Meta: below is a very non-generous view of 80k one-on-one career advising (kinda bitter to be honest). I will probably be raising points that the 80k team thought about over the years and decided against for a good reason but I have not seen them publicly discussed. I will be very happy to be wrong about this.
To sum up: 80k one-on-one career advising has a small negative effect on the world
Why
80k is the place to go for career advice (with low capacity) making it harder for new organizations/projects/initiatives to launch in this space.
A month-long period of reviewing the application is prohibitive and disappointing.
It is extremely upsetting for people to apply and get turned down, especially if they found 80k materials at some emotional time (releasing they are not satisfied with their current job or studies). It is very hard to not interpret this as “you are not good enough”.
I believe CEA had to deal with similar sentiment after changing the EAG acceptance policy when a lot of people who used to be accepted were suddenly not accepted.
By focusing on people “for whom you’ll have useful things to say”, you talk to people who do not need additional resources (like guidance or introductions) for increasing their impact. The contrafactual impact is low.
For example, testimonials on the website include PhD Student in Machine Learning at Cambridge and the President of Harvard Law School Effective Altruism.
By focusing on people for whom you already have useful things to say, you are not putting resources into figuring out how to make the vast majority of people who do not fit these criteria more impactful, effectively losing them.
I have an impression that 80k accepted a long time ago that that wait time will just have to be pretty long. Here is a bunch of ideas to shorten the wait time that I don’t think were attempted historically:
removing sign up form from the website when the waitlist is too long
introduce extra filter like asking people to pay (donate to an effective charity of their choice) small-ish amount ($5-50) as an extra filter
use lottery to determine who to have a call with instead of a longer initial review
hire more advisors
The advising page also says that
It costs hundreds of dollars to provide this service to a single person.
It is not clear to me that the price of having in-house career advisors is justified. I think there are a lot of people (like a hundred) in the community who could gladly volunteer a couple of hours per month to do career advising and would be super excited about the opportunity to help out and share their knowledge and connections with the newcomers.
I believe a structure that has a small experienced 80k career advisor team (2-4 people) managing a community of vetted experienced EA volunteers would be a much more promising way to go. Or alternatively have the community fully self-organise for this project.
By focusing on people “for whom you’ll have useful things to say”, you talk to people who do not need additional resources (like guidance or introductions) for increasing their impact. The contrafactual impact is low.
For example, testimonials on the website include PhD Student in Machine Learning at Cambridge and the President of Harvard Law School Effective Altruism.
I don’t quite agree here. I was counting ‘additional resources’ like guidance and introductions as ‘things to say’. So focusing on people for whom we have useful things to say should increase rather than decrease the extent to which we talk to people who need these resources to increase their impact.
I agree we’re not always good at figuring out which people could most benefit from our providing resources / introductions. We try to keep calibrating on this from our conversations. That’s clearly easier in the case of noticing people we talk to for whom we couldn’t be that useful than the opposite. To counter that asymmetry, we try to do experiments with tweaking which people we speak to in order to get a sense of how useful we can be to different groups.
With respect to your concrete examples:
The descriptions we’ve given of people on that page is actually from where they’re at a year or two after we speak to them. That’s because it takes a while for us to figure out if the conversation was actually useful to them. For example, I think Cullen wasn’t President of HL EA when we spoke to them.
That aside, on the question of whether we should generally speak to people with these types of profiles:
Being a PhD student in Machine Learning doesn’t seem like an indication of how much someone knows about / has interacted with the effective altruism community. So it doesn’t seem to me like it should count against us talking to them. (Though of course the person might in fact already be well connected to the EA community and not stand to benefit much from talking to us.)
It seems like a hard decision to me whether someone running an EA student group should count in favour of or against our speaking to them. On the one hand, they might well be steeped enough in effective altruism they won’t benefit that much from us recommending specific resources to them. They’re also in a better position to reach out to other EAs to ask for their advice than people new to the community would be. On the other hand, it’s a strong signal that they want to spend their energies improving the world as much as possible, and so our research will definitely be applicable for them. It’s also not a foregone conclusion that someone running a student group has had much opportunity to sound board their career with others who feel equally strongly about helping the world, let alone those with similar values but more experience. So I could imagine us being really useful for EA group leaders, despite the caveats above.
