It’s hard to give a nuanced answer, but I’d mostly say that your update is not directionally correct. In particular, I’d expect the number of “EA jobs” to be in the hundreds to low thousands, but the number of EAs to be in the mid to high thousands.
Around 135 people out of 1,679 non-students and 2,166 responses mentioned that they were employed at EA organizations. So this is 8.7% of non-students and 6.2% of total EA respondents.
Not that many people respond to surveys, so the total EA population is probably higher than 2k, but it’s difficult to say how much higher.
Because I don’t get the impression that the number of “EA jobs” has literally doubled in the past year, I think that the chances of getting accepted into any EA org seem at most something like 10%, but more like 2 to 5%. So I’d say that the mood of your update doesn’t seem to be directionally correct.
In particular, just in the case of uni EA groups, I imagine that there might be one organizer for every, say, 20 to 50 people (?? I really have no idea about this), which is also a ratio of 2 to 5%.
One major way in which I could imagine being wrong is if you’re at a very prestigious uni, or if your definition of “hard work and dedicated” does convey 2 to 10% to your audience.
Not that many people respond to surveys, so the total EA population is probably higher than 2k, but it’s difficult to say how much higher.
We give an estimate of the total population engaged at levels 3-5/5 here, which suggests ~2700 (2300 to 3100) at the highest levels of engagement (5000-10000 overall).
We then estimate that the numbers of the most engaged have increased by ~15% between 2019 and 2020 (see the thread with Ben Todd here and the discussion in his EA Global talk.
This suggests to me there are likely 3000 or more highly engaged EAs at present (there has likely been further growth since December 2020).
It’s also important to note that (in my experience in different hiring rounds) a significant number of people who are successfully hired would not have been at levels 4-5 at the time of their application, which increases the numbers quite substantially.
My impression is Michael’s update could easily be directionally correct if we refine that estimate.
If we count direct work in non-EA orgs (which Michael seemed interested in), this opens many more options; ~34% of survey respondents (11.7 + 8.7 + 5.6 + 4.2 + 3.9) seem to be doing such work, although it’s unclear how many of them are working on causes they see as most pressing.
The 2020 survey of the community found that ~20% of respondents self-reported “high engagement” with EA. (And that’s likely an overestimate due to survey selection effects.) This knocks down our denominator by a factor of ~5, approaching the possibility you raise that maybe “‘hard work and dedicated’” does convey 2 to 10% to your audience.”
And now some anecdotal evidence:
I don’t get the impression that the number of “EA jobs” has literally doubled in the past year
Maybe not doubling across the board, but some areas (especially within meta-EA and longtermism) seem to be growing very quickly:
The number of CEA focus universities with community building grantees roughly doubled this past year (as a proxy for how the number of grantees has changed), with plans for creating more full-time work opportunities for university organizers
Redwood Research started up, announced plans for some exponential growth, and has already hired 10+ people to do AI safety research
What makes me most optimistic is probably that, of a handful of recent graduates I happen to know who are very dedicated to meta-EA and/or longtermism, a large majority have been able to get either employment or grants to do direct work (typically following ~1-2 years building relevant skills / track records, often while at university). (Caveat: most of them are from “top schools” and/or live near EA hubs, which likely helps.)
In particular, just in the case of uni EA groups, I imagine that there might be one organizer for every, say, 20 to 50 people (?? I really have no idea about this), which is also a ratio of 2 to 5%.
Anecdotally, my (potentially skewed) personal impression is that [students who are very dedicated, hard-working, decent fits for university organizing, and apply for grants to do university group organizing] have chances > 50% of getting some grant.
(By “very dedicated,” here and in the other comment, I mean to point at something like: has a solid understanding of and intense commitment to core ideas and mindsets of the movement, e.g. prioritization with reasoning & evidence—not just excitement about doing good more effectively.)
EA at Georgia Tech presently has 3 student organizers and ~40 students who have done the Effective Altruism Fellowship within the past year, plus perhaps 15 other people who have attended general meetings, so let’s say 50 members. 3 organizers : 50 members is a ratio of 6%. But our acceptance rate for people interested in becoming an organizer is actually 100%. (Theoretically, we would filter for people who generally agree with the content in the introductory fellowship and are reliable, hard-working, and a decent fit for some organizer position, etc. We would accept most if not all applicants who meet those criteria, but we haven’t had to do any filtering so far.) For next semester, it looks like we’ll have 5–7 new organizers/facilitators for a total of 10 organizers/facilitators. I think most EA university groups are likewise willing to take on most people who are interested in helping organize activities. We’re not covered under Community Building Grants, but my understanding is that we should be able to have new organizers covered under funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund.
