This seems like a helpful sentiment for the community. To share a personal experience, my first full-time job wasn’t in EA, and I’m pretty glad I did it.
I worked at an early stage startup. There were lots of opportunities to take on responsibility and learn from experience by talking with customers and investors, hiring new people, and shipping software. The founders were much more experienced and accomplished than I was, and seeing how they worked taught me a lot. I’m of the opinion that work performance is heavy tailed, and finding people far more capable than me was really helpful for showing me what’s possible and how to get there.
The impact of the startup was mildly positive in my opinion, but the main value for me was educational. I stayed engaged with EA the entire time via friends, EA Global, and honestly mainly this website. My employer matched some of my donations, and I was able to work on some AI alignment-adjacent stuff (reducing racial bias in student loan approvals!), both of which helped me feel more motivated. I do regret staying too long: I stayed nearly three full years, which was more than I probably needed, but now I’m happily back in EA-land working on technical AI safety.
On the current margin I would encourage more young people to work at high performance organizations for short periods of time to learn how the sausage is made. You can stay in touch with EA and come back later with more skills and experience for direct work.
This seems like a helpful sentiment for the community. To share a personal experience, my first full-time job wasn’t in EA, and I’m pretty glad I did it.
I worked at an early stage startup. There were lots of opportunities to take on responsibility and learn from experience by talking with customers and investors, hiring new people, and shipping software. The founders were much more experienced and accomplished than I was, and seeing how they worked taught me a lot. I’m of the opinion that work performance is heavy tailed, and finding people far more capable than me was really helpful for showing me what’s possible and how to get there.
The impact of the startup was mildly positive in my opinion, but the main value for me was educational. I stayed engaged with EA the entire time via friends, EA Global, and honestly mainly this website. My employer matched some of my donations, and I was able to work on some AI alignment-adjacent stuff (reducing racial bias in student loan approvals!), both of which helped me feel more motivated. I do regret staying too long: I stayed nearly three full years, which was more than I probably needed, but now I’m happily back in EA-land working on technical AI safety.
On the current margin I would encourage more young people to work at high performance organizations for short periods of time to learn how the sausage is made. You can stay in touch with EA and come back later with more skills and experience for direct work.