I'm trying to reconcile the arguments (and marketing) with the labour market reality because it looks like even if you have strong credentials and career capital you might not find a relevant role because of how ultracompetitive this landscape is, based on discussions with other EA's and posts on the EA forum attesting how hard it is to land a job.
Every time a new role gets posted on the 80,000 Hours job board it feels like it attracts hundreds of applicants with top, even elite credentials. That doesn’t look "neglected" at the job level at all, it looks more like talent is fulfilled where it’s really necessary. In practice this is really good because it means competent people are working directly on these issues.
So, what’s missing here really? Is “neglected” mostly referring to funding and institutional capacity at the organizational level, while the actual job openings are few, so everyone is trying to get through the same narrow door? Or is it just that lots of people go after the same few EA jobs, so those jobs get really hard to get, even if the cause still needs a lot more people and work overall?
At the same time lots of these non-profits and organizations (*not all of them) also have a lot of money and are not at all underfunded, but not so many jobs are being created. For example, The Future of Life Institute received around $665 million worth of crypto from Vitalik Buterin in 2021 but only spent $17 million in 2024 based on their finance page. They did increase their job openings since 2021, but not by the capacity they have.
If these are really “NEGLECTED AND PRESSING WORLD PROBLEMS” that are vital in the next 5-10 years, why not create more roles when you have the necessary funding if there are so many exceptional candidates willing to work? When there’s money available but staffing doesn’t grow much, it starts to feel less like “we urgently need more competent people” and more like “we already have enough staff”, similar to a normal business that simply doesn’t need more people to run.
I’ve also been thinking about incentives at the senior end as well, how do these orgs decide to pay a small number of senior staff extremely well, like for example I’ve seen figures that Eliezer Yudkowsky is compensated $600k at MIRI alone (*just used as an example, don’t have anything against him personally), instead of paying a little bit less and hiring a couple of other strong researchers, if the cause area they are advocating for is really “NEGLECTED AND PRESSING" as in we are already seeing the precipice.
Do they worry that paying a little bit less would make it harder to keep their best contributors and if full-time hires aren’t the best way to scale, why not use more contractors, fellowships, or small grants? Do they sometimes keep teams small because adding more people adds coordination, meetings and review overhead? How do they decide that paying for a small number of senior people is the best use of funds compared to expanding the staff or funding more independent contributors? When money is available what constraints make more hiring the wrong move, if the cause they work on truly is urgent?
And I’m also uneasy about what the implied advice is for people who aren’t in the top few percent of candidates. Is the real funnel basically just a small number who get paid to work on the direct stuff, and the rest are expected to be earning to give, volunteer, do pro-bono contributions, independent research or create their own roles in their spare time? That might be pragmatic, but then it should be said more plainly, because “we need more people working on these neglected issues” reads very differently than “a handful of elite roles exist and they are steadily growing but the majority will just support indirectly.”
Hi Nicolae,
From my perspective as the 80,000 Hours job board manager, two things explain the difference in experience between hiring managers and job applicants:
More on both of these in my recent blogpost.
I'll also note that there are lots of impactful roles outside of EA orgs (which are indeed very competitive). For example, we mostly don't highlight EA orgs in our top career review.
Hi Conor,
Many thanks for your intervention, really appreciate it.
To answer your two main points:
- On the "applicants often have great credentials, but still aren't exactly a fit for the roles, which often require high context and a particular skillset." I would say that’s just normal hiring dynamics, if you have 300 good applicants, you don’t choose the one who could be great after a couple of months of training, you choose the one who can deliver fastest with minimal supervision. When you have a strong applicant pool, you can afford to be extremely picky and “great credentials” stops being a differentiator. That’s not a moral critique, it’s just how normal competitive markets usually work. But it does mean that from the applicant side, “we need more people” can feel quite misleading, because what they’re experiencing is “we have plenty of applicants, we’re selecting for a very specific profile.”
A useful contrast is COVID-era tech hiring. When things felt GENUINELY URGENT and demand spiked, a lot of companies expanded headcount aggressively and were willing to train or take slightly “unpolished” fits because there was real demand. That’s what REAL URGENCY looks like in labour markets. Standards don’t disappear, but organizations invest in onboarding and accept more variance because capacity matters more than perfect fit. So when people see “urgent, neglected problems” but no comparable willingness to scale via an adjustment period it’s easy to conclude the bottleneck isn’t “we need more people,” it’s “we can be selective because we already have plenty of applicants.”
- On point number 2 regarding management/coordination, I agree that scaling can be hard. But if “we need more people” is true at the cause level and “we can’t absorb more people” is true at the org level, then the bottleneck isn’t just “talent”, it’s management capacity and also organizational design. Then my immediate question is why isn’t more effort and funding going into things like middle management, onboarding, training etc. especially when there is funding available? In other words, if they can’t hire because coordination is too costly, then increasing coordination capacity would be a high-impact intervention.
If the 80,000 Hours cause areas are truly “NEGLECTED AND URGENT” like on a 5–10 year timeline, you would expect hiring to look more agressive like tech during COVID, more roles created, faster scaling, and more willingness to train strong people who aren’t already perfect fits.
Cheers
I feel like even if this is largely true, it doesn't negate the part of the OPs point of which is something like there a mismatch with communicating "the world needs you working on AI" and "there don't seem to be enough jobs for half of good people that want to work on AI"
On your second point "We need more people working on these neglected issues" doesn't necessarily mean that orgs have the "management capacity to absorb more people".
if that's true then in practical sense do we actually need more people working on these neglected issues? Or do we need more jobs first before we push for more people? Or like the OP suggested more junior hires then effort building people up through the system?
And are orgs like 80,000 hours being honest enough about the job market in their communication?
I think, realistically, EA hasn't been bottlenecked by talent for a long time - at least not generally speaking.
My thoughts, linked to what Conor said, are that many orgs (even with funds) don't hire more because they aren't confident in their ability to manage them or scale internal functions quickly, which is a downstream issue of some epistemic issues in EA hiring.
In essence, the types of people EA orgs need (experienced managers, senior leaders etc) struggle to get into EA roles because many EA orgs place disproportionate weight upon EA credentials over non EA experience - to the extent that candidates with a couple years in EA groups roles can end up outcompeting people with multiple factors more experience in significantly higher responsibility non-EA positions.
Projects like HIP are doing their very best to address this, but the issue at its core (at least to me) seems to stem from the thinking around hiring.