Nice post! I think that I agree with all of the specific points you made, that they seem in aggregate pretty useful+important to say, and that in future I’ll probably send this post to at least 5 people when giving career advice.
But here are two criticisms:
I think you don’t state explicitly what you mean by “EA work”?
And I’m guessing at least 25% of readers will consciously or unconsciously interpret it as “work at explicitly EA orgs”, but I’m also guessing you in fact mean it as something like “work that’s motivated by impartial altruism and would be seen by many EAs as plausibly the highest impact choice for the person could take right now”.
E.g., I’m guessing you’d include things like roles in the US government or running for political office in cases where those things either plausibly have very high net positive impact or are great for the person’s career capital and the person aims to use that career capital impactfully later.
I think it’s already the case that many people unfortunately conflate “impactful role” with “role at an EA org”, and also that many people get annoyed at “EA insiders” for appearing to do so (e.g., I think 80k has sometimes been criticised based on perceptions of this).
So if I were you, I’d probably have defined “EA work” early on and explicitly flagged that it includes but is not limited to work at EA orgs.
(To be clear, I do think mid-career people—as with everyone else should also strongly consider switching to working at EA orgs specifically! They should just consider both that and impactful roles elsewhere.)
I think much/most of the advice/info provided in this post is ~exactly as relevant to early-career people as to mid-career people. This is of course itself a good thing—just adds to its usefulness! - but it also makes me feel like maybe therefore this either should’ve been split into two posts or should’ve had a different title?
I expect most of the people I’ll want to share this with in future will be early-career, since that’s most of the people I come across in EA and give career advice to. I’ll probably just clarify each time that most (though not all) of the contents are really just as relevant to early-career people and the title is just a bit misleading.
(Disclaimer-ish thing: I work with Ben at Rethink Priorities.)
Thanks. On the first point in particular, the post might add a bit of confusion here unfortunately.
Edit: I added something near the top that hopefully makes things a bit clearer re the first point
Also note that, for the purposes of this post, by “EA work” I mostly mean working at EA orgs. But I also think it would be great if mid-career people considered switching to really impactful stuff that isn’t at EA orgs, and if they’re already doing really impactful stuff that isn’t at an EA org maybe they should keep doing that. And a lot of what I say here is still relevant for switching to highly impactful work that isn’t at an EA org.
Nice post! I think that I agree with all of the specific points you made, that they seem in aggregate pretty useful+important to say, and that in future I’ll probably send this post to at least 5 people when giving career advice.
But here are two criticisms:
I think you don’t state explicitly what you mean by “EA work”?
And I’m guessing at least 25% of readers will consciously or unconsciously interpret it as “work at explicitly EA orgs”, but I’m also guessing you in fact mean it as something like “work that’s motivated by impartial altruism and would be seen by many EAs as plausibly the highest impact choice for the person could take right now”.
E.g., I’m guessing you’d include things like roles in the US government or running for political office in cases where those things either plausibly have very high net positive impact or are great for the person’s career capital and the person aims to use that career capital impactfully later.
I think it’s already the case that many people unfortunately conflate “impactful role” with “role at an EA org”, and also that many people get annoyed at “EA insiders” for appearing to do so (e.g., I think 80k has sometimes been criticised based on perceptions of this).
So if I were you, I’d probably have defined “EA work” early on and explicitly flagged that it includes but is not limited to work at EA orgs.
(To be clear, I do think mid-career people—as with everyone else should also strongly consider switching to working at EA orgs specifically! They should just consider both that and impactful roles elsewhere.)
I think much/most of the advice/info provided in this post is ~exactly as relevant to early-career people as to mid-career people. This is of course itself a good thing—just adds to its usefulness! - but it also makes me feel like maybe therefore this either should’ve been split into two posts or should’ve had a different title?
I expect most of the people I’ll want to share this with in future will be early-career, since that’s most of the people I come across in EA and give career advice to. I’ll probably just clarify each time that most (though not all) of the contents are really just as relevant to early-career people and the title is just a bit misleading.
(Disclaimer-ish thing: I work with Ben at Rethink Priorities.)
Thanks. On the first point in particular, the post might add a bit of confusion here unfortunately.
Edit: I added something near the top that hopefully makes things a bit clearer re the first point