I’d like to second the opinion that it is a bit of a turn off that the resources go toward people who already have resources. I understand that “justice” and “equality of opportunity” aren’t core EA concerns, and I also realize that giving an hour of time to a person at an elite university who has received lots of educational benefits in life very well may have a higher ROI than giving an hour of time to a “normal” person (I’m using normal here to indicate a person who grew up in a family with a more median income, and who went to a less outlier school).
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for this. The current practice is very much in line with the career advice on 80,000 Hours, which seems to be primarily applicable to people who are able to get jobs at McKinsey, get into PhD Programs about Artificial Intelligence, and able to earn well-above a median income. Elitism isn’t inherently a bad thing; it can sometimes simply be a way of having high standards.
For context, I’m writing this as a person who grew up in a lower-middle class family, who didn’t live in a big city with lots of opportunities, who went to a university that is not famous, and who has never earned more than the average income. I’m privileged in lots of ways in my life, but because the paths that are highlighted on your website aren’t realistic options (unless I were to spend large amounts of money on re-schooling), it sends a message of “if you aren’t in this particular privileged class of people who have received lots of education at elite institutions, then you probably aren’t the right fit for our club.”
It is extremely upsetting for people to apply and get turned down, especially if they found 80k materials at some emotional time (releasing they are not satisfied with their current job or studies). It is very hard to not interpret this as “you are not good enough”.
I am so sad that we are causing this. It is really tough to make yourself vulnerable to strangers and reach out for help, only to have your request rebuffed. That’s particularly hard when it feels like a judgement on someone’s worth, and more particularly on their ability to help others. And I think there are additional reasons for these rejections being particularly tough:
If you’re early on in your career (as most of our readers are) and haven’t yet experienced many rejections, they will hit harder than if you’re more used to them
Effective altruism is often experienced as an identity, above and beyond its ideas and the community. This makes a rejection feel particularly sensitive
Whenever you’re being judged, it’s hard to keep in mind how little information the person has about you. Our application is far shorter and more informal than, say, university applications. We therefore often have pretty little information about people and so are correspondingly likely to make the wrong call. But since the person filling in the application knows all about themselves, it’s hard for them not to take it as an indictment of them overall.
I do want to highlight that our not talking to someone isn’t a sign we don’t think they will have an (extremely) impactful career; rather it is simply a sign that we don’t think we’ll be as helpful to them as we could be to some other people. So while I deeply empathise with the feelings I describe above and I expect I would feel the same way in a similar situation, I don’t think people are actually right to feel like they “are not good enough”.
I realise it’s probably no consolation, but, on a personal note, needing to turn down people who are asking for my help is unquestionably the worst part of my job. We spent a significant part of last year trying to find an alternative model we believe would be as impactful as our current process but wouldn’t involve soliciting and then rejecting so many applications. Unfortunately, we didn’t find one. I think it’s my responsibility to implement the model we think is best, but it’s hard to feel like I’m doing the right thing when I know I’m disappointing so many people. I often only get through reviewing applications by reminding myself of our mission and trying to bring to mind the huge numbers of people in the future who may never get to exist and are entirely voiceless, and for whose sake it is that I have to refuse to help people in front of me today that I care about.
Spitballing here, but have you considered putting some thoughts to this effect on your website? Currently, the relevant part of the 80k website reads as follows.
Why wasn’t I accepted?
Unfortunately, due to overwhelming demand, we can’t advise everyone who applies. However, we’re confident that everyone who is reading this has what it takes to lead a fulfilling, high impact career. Our key ideas series contains lots of our best advice on this topic – we hope you’ll find it useful.
If you’re thinking of re-applying, you can improve your chances by:
Using our planning tool, which we developed to help people think through their own decisions.
You can also get involved in our community to get help from other people trying to do good with their careers.
