One reason I don’t see here: if you take a big decrease in level of responsibility, it can be hard to reverse.
For example, imagine you manage a team of 10 people and a budget of $10 million at a private corporation. You’re on track to eventually take on a C-suite position, which will either allow you to earn to give significantly or bring really great skills to an EA charity at that point.
If you leave the team you’re managing and take two years to write Forum posts on behalf of an EA charity, you may lose the opportunity to become a CEO. Maybe that’s fine—maybe you know ever cared about that because of the social status you could get from it—but maybe EA needs people with experience as successful CEOs and bringing in private sector rising stars for entry level positions is a bad idea.
I’ve come across a few people who said that “getting management experience”, for the purpose of eventually helping with direct work, was a big part in not wanting to do direct work directly. So far I haven’t seen these people ever get into direct work. I think it can be great for earning to give, but am personally skeptical of its applicability to direct work.
From what I’ve seen, the skills one needs to lead EA organizations are fairly distinct, and doing so often requires a lot of domain specific knowledge that takes time to develop. Related, much of the experience I see people getting who are in management seem to be domain specific skills not relevant for direct work, or experience managing large teams of skills very different from what is seems to be needed in direct work.
For example, in bio safety orgs, the #1 requirement of a manager is a lot of experience in the field, and the same is true (maybe more so) in much of AI safety.
I think non-direct-work management tracks can be great for earning to give, as long as that’s what’s intended.
Strongly agree with this, as someone who had approximately the level of responsibility Khorton described until recently.
In my industry (quant trading) the extra value of further experience to outside goals past the level I’ve already reached is limited except potentially as a status signal.
Thanks! I agree that the amount of career capital a position will generate is an important factor in any career decision, “overqualified” or not.
I’m curious about your “it can be hard to reverse” statement though: how frequently do you think this happens? At least in US tech, it’s pretty common for people to take a year off to organize against Trump or whatever, and a year of charity work is definitely not irreversible. When I’ve talked to recruiters they basically just ignore charity work, at worst.
Anecdotally it always feels like now is the wrong time to leave your job because (good thing) is right around the corner, but it’s usually perfectly fine to leave in actuality. Received wisdom (supported by some evidence) is that regularly switching jobs actually makes you more successful.
I’m not sure about tech! I was thinking the more business/management career track.
I definitely agree that regularly switching jobs is a good thing—this isn’t an argument against switching jobs, just against taking a much more junior role
Noting that the link you shared also shows that people who are externally hired seem to perform worse than those who are promoted. So if you care about performance more than pay, it may not be that good to switch jobs often?
Interesting point – my interpretation of that statistic is that external people are hired into more senior roles than internal people. I guess it’s also consistent with the hypothesis that external people get less mentorship though.
One reason I don’t see here: if you take a big decrease in level of responsibility, it can be hard to reverse.
For example, imagine you manage a team of 10 people and a budget of $10 million at a private corporation. You’re on track to eventually take on a C-suite position, which will either allow you to earn to give significantly or bring really great skills to an EA charity at that point.
If you leave the team you’re managing and take two years to write Forum posts on behalf of an EA charity, you may lose the opportunity to become a CEO. Maybe that’s fine—maybe you know ever cared about that because of the social status you could get from it—but maybe EA needs people with experience as successful CEOs and bringing in private sector rising stars for entry level positions is a bad idea.
I just wanted to flag one possible failure mode.
I’ve come across a few people who said that “getting management experience”, for the purpose of eventually helping with direct work, was a big part in not wanting to do direct work directly. So far I haven’t seen these people ever get into direct work. I think it can be great for earning to give, but am personally skeptical of its applicability to direct work.
From what I’ve seen, the skills one needs to lead EA organizations are fairly distinct, and doing so often requires a lot of domain specific knowledge that takes time to develop. Related, much of the experience I see people getting who are in management seem to be domain specific skills not relevant for direct work, or experience managing large teams of skills very different from what is seems to be needed in direct work.
For example, in bio safety orgs, the #1 requirement of a manager is a lot of experience in the field, and the same is true (maybe more so) in much of AI safety.
I think non-direct-work management tracks can be great for earning to give, as long as that’s what’s intended.
Strongly agree with this, as someone who had approximately the level of responsibility Khorton described until recently.
In my industry (quant trading) the extra value of further experience to outside goals past the level I’ve already reached is limited except potentially as a status signal.
Thanks! I agree that the amount of career capital a position will generate is an important factor in any career decision, “overqualified” or not.
I’m curious about your “it can be hard to reverse” statement though: how frequently do you think this happens? At least in US tech, it’s pretty common for people to take a year off to organize against Trump or whatever, and a year of charity work is definitely not irreversible. When I’ve talked to recruiters they basically just ignore charity work, at worst.
Anecdotally it always feels like now is the wrong time to leave your job because (good thing) is right around the corner, but it’s usually perfectly fine to leave in actuality. Received wisdom (supported by some evidence) is that regularly switching jobs actually makes you more successful.
I’m not sure about tech! I was thinking the more business/management career track.
I definitely agree that regularly switching jobs is a good thing—this isn’t an argument against switching jobs, just against taking a much more junior role
Noting that the link you shared also shows that people who are externally hired seem to perform worse than those who are promoted. So if you care about performance more than pay, it may not be that good to switch jobs often?
Interesting point – my interpretation of that statistic is that external people are hired into more senior roles than internal people. I guess it’s also consistent with the hypothesis that external people get less mentorship though.