been rejected from all the 80K listed EA jobs you’ve applied for? It sucks, right? Welcome to the club. What might be comforting is that you (and I) are not alone. EA Job listings are extremely competitive, and in the classic EA career path, you just get rejected over and over.
Celebrating rejection: The basic idea is to create a system to log, share, and celebrate rejections with a relatively small group of people.The piece unpacks why rejection is so tough, illustrates how this system came to be, and what about it helps people effectively manage rejection.
Rejection thread: stories and tips: Getting rejected from jobs can be crushing — but learning how to deal with rejection productively is an incredibly valuable skill. And hearing others' rejection stories can make us feel less alone and judged, and generally help us orient toward rejection in more productive ways.
Recovering from Rejection: A story about how I reacted poorly to my first few EA job rejections, and what I learned from reflecting on my mistakes.
The Cost of Rejection: Rejection hurts. Specifically, rejection from a job that's considered high impact (which, for many, implicitly includes all jobs with EA organizations) hurts a lot. And I think that hurt has a negative impact that goes beyond the suffering involved.
Benefits of being rejected from CEA’s Online team: People who have been rejected from the CEA Online team have gotten concrete job opportunities that they would not have gotten if they had never applied and if you're rejected, I can also give you advice and connect you to other opportunities.
Dispatches from the job hunt: I’ve been actively searching since January, having left my last role at Sentience Politics (Swiss animal advocacy org, funded by EA Animal Welfare Fund et al) in April.
Hiring Process and Takeaways from Fish Welfare Initiative: This post will likely only be useful to those employers who will be directly involved in a hiring process, although the Recommendations for Applicants section should be useful for most job applicants. Job applicants may also find it interesting to learn about the employer side of the process.
Reflections on applications, rejections and feedback: If you get an application for you [job opening, grant program, etc] and you take some amount of time evaluating the application, it can’t take that much extra time to just write down the reason for your decision. You made the decision, so you know why you made it. So why then isn’t feedback better integrated in more application processes? Why do many EA orgs say they don’t have time to give personal feedback to applicants? I have heard this argument several times in writing and in person, and I have thought this exact thing many times. It makes sense in theory. But unfortunately reality is more messy, or at least sometimes it’s more messy.
Notes on hiring a copyeditor for CEA: A few months ago, I went through my first hiring process from the employer side when I found a part-time copyeditor. I thought my process might be interesting to people who've been following the aforementioned discussion, so I’m writing up my notes in this post.
Is EA still 'talent-constrained'?: Since January I’ve applied to ~25 EA-aligned roles. Every listing attracted hundreds of candidates (one passed 1,200). It seems we already have a very deep bench of motivated, values-aligned people, yet orgs still run long, resource-heavy hiring rounds.
Is it still hard to get a job in EA? Insights from CEA’s recruitment data: How hard is it to get a job in an EA-aligned organisation? CEA can contribute to this conversation by sharing some insights from our recruitment data. In this post we look at the recruitment process for 12 vacancies, which were recruited for between January 2021 and April 2022. The 12 roles were recruited for in two categories: CEA Core roles, which represent the main rounds, and Expressions of Interest (EOIs), which we were open to hiring but not actively focused on. In brief, there was a 1.85% hiring rate (average of 54 applicants to each job) and roughly 2 hours of time investment beyond the initial screen on average.
EA is vetting-constrained: So scale up the vetting! Then fund more orgs! And all of those amazingly competent people will eventually find a job in one of them, and who knows, net utility of EA might end up orders of magnitude larger.
“EA” doesn’t have a talent gap. Different causes have different gaps.: There’s been a lot of discussion and disagreement over whether EA has a talent or a money gap and the reason for the misunderstanding is that we have been referring to the entire EA movement instead of breaking it down by cause area. In this blog post I do so.
EA Organizations Hiring Frustration: I have found it very difficult to land a career in EA -- and I have a couple hypotheses why (saturated market, and elitist hiring).
Identifying Talent without Credentialing In EA: In this article, I explain the concerns with existing credentialing systems and try to speculate on which idiosyncrasies of EA would enable us to avoid them.
What's wrong with the EA-aligned research pipeline?; This post briefly highlights some things that I (and I think many others) have observed or believe, which I think collectively demonstrate that the current processes by which new EA-aligned research and researchers are “produced” are at least somewhat insufficient, inefficient, and prone to error.
Cross-post: Think twice before talking about ‘talent gaps’ – clarifying nine misconceptions, by 80,000 Hours: After pushing the idea of ‘talent gaps’ in 2015, we’ve noticed increasing confusion about the term. This is partly our fault. So, here’s a quick list of common misconceptions about talent gaps and how they can be fixed. This is all pretty rough and we’re still refining our own views, but we hope this might start to clarify this issue, while we work on better explaining the idea in our key content.
A Framework for Thinking about the EA Labor Market: Since 2015, the EA community has increasingly discussed talent constraints. I argue that standard frameworks like labor supply and demand models can provide considerable insight into why EA organizations and the broader EA community experience shortages (and surpluses) of various skills and how to resolve these imbalances.
Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people: In the rest of this post, I make some rough guesses at total committed funds compared to the number of interested people, to see how the balance of funding vs. talent might have changed over time. This will also serve as an update on whether effective altruism is growing – with a focus on what I think are the two most important metrics: the stock of total committed funds, and of committed people.
The career coordination problem: If we keep recommending pursuing careers that alleviate current bottlenecks for too long after they've been identified, then when the bottlenecks are finally alleviated there will be a flood of talented people coming after, crowding over the same limited jobs.
"The job interview process is borderline predatory": The strenuous, drawn out, and impersonal interview process described in this article is exactly what I have experience attempting to apply to EA jobs. Dozens of interviews and countless trials over weeks and weeks of not hearing back or knowing what is next
This is making use of Cunningham's Law, because I’m sure I missed some and did cut some due to space, but I also reasonably I think I can say I’ve captured over 95% from those posts within the tags
I want to mention straight out the gate that though much of this specifically pertains to EA direct work jobs, a lot also applies to those seeking to apply the EA framework to jobs elsewhere, and the Job Search section in particular involves more general advice that anyone job searching can find value in.
I did not read all of the posts, nor did I highlight all of the posts I read and liked. I mostly just did this when I remembered and had time, so take it as a good signal for those highlighted, but as not representing much for those that aren’t highlighted.
Interestingly, I think we came up with the name “career factors” entirely separately, which is pretty cool. But another way to expand this document would be to import more of Vaidehi’s factors into the structure of this doc.
I curated this because it's a really useful document, and a fantastic community service. Thanks Tristan!
Thank you Toby, really heartening to see it valued.