This is ok as far as it goes, but to me does feel a little like a fake-positive ‘I’m sure you’ll do just fine, whoever-you-are!‘. Pointing out things like the fact that you have very little information to go on, and that you’re optimising for people you can help most rather than making some kind of pure ‘how valuable is this person’ call, seems like it could help soften the blow the margin, though I appreciate it’ll never make that large a difference given the other things you mentioned.
Thanks for this feedback. I had a go at rewriting that our ‘why wasn’t I accepted’ FAQ. It now reads:
Why wasn’t I accepted?
We sincerely regret that we can’t advise everyone who applies. We read every application individually and are thankful that you took the time to apply. It’s really touching reading about people who have come across 80,000 Hours and are excited about using their careers to help others.
We aim to talk to the people we think we can help most. Our not speaking with you does not mean we think you won’t have a highly impactful career. Whether we can be helpful to you sometimes depends on contingent factors like whether one of our advisers happens to know of a role or introduction right now that might be a good fit for you. We also have far less information about you than you do, so we aren’t even necessarily making the right calls about who we can help most.
You’re very welcome to reapply, particularly if your situation changes. If you’re thinking of doing so, it might be worth reading our key ideas series and trying out our career planning process, which we developed to help people think through their career decisions. You can also get involved in our community to get help from other people trying to do good with their careers.
A month-long period of reviewing the application is prohibitive and disappointing.
I agree this is too long, and I’m sad that it was actually longer than this at times. Right now I’m mostly managing to review them within a week, and almost always within 2 weeks. I wouldn’t want to promise to always be able to do this, but it’s much easier now we have a team of people working on advising.
I have an impression that 80k accepted a long time ago that that wait time will just have to be pretty long.
I’m actually really keen to avoid us having long wait times. Career decisions are often pretty time sensitive due to application and decision deadlines. Thinking about your overall career also seems pretty aversive to me, so I think it’s important to capitalise on people’s enthusiasm and energy for doing those occur. Right now we’re aiming to have slots available in the next couple of weeks after we’ve accepted an application, though it might take a few weeks before there are slots that work for a person, particularly if they’re in a very different time zone than us.
O: I have an impression that 80k accepted a long time ago that that wait time will just have to be pretty long.
M: I’m actually really keen to avoid us having long wait times. Career decisions are often pretty time sensitive due to application and decision deadlines.
Agreed on this prioritization, also I think both in principle (and as you noted) in practice, long wait times are highly avoidable. In principle you don’t need that much resources to turn a particularly long wait time to one that is pleasantly short, certain exigencies (eg correlated staff vacation times) aside. The mathematics of queueing theory also might be helpful here.
Thanks for sharing your view. It’s useful for us to get an overall sense of whether others think our work is useful in order to sense check our views and continue figuring out whether this is the right thing for us to focus our time on. It’s also important to hear detail about what the problems with it are so that we can try to address them. I’ll respond to your points in separate comments so that they’re easier to parse and engage with.
I can second feeling pretty heavy-hearted after my rejection, and really like the idea of vetting a crowd of volunteers. A similar idea would be to offer rejected people to share the info from their form, plus maybe their most important questions, with people who agreed to maybe take a look, e.g. via the EA Hub, where you could also filter relevant background. Or alternatively into a private group like „AI Safety Career Discussion“. I’m one of the shy people who would probably never do something like that themselves, but if it were an „official“ and recommended thing from 80,000Hours it would feel somehow much less scary.
Thanks for this feedback! It’s really useful to know that this would make it easier to put yourself out there. We’re in the process of changing the application form to connect better with our career planning process, to hopefully make filling it out a commitment mechanism for getting started on making a career plan (since doing so is often aversive). As part of that, we aim to send people a google doc of the relevant answers in a readily shareable format and encourage people to send it to friends and others whose judgement they trust.
I also find it pretty scary to email people out of the blue, even if I know them, particularly to ask them for something. But my hope is that if someone already has a doc they want comments on, and it’s been explicitly suggested they send that to friends, it will make it a bit easier to ask for this kind of help. Increasing the extent to which people do that seems good to me, since my impression is that although people find it hard to reach out, most people would actually be happy to give their friends comments on something like this!
