All of EA applicant's Comments + Replies
I would advocate for controllably timed work tests whenever possible. Simply saying "please don't spend more than X hours on this work test" gives the opportunity to cheat by spending more time. Incentives for cheating are strong, because:
- The tasks usually have tight time limits, so spending additional time will improve your results.
- Applicants know the application process is highly competitive.
- Applicants know that EA organisations put a lot of value on work test performance.
If you have enough applicants, some will cheat, and they will get a ...
I have quantitative data on that :-)
I asked 10 people for career advice in a semi-structured way (I sent them the same document listing my options and asked them to provide rankings). These were all people I would think rank somewhere between "one of the top cause prioritization experts in the world" to "really, really knowledgeable about EA and very smart".
6 out of 10 thought that research analyst for OpenPhil would be my best option. But after that, there was much less consensus on the second best option (among my remaining three top ...
Hey :-)
Regarding me being a bit of an outlier: Yes, I think so as well. I personally don't know anyone who applied for quite as many positions. I still don’t think I am a *very* special case. I also got several private messages in response to this post, of people saying they had made similar experiences.
Regarding compensation: I was lucky enough to have decent runway, so the financial aspect wasn't crucial for me, so I just forgot including it. I will edit that now.
Of course, the one who writes the post about it is likely to be the outlier rather than the median.
Two additional possible reasons:
- Many people in EA community believe it is easier to get a job at an EA organisation than it really is. People working at EA organisations, sometimes in senior positions, were surprised when they heard I didn't get an offer (from another organisation). I'd guess around half the organisations I applied to were "surprised about the very strong field of applicants". Past messaging about talent constraints probably also plays a role. As a result, career advice in the EA community can be overly optimistic, to a
Thanks for sharing your comment about personalized invitations, that's interesting. At Open Phil, almost all our personalized invitations (even to people we already knew well) were only lightly personalized. But perhaps a noticeable fraction of people misperceived that as "high chance you'll get the job if you apply," or something. The Open Phil RA hiring committee is discussing this issue now, so thanks for raising it.
I got feedback for most of the roles where I reached the last stage of the application process, usually not for others. Usually the feedback was that my application was good (that I would have passed the hiring bar), but that someone else was better. I also got more specific feedback, but that was different every time (which makes some sense, since the positions were different, the people evaluating me were different, and I tried to not repeat mistakes that I had previously gotten feedback on).
I think there are probably a few things that some EA orgs could improve and I hope to write a post about it soon. In the meantime, it might be useful to explain where some of these high numbers come from:
1. Un-timed work test (e.g. OpenPhil research analyst):
I think most EA orgs underestimate how much time a work test takes. Take for example the conversation notes test of OpenPhil's application procedure. In the email instructions to the test, you will find the following line: "Historically, we think people have spent 2-8 hours on this assignment...
Thanks for mentioning the thing about the conversation notes test. It was simply an oversight to not explicitly say "Please don't spend more than X hours on this work test," and I've now added such a sentence to our latest draft of those work test instructions. We had explicit time limits for our other two tests.
1. Un-timed work test (e.g. OPP research analyst)
Huh. I'm really surprised that they find this useful. One of the main ways that Wave employees' productivity has varied is in how quickly they can accomplish a task at a given level of quality, which varies by an order of magnitude between our best and worst candidates. (Or equivalently, how good of a job they can do in a fixed amount of time.) It seems like not time-boxing the work sample would make it much, much harder to make an apples-to-apples quality comparison between applicants, because slower applicants can spend more time to reach the same level of quality.
Thanks for your comments. I already have a draft for a follow-up post on how I think the EA community could improve. Hopefully I will have time to write it up soon. Your points all seem to be good suggestions (with the caveat Denise mentions) .
(My answers might be very different to the ones that anonymousthrowaway might give).
Even if not a direct answer to your question, maybe it helps to illuminate the dynamics that contributed towards me making that many applications before moving on to other EA things. I personally did NOT think that jobs at EA organisations had clearly higher expected value than my other top options (which were working in biosecurity basically anywhere, or upskilling in machine learning via a master's degree). (There were very few exceptions, like Chief of Staff for Wi... (read more)
Regarding biosecurity roles from 80,000 Hours: While they don't seem to have any jobs in that field being actively promoted on their job board, they do maintain a list of "organizations we recommend" in biosecurity on this page, which might be useful for getting a head start on learning about these orgs' work.
Thanks, that all makes sense to me. Will think more about this. Also still curious to hear replies from others here.