One thing that’s making my work less valuable is how well the EA community is growing—the fact that for a lot of the kinds of information I might give people, many people are already coming across it from other means! (Which is why we tend to talk to people who have had less contact with the EA community so far.)
More seriously: I think the two main things that feel most limiting are information and time/capacity (which also interrelate, because if we had more time we could gather more information). On the former, I both mean that I feel limited by not knowing as much as I’d like to about specifically what parts of advising are the most useful for people and that I’d like to know more about different careers—their impact, how to get into them etc. One specific thing I’d like to know more about is concrete organisations and roles that seem really high impact, because it’s so much more actionable for a person to have specific things suggested that they could apply for than to discuss how they could go out and research the organisations in a particular sector. I think this is one of the reasons that effective altruists tend to talk as if working for organisations that identify as effective altruist is the best thing to aim for—these orgs are few in number and therefore easily identifiable, whereas (for example) the UK government is huge and there are lots of choices to make about departments you might work for and specific types of roles to apply to.
With regard to time, I would appreciate more time to be able to talk to more people, to be able to talk to people for longer, and to be able to work on a greater number of projects—for example working with local groups on their giving careers advice. This object level work also trades off against spending time on building up the capacity of the team so that in future we’ll have more time for object level work (and of course against improving my advice in other ways, such as learning more!).
In terms of which of these limiting factors seem best to work on: For now, I’m keen not to decrease the cost-effectiveness of advising, which means likely not spending more time per person we talk to (for example). I’m aware that I could always learn more in order to finesse the advice I give, so while I want to continue working on this, I try to prioritise what seems most important to learn about. On balance, the most limiting thing after having time to do work (since I’m on maternity leave) probably seems to me to be having an accurate enough understanding of what parts of advising are most valuable to scale the team up further (for example, knowing whether we should be hiring specialist advisers in specific areas, or more generalists). I’ll be trying to work more on that in the new year when I’m back to work (along with getting through our waitlist).
What feels most limiting to your advising work at 80k?
(i.e. what things are most keeping your work from being what you’d like it to be in the ideal case?)
One thing that’s making my work less valuable is how well the EA community is growing—the fact that for a lot of the kinds of information I might give people, many people are already coming across it from other means! (Which is why we tend to talk to people who have had less contact with the EA community so far.)
More seriously: I think the two main things that feel most limiting are information and time/capacity (which also interrelate, because if we had more time we could gather more information). On the former, I both mean that I feel limited by not knowing as much as I’d like to about specifically what parts of advising are the most useful for people and that I’d like to know more about different careers—their impact, how to get into them etc. One specific thing I’d like to know more about is concrete organisations and roles that seem really high impact, because it’s so much more actionable for a person to have specific things suggested that they could apply for than to discuss how they could go out and research the organisations in a particular sector. I think this is one of the reasons that effective altruists tend to talk as if working for organisations that identify as effective altruist is the best thing to aim for—these orgs are few in number and therefore easily identifiable, whereas (for example) the UK government is huge and there are lots of choices to make about departments you might work for and specific types of roles to apply to.
With regard to time, I would appreciate more time to be able to talk to more people, to be able to talk to people for longer, and to be able to work on a greater number of projects—for example working with local groups on their giving careers advice. This object level work also trades off against spending time on building up the capacity of the team so that in future we’ll have more time for object level work (and of course against improving my advice in other ways, such as learning more!).
In terms of which of these limiting factors seem best to work on: For now, I’m keen not to decrease the cost-effectiveness of advising, which means likely not spending more time per person we talk to (for example). I’m aware that I could always learn more in order to finesse the advice I give, so while I want to continue working on this, I try to prioritise what seems most important to learn about. On balance, the most limiting thing after having time to do work (since I’m on maternity leave) probably seems to me to be having an accurate enough understanding of what parts of advising are most valuable to scale the team up further (for example, knowing whether we should be hiring specialist advisers in specific areas, or more generalists). I’ll be trying to work more on that in the new year when I’m back to work (along with getting through our waitlist).
Thanks for this thorough answer :-)