Great idea. What did you think about the idea to somehow streamline a process to share that Google Doc with others who might have something to say? A process that might require relatively little effort would be asking people in those forms “Would you be interested in receiving career plans from other people that are looking for feedback?”. That might make it relatively effortless for people from a particular field, e.g. Cognitive Science in my case, to be matched to other people who might have valuable feedback.
It might be a bit effortful to match people, though I suppose you have information about the general field and that might already suffice? Or you might worry that people will receive unhelpful feedback and that this might reflect badly on you? Though I suppose you could emphasize that the people who you’d share the Google Doc are not vetted at all and are only fellow 80,000Hours fans who clicked on “I’d be down to look over other people’s career plans”.
Meta: below is a very non-generous view of 80k one-on-one career advising (kinda bitter to be honest). I will probably be raising points that the 80k team thought about over the years and decided against for a good reason but I have not seen them publicly discussed. I will be very happy to be wrong about this.
To sum up: 80k one-on-one career advising has a small negative effect on the world
Why
80k is the place to go for career advice (with low capacity) making it harder for new organizations/projects/initiatives to launch in this space.
A month-long period of reviewing the application is prohibitive and disappointing.
It is extremely upsetting for people to apply and get turned down, especially if they found 80k materials at some emotional time (releasing they are not satisfied with their current job or studies). It is very hard to not interpret this as “you are not good enough”.
I believe CEA had to deal with similar sentiment after changing the EAG acceptance policy when a lot of people who used to be accepted were suddenly not accepted.
By focusing on people “for whom you’ll have useful things to say”, you talk to people who do not need additional resources (like guidance or introductions) for increasing their impact. The contrafactual impact is low.
For example, testimonials on the website include PhD Student in Machine Learning at Cambridge and the President of Harvard Law School Effective Altruism.
By focusing on people for whom you already have useful things to say, you are not putting resources into figuring out how to make the vast majority of people who do not fit these criteria more impactful, effectively losing them.
I have an impression that 80k accepted a long time ago that that wait time will just have to be pretty long. Here is a bunch of ideas to shorten the wait time that I don’t think were attempted historically:
removing sign up form from the website when the waitlist is too long
introduce extra filter like asking people to pay (donate to an effective charity of their choice) small-ish amount ($5-50) as an extra filter
use lottery to determine who to have a call with instead of a longer initial review
hire more advisors
The advising page also says that
It is not clear to me that the price of having in-house career advisors is justified. I think there are a lot of people (like a hundred) in the community who could gladly volunteer a couple of hours per month to do career advising and would be super excited about the opportunity to help out and share their knowledge and connections with the newcomers.
I believe a structure that has a small experienced 80k career advisor team (2-4 people) managing a community of vetted experienced EA volunteers would be a much more promising way to go. Or alternatively have the community fully self-organise for this project.
I don’t quite agree here. I was counting ‘additional resources’ like guidance and introductions as ‘things to say’. So focusing on people for whom we have useful things to say should increase rather than decrease the extent to which we talk to people who need these resources to increase their impact.
I agree we’re not always good at figuring out which people could most benefit from our providing resources / introductions. We try to keep calibrating on this from our conversations. That’s clearly easier in the case of noticing people we talk to for whom we couldn’t be that useful than the opposite. To counter that asymmetry, we try to do experiments with tweaking which people we speak to in order to get a sense of how useful we can be to different groups.
With respect to your concrete examples:
The descriptions we’ve given of people on that page is actually from where they’re at a year or two after we speak to them. That’s because it takes a while for us to figure out if the conversation was actually useful to them. For example, I think Cullen wasn’t President of HL EA when we spoke to them.
That aside, on the question of whether we should generally speak to people with these types of profiles:
Being a PhD student in Machine Learning doesn’t seem like an indication of how much someone knows about / has interacted with the effective altruism community. So it doesn’t seem to me like it should count against us talking to them. (Though of course the person might in fact already be well connected to the EA community and not stand to benefit much from talking to us.)
