I think there’s 2 different questions at play here:
1. Whether you’re competitive for EA roles—As others have mentioned, EA roles are competitive. To be honest, it really is just a matter of why you want an EA role.
If it’s purely a matter of impact allocation, I think it’s good to just … try hard as you want and let hirers decide? Whenever I’m in an EA hiring round, I genuinely just want the most suitable person to get the job, and the EA hirers I’ve come across have been pretty good at figuring out what candidate they want. I have declined several role on this basis (it wasn’t unilateral, I explained, had a conversation with the hirers and recommended someone I thought was better-suited). The EA community is small and nice, so I’m really rooting for people to find the best role for them.
If it’s a sense of community, for me I’ve been lucky to find friends in EA who will still stick around even if I Don’t Have An EA Job. I think you can definitely find close friends in EA without getting a fulltime role, and our national chapter only has like a dozen regulars.
For me, I just try my best, have low expectations and vaguely tell myself it’ll work out. I also argue more people should look to start orgs, but that’s a separate issue.
2. Whether you feel imposter syndrome because EAs are generally high-achieving—Objectively, EAs are on average, abnormally high-achieving. IIRC, like 20% of EAs have attended to Top 25 university and 40% have attended a Top 100 university. Which is an absolutely bonkers percentage. I do think this kind of comparison is inherent in any social setting.
For me, I just talk to a lot of EAs, and realise they’re just nice nerds who like talking about ideas. The power distance feels a lot lower the more I work with them. If someone works at A Big Well-funded AI Lab and went to A Top 5 PhD Program, then yeah you’re gonna feel intimidated. But like, after a year I just started doing more research which involves pinging people dumb practical questions like “what settings on AWS do I use for a training run” or funny what-ifs like “do you think we can make Deep Learning into Deep Unlearning” (an actual thing btw). Then they’re always really nice and helpful, and I just kinda forget about the imposter syndrome.
There’s also the stoic approach, which is to accept imposter syndrome as motivation to do better without letting it demotivate you. Which is prolly good if you want to improve, but easier said than done.
I think there’s 2 different questions at play here:
1. Whether you’re competitive for EA roles—As others have mentioned, EA roles are competitive. To be honest, it really is just a matter of why you want an EA role.
If it’s purely a matter of impact allocation, I think it’s good to just … try hard as you want and let hirers decide? Whenever I’m in an EA hiring round, I genuinely just want the most suitable person to get the job, and the EA hirers I’ve come across have been pretty good at figuring out what candidate they want. I have declined several role on this basis (it wasn’t unilateral, I explained, had a conversation with the hirers and recommended someone I thought was better-suited). The EA community is small and nice, so I’m really rooting for people to find the best role for them.
If it’s a sense of community, for me I’ve been lucky to find friends in EA who will still stick around even if I Don’t Have An EA Job. I think you can definitely find close friends in EA without getting a fulltime role, and our national chapter only has like a dozen regulars.
For me, I just try my best, have low expectations and vaguely tell myself it’ll work out. I also argue more people should look to start orgs, but that’s a separate issue.
2. Whether you feel imposter syndrome because EAs are generally high-achieving—Objectively, EAs are on average, abnormally high-achieving. IIRC, like 20% of EAs have attended to Top 25 university and 40% have attended a Top 100 university. Which is an absolutely bonkers percentage. I do think this kind of comparison is inherent in any social setting.
For me, I just talk to a lot of EAs, and realise they’re just nice nerds who like talking about ideas. The power distance feels a lot lower the more I work with them. If someone works at A Big Well-funded AI Lab and went to A Top 5 PhD Program, then yeah you’re gonna feel intimidated. But like, after a year I just started doing more research which involves pinging people dumb practical questions like “what settings on AWS do I use for a training run” or funny what-ifs like “do you think we can make Deep Learning into Deep Unlearning” (an actual thing btw). Then they’re always really nice and helpful, and I just kinda forget about the imposter syndrome.
There’s also the stoic approach, which is to accept imposter syndrome as motivation to do better without letting it demotivate you. Which is prolly good if you want to improve, but easier said than done.