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Why I won’t wait for my dream EA role
I have tasted the perfect job, but I am asked to help where it’s needed. Some people say job fit is very important, so should I ignore the calls for help and instead chase my dream role? I have struggled with this tension. Tired of lack of clarity, I did like any good EA does: I made a simple spreadsheet to make this important impact and life choice. My quick spreadsheet shows that perhaps I should not wait for the dream role, but instead help where organizations actually need me now.
I think this could be useful to others that have:
Me securing one of the HEPA filters inside the filter cabinet of the shelter's air supply.
Importantly, when I talk about “dream roles,” I mostly mean differences in fit, motivation and role shape - not abandoning cause prioritization. A danger of just “going where people are shouting for help” is that you might implicitly defer to funder priorities. Therefore, I do not think people should stop questioning cause prioritization and funder priorities. Abraham Rowe recently wrote an excellent post on this topic.
My story includes having “tasted” the perfect job which might have biased me excessively for more of that job satisfaction. The last 3 years I have designed, built and sold shelters against mirror bacteria - work that energized me the most of any work I have done. This means it did not even feel like work, my life felt extremely integrated, and I did not feel like I needed time off work to recharge - the work itself gave me energy in a self sustaining loop. My heart was fully in it, not only impact wise, but in how it used my most cherished abilities and satisfied my emotional needs.
This mirror bio shelter project is now in a good but low-burn-rate phase - I can run it as a side project. I therefore tried applying to ~25 impact roles and discovered I was a top candidate for both operations/Chief-of-Staff and fieldbuilding roles. My “progress-to-next-step” rate was closer to what seems to be the case for people that land EA jobs. The positions were in no way boring, and the people I would have worked with were amazing and our calls/interviews often went over time as we were both excited about exploring fit. But they did not come from my heart - they were structured around the needs of the organizations I sought to work in. Importantly, this was not a choice between dream work and misery. No! 70% of my heart is still a lot of love. The people were amazing, the work mattered, and the alternative I fear most is not taking a good-but-imperfect impact role - but instead drifting into work that is disconnected from impact altogether. One thing I took away from this process: My candidacy was strong in fields I had not previously considered such as operations and field-building. One suspected reason I did not get selected for some of the roles where I was a top candidate is that organizations could sense my dream fit was a bit different from their role. Maybe I was too transparent about this?
Also, maybe this is my curse of having played with entrepreneurship - that I experienced what it was like to co-evolve with a project, rather than “regular” jobs where you step into something much more mature where there always seem to be some need for the candidate to adapt to the job and organization while never closing that remaining, unresolvable gap between them.
The spreadsheet I made is intentionally simple. First, I just wanted a first-order estimate of the tradeoff between waiting for a dream-fit role versus stepping into a good-but-imperfect role now. Secondly, I think more detail could give the impression of accuracy. However, I am skeptical a spreadsheet can capture the complexity and nuance of lived experiences and a messy world. In any case, the key variables were things like how much less efficient I will be at my non-dream job and how many dream opportunities realistically exist. I was actually somewhat surprised by the result. Given how unusually energizing the shelter work had been for me, I expected the spreadsheet to push me harder toward continuing to pursue dream-fit work. Instead, it kept pointing toward stepping into types of roles where organizations repeatedly signalled they needed me.
After applying to 25 roles, which was honestly quite exhausting due to high-pressure work tests and trials, I took a pause to think about my next step: Should I keep doing this, or build my next dream role? Feeling uneasy with the small number of opportunities to build exactly what I wanted and knowing a lot of life is a number’s game, I wanted to check if I should perhaps keep on applying to jobs that orgs find hard to fill.
One input I needed data to estimate was how many applications it might realistically take me to land an offer. I looked through a few EA Forum posts from people writing about their job searches. One person described 10 targeted applications leading to 5 interviews/trial tasks and eventually an offer. Another described applying to 20 EA positions, reaching several late-stage interviews and work trials, but still getting no offer. A third described applying to dozens, probably over 100 EA-aligned roles, receiving only a few interviews and no offers. My own applications looked closer to the high-traction cases: 25 applications led to 14 first interviews, 11 tests/trials and several top-candidate-ish outcomes. But since I still had not converted that into an offer, I ended up using a bit higher estimate of 50 applications per offer in the spreadsheet.
I think it is a real issue - I often ask EAs I meet “what is your dream project?” I often find that the answer is not their current job. And I think that is ok and something we might want to normalize and accept.
One alternative hypothesis: It could also be that most people never get the chance to try that one uniquely shaped position that checks all the marks. If I had not spent the last 3 years building physical shelters against x-risk, maybe I would think field building was indeed my dream job. If that is the case, I do not know what the take-away is apart from accepting that the future might be less exciting than my past, job-fit wise.
I am now considering stepping back into the application game but remain uncertain whether being transparent about my desire for the dream role increases the pain of the process (so much for lack of transparency by posting this haha!). Maybe some degree of “excitement theatre” is unavoidable in hiring, even in EA. But if many people’s dream projects are not their current role, perhaps this is something we should normalize and talk about.
I used an LLM to help draft this post and it could perhaps contain >10% AI-generated text? I have no idea how to measure this as sometimes AI rewrites my sentences slightly - is that me-generated or AI-generated? All ideas, thoughts and opinions are my own. Happy to consider sharing the LLM convo used to draft this.