It seems like a hard decision to me whether someone running an EA student group should count in favour of or against our speaking to them. On the one hand, they might well be steeped enough in effective altruism they won’t benefit that much from us recommending specific resources to them. They’re also in a better position to reach out to other EAs to ask for their advice than people new to the community would be. On the other hand, it’s a strong signal that they want to spend their energies improving the world as much as possible, and so our research will definitely be applicable for them. It’s also not a foregone conclusion that someone running a student group has had much opportunity to sound board their career with others who feel equally strongly about helping the world, let alone those with similar values but more experience. So I could imagine us being really useful for EA group leaders, despite the caveats above.
I’d like to second the opinion that it is a bit of a turn off that the resources go toward people who already have resources. I understand that “justice” and “equality of opportunity” aren’t core EA concerns, and I also realize that giving an hour of time to a person at an elite university who has received lots of educational benefits in life very well may have a higher ROI than giving an hour of time to a “normal” person (I’m using normal here to indicate a person who grew up in a family with a more median income, and who went to a less outlier school).
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for this. The current practice is very much in line with the career advice on 80,000 Hours, which seems to be primarily applicable to people who are able to get jobs at McKinsey, get into PhD Programs about Artificial Intelligence, and able to earn well-above a median income. Elitism isn’t inherently a bad thing; it can sometimes simply be a way of having high standards.
For context, I’m writing this as a person who grew up in a lower-middle class family, who didn’t live in a big city with lots of opportunities, who went to a university that is not famous, and who has never earned more than the average income. I’m privileged in lots of ways in my life, but because the paths that are highlighted on your website aren’t realistic options (unless I were to spend large amounts of money on re-schooling), it sends a message of “if you aren’t in this particular privileged class of people who have received lots of education at elite institutions, then you probably aren’t the right fit for our club.”
I am so sad that we are causing this. It is really tough to make yourself vulnerable to strangers and reach out for help, only to have your request rebuffed. That’s particularly hard when it feels like a judgement on someone’s worth, and more particularly on their ability to help others. And I think there are additional reasons for these rejections being particularly tough:
If you’re early on in your career (as most of our readers are) and haven’t yet experienced many rejections, they will hit harder than if you’re more used to them
Effective altruism is often experienced as an identity, above and beyond its ideas and the community. This makes a rejection feel particularly sensitive
Whenever you’re being judged, it’s hard to keep in mind how little information the person has about you. Our application is far shorter and more informal than, say, university applications. We therefore often have pretty little information about people and so are correspondingly likely to make the wrong call. But since the person filling in the application knows all about themselves, it’s hard for them not to take it as an indictment of them overall.
I do want to highlight that our not talking to someone isn’t a sign we don’t think they will have an (extremely) impactful career; rather it is simply a sign that we don’t think we’ll be as helpful to them as we could be to some other people. So while I deeply empathise with the feelings I describe above and I expect I would feel the same way in a similar situation, I don’t think people are actually right to feel like they “are not good enough”.
I realise it’s probably no consolation, but, on a personal note, needing to turn down people who are asking for my help is unquestionably the worst part of my job. We spent a significant part of last year trying to find an alternative model we believe would be as impactful as our current process but wouldn’t involve soliciting and then rejecting so many applications. Unfortunately, we didn’t find one. I think it’s my responsibility to implement the model we think is best, but it’s hard to feel like I’m doing the right thing when I know I’m disappointing so many people. I often only get through reviewing applications by reminding myself of our mission and trying to bring to mind the huge numbers of people in the future who may never get to exist and are entirely voiceless, and for whose sake it is that I have to refuse to help people in front of me today that I care about.
Spitballing here, but have you considered putting some thoughts to this effect on your website? Currently, the relevant part of the 80k website reads as follows.
This is ok as far as it goes, but to me does feel a little like a fake-positive ‘I’m sure you’ll do just fine, whoever-you-are!‘. Pointing out things like the fact that you have very little information to go on, and that you’re optimising for people you can help most rather than making some kind of pure ‘how valuable is this person’ call, seems like it could help soften the blow the margin, though I appreciate it’ll never make that large a difference given the other things you mentioned.
Thanks for this feedback. I had a go at rewriting that our ‘why wasn’t I accepted’ FAQ. It now reads:
Why wasn’t I accepted?
