A piece exploring why it took me so long to go from “leader of moderately successful student group” to “actually applying for jobs in EA”, and speculating that there may be a lot of other people who aren’t aware of how qualified they actually are for direct work (with reference to at least one more anecdotal example of someone who was in the “doldrums” for a while). Includes thoughts on what kinds of prompting might actually get people in these positions to take EA jobs seriously.
I feel I should note that there is an opposite problem happening as well. Robert Wiblin once wrote:
It’s a problem for 80,000 Hours that people range from wildly overconfident in themselves to wildly under-confident in themselves. The extent of people’s inaccurate self-assessments has surprised me and might surprise you too.
As a result, almost anything we say to help people figure out whether they can plausibly pursue a given career path will still lead to some combination of confident but unsuitable people pushing ahead, and under-confident but suitable people not even bothering to try. Both of these are significant costs.
The ideal is to give objective measures like test scores, but i) many roles have no such clear entry criteria, ii) even those that do usually also require some softer skills that are harder to measure, iii) most people won’t have done the test, so we’re back to people’s guesses about how well they would do, and iv) some people have such strong positive and negative convictions about themselves even this wouldn’t help.
Anyway, the bottom line is that if you could all go and achieve perfect self-knowledge it would make my job slightly easier, thank you.
There are certainly people on both ends of the (confidence / ability) spectrum. I suspect that “skilled people deciding not to try entering EA work” is a bigger problem than “people trying to push ahead when they shouldn’t”.
Reasoning:
From an individual’s perspective, “wasting time trying to enter a field” doesn’t seem much worse than “missing your chance to enter a field where you’d have had a much higher impact than you did otherwise”.
From an org’s perspective, it’s much more costly to miss out on a great employee than to say “no” to one more person.
But there are a lot of other ways you could look at the issue, and this is just my first impression.
Generally, I would expect more people to overestimate themselves (illusory superiority) than underestimate themselves. I also expect that there is a social desirability bias at play here: it’s more socially acceptable to point out that people underestimate themselves, than that they overestimate themselves.
Unsolicited advice-seeking (respond to all, some, or none, as your schedule and interests permit): Is being the “leader of a moderately successful student group” in itself a useful qualification for getting EA jobs? And if so, where do you find openings where it’s relevant? (I’m the leader of a moderately successful student group! :D) I just finished a bachelors in economics and my very preliminary search of EA-adjacent job postings has turned up a lot of opportunities for grad students, phd’s, or programmers, of which I am none. (Fwiw I might actuallybe overestimating my qualifications, given that I can’t code and my only significant paid job experience is tutoring.)
FWIW, I think tutoring EAs can be a valuable intervention, though maybe won’t ever be big enough for an org (or possibly even a single person) to work on this full-time.
Didn’t write it, but have two-thirds of a draft lying around to finish someday.
Leading a group is a good signal, but for most jobs, I think other qualifications will also be important (though these could include “having a strong application and doing well on work tests”). If you’re trying to do something that makes use of your econ knowledge (rather than your ops/organizing ability or general research skills), competing with PhDs will be tough.
I’m an unusual case, because I went to a one-off retreat for people interested in ops work at a time lots of orgs were hiring at once—it was a bit like a “job fair”. Had I not gone there, I’d have just kept checking the 80K job board, the “Effective Altruism Job Postings” Facebook group, and the websites of a few orgs I liked (if I’d seen that their jobs weren’t being added to the board).
“The EA Doldrums: Drifting for no good reason”
A piece exploring why it took me so long to go from “leader of moderately successful student group” to “actually applying for jobs in EA”, and speculating that there may be a lot of other people who aren’t aware of how qualified they actually are for direct work (with reference to at least one more anecdotal example of someone who was in the “doldrums” for a while). Includes thoughts on what kinds of prompting might actually get people in these positions to take EA jobs seriously.
I feel I should note that there is an opposite problem happening as well. Robert Wiblin once wrote:
There are certainly people on both ends of the (confidence / ability) spectrum. I suspect that “skilled people deciding not to try entering EA work” is a bigger problem than “people trying to push ahead when they shouldn’t”.
Reasoning:
From an individual’s perspective, “wasting time trying to enter a field” doesn’t seem much worse than “missing your chance to enter a field where you’d have had a much higher impact than you did otherwise”.
From an org’s perspective, it’s much more costly to miss out on a great employee than to say “no” to one more person.
But there are a lot of other ways you could look at the issue, and this is just my first impression.
Generally, I would expect more people to overestimate themselves (illusory superiority) than underestimate themselves. I also expect that there is a social desirability bias at play here: it’s more socially acceptable to point out that people underestimate themselves, than that they overestimate themselves.
Did you ever write this? I’d love to read it.
Unsolicited advice-seeking (respond to all, some, or none, as your schedule and interests permit): Is being the “leader of a moderately successful student group” in itself a useful qualification for getting EA jobs? And if so, where do you find openings where it’s relevant? (I’m the leader of a moderately successful student group! :D) I just finished a bachelors in economics and my very preliminary search of EA-adjacent job postings has turned up a lot of opportunities for grad students, phd’s, or programmers, of which I am none. (Fwiw I might actually be overestimating my qualifications, given that I can’t code and my only significant paid job experience is tutoring.)
FWIW, I think tutoring EAs can be a valuable intervention, though maybe won’t ever be big enough for an org (or possibly even a single person) to work on this full-time.
Now on a massive tangent, but maybe you could offer to subsidize people buying tutoring from Wyzant?
Didn’t write it, but have two-thirds of a draft lying around to finish someday.
Leading a group is a good signal, but for most jobs, I think other qualifications will also be important (though these could include “having a strong application and doing well on work tests”). If you’re trying to do something that makes use of your econ knowledge (rather than your ops/organizing ability or general research skills), competing with PhDs will be tough.
I’m an unusual case, because I went to a one-off retreat for people interested in ops work at a time lots of orgs were hiring at once—it was a bit like a “job fair”. Had I not gone there, I’d have just kept checking the 80K job board, the “Effective Altruism Job Postings” Facebook group, and the websites of a few orgs I liked (if I’d seen that their jobs weren’t being added to the board).