In the case of EA at Georgia Tech, taking the ratio of filled positions to EAs significantly underestimates the acceptance rate for a position, because most members aren’t interested in taking on a position. This might be true for direct work jobs overall. My model of Kuhan would say something like, there are actually relatively few EAs who are longtermist and who seriously want to switch to a career doing direct work.
An important factor is how many people in the EA movement are actively searching for EA jobs and how many applications they write per year. Maybe this would be a good question for the next EA survey.
We have a sense of this from questions we asked before (though only as recently in 2019, so they don’t tell us whether there’s been a change since then).
At that point 36.6% of respondents included EA non-profit work (i.e. working for an EA org) in their career plans. It was multiple select, so their plans could include multiple things, but it seems plausible that often EA org work is people’s most preferred career and other things are backups.
At that time 32% of respondents cited too few job opportunities as a barrier to their involvement in EA. This was the most commonly cited barrier (and the third most cited was it being too hard to get an EA job!).
These numbers were higher among more engaged respondents.
I think these numbers speak to EA jobs being very hard to get (at least in 2019).
Number of applications people are writing could be interesting to some degree, though I think there are a couple of limitations. Firstly, if people find that it is too hard to get a job and drop out of applying , this may make the numbers look better without the number of people who want a job and can’t get one decreasing, and even without it becoming appreciably easier for those still applying for jobs. Secondly, if there are fewer (more) jobs for people to apply to this may reduce (increase) the number of applications, but this would be actually be making it harder (easier) for people to get jobs.
To assess the main thing that I think these numbers would be useful for (how competitive jobs actually are), I think hiring data from orgs would be most useful (i.e. how many applicants to how many roles). The data could also be useful to assess how much time EAs are spending applying (since this is presumably at some counterfactual cost to the community), but for that we might simply ask about time spent on applications directly.
It’s hard to give a nuanced answer, but I’d mostly say that your update is not directionally correct. In particular, I’d expect the number of “EA jobs” to be in the hundreds to low thousands, but the number of EAs to be in the mid to high thousands.
Per the 2020 EA survey:
Around 135 people out of 1,679 non-students and 2,166 responses mentioned that they were employed at EA organizations. So this is 8.7% of non-students and 6.2% of total EA respondents.
Not that many people respond to surveys, so the total EA population is probably higher than 2k, but it’s difficult to say how much higher.
Because I don’t get the impression that the number of “EA jobs” has literally doubled in the past year, I think that the chances of getting accepted into any EA org seem at most something like 10%, but more like 2 to 5%. So I’d say that the mood of your update doesn’t seem to be directionally correct.
In particular, just in the case of uni EA groups, I imagine that there might be one organizer for every, say, 20 to 50 people (?? I really have no idea about this), which is also a ratio of 2 to 5%.
One major way in which I could imagine being wrong is if you’re at a very prestigious uni, or if your definition of “hard work and dedicated” does convey 2 to 10% to your audience.
We give an estimate of the total population engaged at levels 3-5/5 here, which suggests ~2700 (2300 to 3100) at the highest levels of engagement (5000-10000 overall).
We then estimate that the numbers of the most engaged have increased by ~15% between 2019 and 2020 (see the thread with Ben Todd here and the discussion in his EA Global talk.
This suggests to me there are likely 3000 or more highly engaged EAs at present (there has likely been further growth since December 2020).
It’s also important to note that (in my experience in different hiring rounds) a significant number of people who are successfully hired would not have been at levels 4-5 at the time of their application, which increases the numbers quite substantially.
My impression is Michael’s update could easily be directionally correct if we refine that estimate.
If we count direct work in non-EA orgs (which Michael seemed interested in), this opens many more options; ~34% of survey respondents (11.7 + 8.7 + 5.6 + 4.2 + 3.9) seem to be doing such work, although it’s unclear how many of them are working on causes they see as most pressing.
