Try asking some of the same questions 80,000 Hours does when they look at careers for themselves!
(I don’t claim to reflect their views perfectly here—this is a quick answer that aims to sum up the basics without any major mistakes.)
For example, you can see that their list of career reviews uses five elements to “score” each career path. They are:
Direct impact: This is the hardest thing to calculate, but an easy substitute question is: “How much am I helping the world, compared to if I didn’t exist and someone else had taken this job?”
For some jobs, the personal views and strategies of the employee matter a lot (an election choosing which politician gets a “job” could have a huge effect on how much good the person in that “job” can do). Other jobs aren’t this way (which of two accountants gets a job probably won’t matter very much to the world, unless one of them was grossly incompetent).
For your engineering position, you might think: “I was chosen over someone. How good would that person have been if I didn’t take the job? What are some unusual, unlikely, or particularly skilled things I’ve done on the job?” Even if your job itself has a lot of high-impact features, your direct impact may not be as high unless the person you “replaced” wouldn’t have done a very good job.
Questions about this idea (known as “replaceability”) are complicated to figure out, since you can never really know who would have taken your job (or what that person is doing now, since they didn’t take it), but it still provides a useful starting point.
Advocacy potential: Does your job put you in a good position to reach a lot of people, or some very important people? (Some media or other “public” positions are good for this; most engineering positions don’t seem especially good, since the work tends to be done privately or in small teams.)
Earnings: Engineering tends to do well on this criterion, but that still depends on what you do with the money you earn.
Career capital: How well does your job set you up to do high-impact work later? Some ways that engineering might create this “capital”: You rise to an executive position later on, you start your own company using your experience, you consult for governments and help them set up better water policy than they would have otherwise, etc.
Ease of competition: This factor only really matters for choosing a job, so it doesn’t seem relevant here.
Your last question (about how your skillset might transfer to a more impactful domain) seems really important. Have you looked at open engineering positions on the 80,000 Hours Job Board or in the EA Job Postings Facebook group? Those positions are likely to have few “competitors” (since most EA orgs are small), and thus, high “replaceability” value (if you don’t take the job, they might not find anyone, or find a weaker candidate).
Let me know if you have questions about any of this!
Try asking some of the same questions 80,000 Hours does when they look at careers for themselves!
(I don’t claim to reflect their views perfectly here—this is a quick answer that aims to sum up the basics without any major mistakes.)
For example, you can see that their list of career reviews uses five elements to “score” each career path. They are:
Direct impact: This is the hardest thing to calculate, but an easy substitute question is: “How much am I helping the world, compared to if I didn’t exist and someone else had taken this job?”
For some jobs, the personal views and strategies of the employee matter a lot (an election choosing which politician gets a “job” could have a huge effect on how much good the person in that “job” can do). Other jobs aren’t this way (which of two accountants gets a job probably won’t matter very much to the world, unless one of them was grossly incompetent).
For your engineering position, you might think: “I was chosen over someone. How good would that person have been if I didn’t take the job? What are some unusual, unlikely, or particularly skilled things I’ve done on the job?” Even if your job itself has a lot of high-impact features, your direct impact may not be as high unless the person you “replaced” wouldn’t have done a very good job.
Questions about this idea (known as “replaceability”) are complicated to figure out, since you can never really know who would have taken your job (or what that person is doing now, since they didn’t take it), but it still provides a useful starting point.
Advocacy potential: Does your job put you in a good position to reach a lot of people, or some very important people? (Some media or other “public” positions are good for this; most engineering positions don’t seem especially good, since the work tends to be done privately or in small teams.)
Earnings: Engineering tends to do well on this criterion, but that still depends on what you do with the money you earn.
Career capital: How well does your job set you up to do high-impact work later? Some ways that engineering might create this “capital”: You rise to an executive position later on, you start your own company using your experience, you consult for governments and help them set up better water policy than they would have otherwise, etc.
Ease of competition: This factor only really matters for choosing a job, so it doesn’t seem relevant here.
Your last question (about how your skillset might transfer to a more impactful domain) seems really important. Have you looked at open engineering positions on the 80,000 Hours Job Board or in the EA Job Postings Facebook group? Those positions are likely to have few “competitors” (since most EA orgs are small), and thus, high “replaceability” value (if you don’t take the job, they might not find anyone, or find a weaker candidate).
Let me know if you have questions about any of this!