Quick takes

As someone who hires people (I am hiring right now, see bottom of the post), I often get emails asking whether someone should apply for a role I've listed. If you're considering contacting a hiring manager to ask if you're a good fit for the role, you should just apply. Why? * Job descriptions are wish lists. Everyone wants someone who checks all the boxes. If the dream candidate applies, you'll probably get rejected. In reality, everyone has weaknesses, and an 80% match candidate is highly competitive. * Self-skepticism correlates with candidate quality. Applicant pools are filled with people who can't do the job but don't understand their abilities well enough to realize it. Conversely, many highly competent professionals self-select out. If you are humble and self-reflective enough to consider your chances honestly, you are probably more competitive than you think. * You probably won't get a response. Hiring is always a busy time, and hiring managers don't have time to review every email. Often, you'll receive nothing, leaving you with wasted effort. I try to reply as much as I can, but there's only so much that can be done. * Any response you get is biased toward yes. If an org has a good filtering process, the biggest determinant in hire quality is whether good candidates apply. More "bad fit" candidates pose little strain, while one more "great fit" candidate could double the success of the hiring round. The incentive is always to get more people to apply. It's unclear whether a seeming good fit is a great fit who is overly worried about their weaknesses or a bad fit exaggerating their strengths, but it doesn't matter. Hiring managers are better off if both apply so they encourage them to do so. As a result, you spend some time writing an email, the hiring manager spends some time reviewing your email, they take time to send a response, and you receive the answer that you probably should apply, so all that effort led to nothing. Skipping t

Applications to SPAR Fall 2026 are closing tomorrow Aug 18 EOD Anywhere on Earth. SPAR is the ecosystem's biggest AI safety research program, and it's part-time remote. We still have many strong projects across AI safety, AI policy, and biosecurity with very few applications[1], so please consider applying! This round, we also have 18 non-research/generalist projects that people can apply to, and we have much more mentee capacity than previous rounds; we expect to accept around 500 people into the program. If you have friends who have thought about going into AI safety, spread the word! 1. ^ To be specific, as of 2:25 PM PT, we had around 67 projects with fewer than 20 applications total!

Our board now has more roles than before (1600+), and a public Airtable version that you can use to set up custom views and automations (including with Slack). A quick guide for using the new Airtable: 1. Open the public Airtable and click "Use this data". Make sure "Create a synced table" is selected. Choose which Airtable base you'd like the jobs data to live in. This creates a read-only synced table with our published roles. 2. Create a filtered view in the new table (e.g., filter by cause area, location, or role type). 3. From here, you can set up Slack notifications: 1. Trigger: "When record enters view", selecting the filtered view you created in step 2.  2. Action: "Send a Slack message" (via Airtable’s built-in Slack integration) 3. Compose your message using field tokens to pull in live data from each role, e.g. New role: {Job Title} at {Org Name} | {Job URL}. Use markdown for basic formatting like bold or italics.  If you use our job board, here’s a few ways you can help us to help you: * Test out the new Airtable and let us know if there are any issues or if you do anything cool with it. * If you land a role that you found on the job board, please get in touch! Even a short message about how our services helped you makes a huge difference to our ability to continue providing these services. * If you know of any orgs you think we should monitor for the board (including ones you work for), please share them! * If you work at an org that's listed on the board, note that links to your roles from our job board automatically include utm_source=probablygood_board so if you track referral sources, you'll be able to see applications that came via us. If you have a question on your application forms regarding where candidates heard about the role, please also consider adding "Probably Good" as an option.  * If you’re a hiring manager/recruiter who ends up hiring a candidate who found your role through our job board, please let us know! Othe

I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer! The summer 2023 incubator round is focused on biosecurity and scalable global health charities and I'm really excited to see what's the best fit for me and hopefully launch a new charity. The ideas that the research team have written up look really exciting and I'm trepidatious about the challenge of being a founder but psyched for getting started. Watch this space! <3 I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+ advising calls I did and feel very privileged I got to talk to so many people and try and help them along their careers! I've learned so much during my time at 80k. And the team at 80k has been wonderful to work with - so thoughtful, committed to working out what is the right thing to do, kind, and fun - I'll for sure be sad to leave them. There are a few main reasons why I'm leaving now: 1. New career challenge - I want to try out something that stretches my skills beyond what I've done before. I think I could be a good fit for being a founder and running something big and complicated and valuable that wouldn't exist without me - I'd like to give it a try sooner rather than later. 2. Post-EA crises stepping away from EA community building a bit - Events over the last few months in EA made me re-evaluate how valuable I think the EA community and EA community building are as well as re-evaluate my personal relationship with EA. I haven't gone to the last few EAGs and switched my work away from doing advising calls for the last few months, while processing all this. I have been somewhat sad that there hasn't been more discussion and changes by now though I have been glad to see more EA leaders share things more recently (e.g. this from Ben Todd). I do still believe there are some really important ideas that EA prioritises but I'm more circumspect about some of the things I think we're not doing as well as we could (

