[Edited on 9/1/2023]
There are some opportunities to work at the intersection of technolgoy and doing good, but not enough for the many promising early career people. Another option that I don’t think gets considered enough is to work at a fast-growing startup in an emerging technology (e.g. robotics or NLP), where one can often have much faster skill development within a couple of years. By fast-growing startup, I mean a company that seems decently likely to be one of the top 20 highest valued startups founded in a given 5 year period.
Claim: it would often be a better long-term career bet to work at a fast-growing startup than to work at a nonprofit that doesn’t seem likely to be high impact or have high potential for individual growth.
The three main benefits from fast-growing startups are that the company’s growth leads to greater responsibility earlier, you can work with very competent people and develop a better bar for excellence, and that working on the edge of technological developments gives you insights into how the world will change over the next decade.
Aurora, a now-public self-driving car company, had 30 employees when I joined, and about 300 when I left two years later. Six months after joining, I became a project lead for a team of 5 engineers on a high priority project. That opportunity was mostly due to the company needing leaders to keep up with our growth and my generalist skills making me not-awful at the role. That experience taught me a lot about leadership, management, and long-term engineering projects, and it seems like this type of experience is much more common in fast-growing startups. In contrast, nonprofits often grow slowly or don't grow at all.
An additional benefit is working with very competent people and getting a sense of what a highly successful company looks like. It’s useful to have a well-calibrated bar for who you should work with in the future and who to hire -- I think it would be pretty valuable if more people trying to do good had well-defined standards of excellence. To quantify this, I think I probably worked with at least 5 of the top 100 people who have worked on self-driving cars in the past decade, and at least 15 people that could get hired to lead a team at basically any self-driving or robotics company.
It’s also useful to see trends in fast-growing startups to understand how the world is changing. At Aurora, I learned about how people are thinking about ML engineering and deploying ML products, and which parts of the ML industry were real or all hype. Learnings on the front of developing technologies seem a lot more useful for doing impactful work later than learning about random web apps because the learnings are more applicable for doing good in the future (e.g. AI research).
(I wrote this comment you are reading super quickly and there may be tons of errors. )
I know someone who mentored people in startups and Google and their path across these companies.
There’s two sections in this comment here, one that is object level and gives a mainstream perspective, and another that is meta (and has to deal with EA):
Mainstream comment:
Startups are good but contrary to what Eli, Bill and Bwr are saying, the best choice is probably a FAANG (Google, Facebook, etc.) and then going to a high rolling startup after. I think this is a mainstream and normal opinion.
One reason is that the FAANG have guaranteed cachet and on a resume, might be worth equal to “HYPS” in some fields, like “AI”. On the other hand, the value of having a startup on your resume is much less clear (unless your company does turn out to be the next AirBnB and Cruise, which by the way are outliers, maybe 0.1% of the pool of startups companies)
Another one is great flexibility (there’s often large internal demand and recruiting new candidates for managers is hard) so you can transfer to many other teams. Google, FB and others have huge ecosystems of products, teams and areas that you can join. You can plausibly even change careers mid-company.
Another the reason is that the salary is much more guaranteed, and work hours are probably much better than a startup. There is a real chance you won’t be able to think about EA or much less anything at all at certain startups.
Note this:
This brings up the point: what makes a new grad entering a startup think it is they will be managing a team of 5 engineers, as opposed to being one of the 5 engineers managed by a brand new manager who is in their early career themselves, who probably is missing a lot of skills to ensure productivity and basic experience for their reports.
Finally, this is marginal point and there’s a bit packed into here, but given how much time is given to sort of social justice/equity issues on the EA Forum (because of the nonprofit, academic contact EA has), it’s worth pointing out that you are much more likely to have a good experience from one of the FAANGs along these lines. On the other hand, there are just awful, terrible things that have happened in startups, even pretty mature ones, and it’s probably still true.
The second comment here is meta.
Basically, there’s a huge amount of attention given to careers and finding a job in EA, and Rejection is one of the top posts right now. There’s a ton packed into this on many levels.
I want to acknowledge that this comment (and probably the post and other comments) speaks to about 1-5% of EAs, much less the many other normal people who can do good. That's not a sign of value as an EA or person.
Also, as a distinct point, I’m also somewhat concerned about selection bias and survivor bias, which affects the epistemics of the post and the comments. This is well known and sort of obnoxious.
My point is that if you are reading this and going WTF. Don’t feel bad.
I agree that selection bias and survivorship bias affect things like this, and it probably would’ve been good to call those out explicitly. I have a draft part 2 of this post that discusses that and how hard it is to get a job at one of these companies.
I also appreciate the comment directed at people that might feel alienated by the post, and agree that I don’t want those people to feel alienated by this. A more positive frame on this post would be: some people think that they can only work at the ~10 EA orgs they think most highly of to have a good next ... (read more)