The 2020 survey of the community found that ~20% of respondents self-reported “high engagement” with EA. (And that’s likely an overestimate due to survey selection effects.) This knocks down our denominator by a factor of ~5, approaching the possibility you raise that maybe “‘hard work and dedicated’” does convey 2 to 10% to your audience.”
And now some anecdotal evidence:
Maybe not doubling across the board, but some areas (especially within meta-EA and longtermism) seem to be growing very quickly:
CEA’s number of staff nearly doubled this past year
The number of CEA focus universities with community building grantees roughly doubled this past year (as a proxy for how the number of grantees has changed), with plans for creating more full-time work opportunities for university organizers
Redwood Research started up, announced plans for some exponential growth, and has already hired 10+ people to do AI safety research
Rethink Priorities also doubled in staff size this past year
What makes me most optimistic is probably that, of a handful of recent graduates I happen to know who are very dedicated to meta-EA and/or longtermism, a large majority have been able to get either employment or grants to do direct work (typically following ~1-2 years building relevant skills / track records, often while at university). (Caveat: most of them are from “top schools” and/or live near EA hubs, which likely helps.)
Makes sense
Anecdotally, my (potentially skewed) personal impression is that [students who are very dedicated, hard-working, decent fits for university organizing, and apply for grants to do university group organizing] have chances > 50% of getting some grant.
(By “very dedicated,” here and in the other comment, I mean to point at something like: has a solid understanding of and intense commitment to core ideas and mindsets of the movement, e.g. prioritization with reasoning & evidence—not just excitement about doing good more effectively.)
EA at Georgia Tech presently has 3 student organizers and ~40 students who have done the Effective Altruism Fellowship within the past year, plus perhaps 15 other people who have attended general meetings, so let’s say 50 members. 3 organizers : 50 members is a ratio of 6%. But our acceptance rate for people interested in becoming an organizer is actually 100%. (Theoretically, we would filter for people who generally agree with the content in the introductory fellowship and are reliable, hard-working, and a decent fit for some organizer position, etc. We would accept most if not all applicants who meet those criteria, but we haven’t had to do any filtering so far.) For next semester, it looks like we’ll have 5–7 new organizers/facilitators for a total of 10 organizers/facilitators. I think most EA university groups are likewise willing to take on most people who are interested in helping organize activities. We’re not covered under Community Building Grants, but my understanding is that we should be able to have new organizers covered under funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund.
In the case of EA at Georgia Tech, taking the ratio of filled positions to EAs significantly underestimates the acceptance rate for a position, because most members aren’t interested in taking on a position. This might be true for direct work jobs overall. My model of Kuhan would say something like, there are actually relatively few EAs who are longtermist and who seriously want to switch to a career doing direct work.
Cheers, thanks for the data.
An important factor is how many people in the EA movement are actively searching for EA jobs and how many applications they write per year. Maybe this would be a good question for the next EA survey.
We have a sense of this from questions we asked before (though only as recently in 2019, so they don’t tell us whether there’s been a change since then).
At that point 36.6% of respondents included EA non-profit work (i.e. working for an EA org) in their career plans. It was multiple select, so their plans could include multiple things, but it seems plausible that often EA org work is people’s most preferred career and other things are backups.
At that time 32% of respondents cited too few job opportunities as a barrier to their involvement in EA. This was the most commonly cited barrier (and the third most cited was it being too hard to get an EA job!).
These numbers were higher among more engaged respondents.
I think these numbers speak to EA jobs being very hard to get (at least in 2019).
Number of applications people are writing could be interesting to some degree, though I think there are a couple of limitations. Firstly, if people find that it is too hard to get a job and drop out of applying , this may make the numbers look better without the number of people who want a job and can’t get one decreasing, and even without it becoming appreciably easier for those still applying for jobs. Secondly, if there are fewer (more) jobs for people to apply to this may reduce (increase) the number of applications, but this would be actually be making it harder (easier) for people to get jobs.
To assess the main thing that I think these numbers would be useful for (how competitive jobs actually are), I think hiring data from orgs would be most useful (i.e. how many applicants to how many roles). The data could also be useful to assess how much time EAs are spending applying (since this is presumably at some counterfactual cost to the community), but for that we might simply ask about time spent on applications directly.