  I've now spoken to  ~1,400 people as an advisor with 80,000 Hours, and if there's a quick thing I think is worth more people doing, it's doing a short reflection exercise about one's current situation.  Below are some (cluster of) questions I often ask in an advising call to facilitate this. I'm often surprised by how much purchase one can get simply from this -- noticing one's own motivations, weighing one's personal needs against a yearning for impact, identifying blind spots in current plans that could be triaged and easily addressed, etc.   A long list of semi-useful questions I often ask in an advising call   1. Your context: 1. What’s your current job like? (or like, for the roles you’ve had in the last few years…) 1. The role 2. The tasks and activities 3. Does it involve management? 4. What skills do you use? Which ones are you learning? 5. Is there something in your current job that you want to change, that you don’t like? 2. Default plan and tactics 1. What is your default plan? 2. How soon are you planning to move? How urgently do you need to get a job? 3. Have you been applying? Getting interviews, offers? Which roles? Why those roles? 4. Have you been networking? How? What is your current network? 5. Have you been doing any learning, upskilling? How have you been finding it? 6. How much time can you find to do things to make a job change? Have you considered e.g. a sabbatical or going down to a 3/4-day week? 7. What are you feeling blocked/bottlenecked by? 3. What are your preferences and/or constraints? 1. Money 2. Location 3. What kinds of tasks/skills would you want to use? (writing, speaking, project management, coding, math, your existing skills, etc.) 4. What skills do you want to develop? 5. Are you interested in leadership, management, or individual contribution? 6. Do you want to shoot for impact? H

Dwarkesh (of the famed podcast) recently posted a call for new guest scouts. Given how influential his podcast is likely to be in shaping discourse around transformative AI (among other important things), this seems worth flagging and applying for (at least, for students or early career researchers in bio, AI, history, econ, math, physics, AI that have a few extra hours a week). The role is remote, pays ~$100/hour, and expects ~5–10 hours/week. He’s looking for people who are deeply plugged into a field (e.g. grad students, postdocs, or practitioners) with high taste. Beyond scouting guests, the role also involves helping assemble curricula so he can rapidly get up to speed before interviews. More details are in the blog post; link to apply (due Jan 23 at 11:59pm PST).

GET AMBITIOUS SLOWLY Most approaches to increasing agency and ambition focus on telling people to dream big and not be intimidated by large projects. I'm sure that works for some people, but it feels really flat for me, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The worst case scenario is big inspiring  speeches get you really pumped up to Solve Big Problems but you lack the tools to meaningfully follow up.  Faced with big dreams but unclear ability to enact them, people have a few options.  *  try anyway and fail badly, probably too badly for it to even be an educational failure.  * fake it, probably without knowing they're doing so * learned helplessness, possible systemic depression * be heading towards failure, but too many people are counting on you so someone steps in and rescue you. They consider this net negative and prefer the world where you'd never started to the one where they had to rescue you.  * discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot.  The first three are all very costly, especially if you repeat the cycle a few times. My preferred version is ambition snowball or "get ambitious slowly". Pick something big enough to feel challenging but not much more, accomplish it, and then use the skills and confidence you learn to tackle a marginally bigger challenge. This takes longer than immediately going for the brass ring and succeeding on the first try, but I claim it is ultimately faster and has higher EV than repeated failures. I claim EA's emphasis on doing The Most Important Thing pushed people into premature ambition and everyone is poorer for it. Certainly I would have been better off hearing this 10 years ago  What size of challenge is the right size? I've thought about this a lot and don't have a great answer. You can see how things feel in your gut, or compare to past projects. My few rules: * stick to problems where failure will at least be informative. If you can't track reality well eno

EU opportunities for early-career EAs: quick overview from someone who applied broadly I applied to several EU entry programmes to test the waters, and I wanted to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I'm still uncertain about, hoping to get some insights. Quick note: I'm a nurse, currently finishing a Master of Public Health, and trying to contribute as best I can to reducing biological risks. My specialisation is in Governance and Leadership in European Public Health, which explains my interest in EU career paths. I don’t necessarily think the EU is the best option for everyone. I just happen to be exploring it seriously at the moment and wanted to share what I’ve learned in case it’s useful to others. ⌨️ What I applied to & how it went * Blue Book traineeship – got it (starting October at HERA.04, Emergency Office of DG HERA) * European Committee of the Regions traineeship – rejected in pre-selection * European Economic & Social Committee traineeship – same * Eurofound traineeship – no response * EMA traineeship (2 applications: Training Content and Vaccine Outreach) – no response * Center for Democracy & Technology internship – no response * Schuman traineeship (Parliament) – no response * EFSA traineeship – interview but no feedback (I indicated HERA preference, so not surprised) If anyone needed a reminder: rejection is normal and to be expected, not a sign of your inadequacy. It only takes one “yes.” 📄 Key EA Forum posts that informed and inspired me * “EAs interested in EU policy: Consider applying for the European Commission’s Blue Book Traineeship” * “What I learned from a week in the EU policy bubble” – excellent perspective on the EU policymaking environment 🔍 Where to find EU traineeships All together here: 🔗 https://eu-careers.europa.eu/en/job-opportunities/traineeships?institution=All Includes Blue Book, Schuman, and agency-specific roles (EMA, EFSA, ECDC...). Traineeships are just traineeships: don’t underestimate what