We sincerely regret that we can’t advise everyone who applies. We read every application individually and are thankful that you took the time to apply. It’s really touching reading about people who have come across 80,000 Hours and are excited about using their careers to help others.
We aim to talk to the people we think we can help most. Our not speaking with you does not mean we think you won’t have a highly impactful career. Whether we can be helpful to you sometimes depends on contingent factors like whether one of our advisers happens to know of a role or introduction right now that might be a good fit for you. We also have far less information about you than you do, so we aren’t even necessarily making the right calls about who we can help most.
You’re very welcome to reapply, particularly if your situation changes. If you’re thinking of doing so, it might be worth reading our key ideas series and trying out our career planning process, which we developed to help people think through their career decisions. You can also get involved in our community to get help from other people trying to do good with their careers.
I agree this is too long, and I’m sad that it was actually longer than this at times. Right now I’m mostly managing to review them within a week, and almost always within 2 weeks. I wouldn’t want to promise to always be able to do this, but it’s much easier now we have a team of people working on advising.
I’m actually really keen to avoid us having long wait times. Career decisions are often pretty time sensitive due to application and decision deadlines. Thinking about your overall career also seems pretty aversive to me, so I think it’s important to capitalise on people’s enthusiasm and energy for doing those occur. Right now we’re aiming to have slots available in the next couple of weeks after we’ve accepted an application, though it might take a few weeks before there are slots that work for a person, particularly if they’re in a very different time zone than us.
Agreed on this prioritization, also I think both in principle (and as you noted) in practice, long wait times are highly avoidable. In principle you don’t need that much resources to turn a particularly long wait time to one that is pleasantly short, certain exigencies (eg correlated staff vacation times) aside. The mathematics of queueing theory also might be helpful here.
Thanks for sharing your view. It’s useful for us to get an overall sense of whether others think our work is useful in order to sense check our views and continue figuring out whether this is the right thing for us to focus our time on. It’s also important to hear detail about what the problems with it are so that we can try to address them. I’ll respond to your points in separate comments so that they’re easier to parse and engage with.
Thank you for your thoughtful replies, Michelle.
I can second feeling pretty heavy-hearted after my rejection, and really like the idea of vetting a crowd of volunteers. A similar idea would be to offer rejected people to share the info from their form, plus maybe their most important questions, with people who agreed to maybe take a look, e.g. via the EA Hub, where you could also filter relevant background. Or alternatively into a private group like „AI Safety Career Discussion“. I’m one of the shy people who would probably never do something like that themselves, but if it were an „official“ and recommended thing from 80,000Hours it would feel somehow much less scary.
Thanks for this feedback! It’s really useful to know that this would make it easier to put yourself out there. We’re in the process of changing the application form to connect better with our career planning process, to hopefully make filling it out a commitment mechanism for getting started on making a career plan (since doing so is often aversive). As part of that, we aim to send people a google doc of the relevant answers in a readily shareable format and encourage people to send it to friends and others whose judgement they trust.
I also find it pretty scary to email people out of the blue, even if I know them, particularly to ask them for something. But my hope is that if someone already has a doc they want comments on, and it’s been explicitly suggested they send that to friends, it will make it a bit easier to ask for this kind of help. Increasing the extent to which people do that seems good to me, since my impression is that although people find it hard to reach out, most people would actually be happy to give their friends comments on something like this!
Great idea. What did you think about the idea to somehow streamline a process to share that Google Doc with others who might have something to say? A process that might require relatively little effort would be asking people in those forms “Would you be interested in receiving career plans from other people that are looking for feedback?”. That might make it relatively effortless for people from a particular field, e.g. Cognitive Science in my case, to be matched to other people who might have valuable feedback.
It might be a bit effortful to match people, though I suppose you have information about the general field and that might already suffice? Or you might worry that people will receive unhelpful feedback and that this might reflect badly on you? Though I suppose you could emphasize that the people who you’d share the Google Doc are not vetted at all and are only fellow 80,000Hours fans who clicked on “I’d be down to look over other people’s career plans”.