A number of factors, but the biggest was suitedness to the role. I tend to get a lot of energy from talking to other people. My role at GPI was very independent—at the time I was the only operations person there, and academics tend to work fairly individually on their research. By comparison, my current role involves not just talking to people I advise, but the team is also more collaborative in general (for example, it makes sense for the research team and advising team to collaborate quite a bit because advising calls are both how we get out quite a bit of our research and a good way to find out what research we might want to do more of). I also enjoy discussing and having an incentive for keeping more up to date on EA research, which was less the case in a purely operations role. I was actually surprised how much my greater enjoyment of the role has led me to working more hours and therefore being more productive. I found the GPI role engaging and loved the team, so I hadn’t thought of myself as not enjoying the job. But my greater enjoyment of and therefore productivity at the 80,000 Hours role has updated me some to the importance of finding a role you really like.
There were also various situational factors: I had done the initial set up of GPI, at which point my role was pretty amorphous and hard to hire for. But by the time I left, when the initial grant I got was running out so we were issuing a new contract anyway, it was a more well defined role so it was easier to find a good replacement. In addition, I had just had a late term stillbirth, and so was emotionally keen on a change.
A number of factors, but the biggest was suitedness to the role. I tend to get a lot of energy from talking to other people. My role at GPI was very independent—at the time I was the only operations person there, and academics tend to work fairly individually on their research. By comparison, my current role involves not just talking to people I advise, but the team is also more collaborative in general (for example, it makes sense for the research team and advising team to collaborate quite a bit because advising calls are both how we get out quite a bit of our research and a good way to find out what research we might want to do more of). I also enjoy discussing and having an incentive for keeping more up to date on EA research, which was less the case in a purely operations role. I was actually surprised how much my greater enjoyment of the role has led me to working more hours and therefore being more productive. I found the GPI role engaging and loved the team, so I hadn’t thought of myself as not enjoying the job. But my greater enjoyment of and therefore productivity at the 80,000 Hours role has updated me some to the importance of finding a role you really like.
There were also various situational factors: I had done the initial set up of GPI, at which point my role was pretty amorphous and hard to hire for. But by the time I left, when the initial grant I got was running out so we were issuing a new contract anyway, it was a more well defined role so it was easier to find a good replacement. In addition, I had just had a late term stillbirth, and so was emotionally keen on a change.