I think this is putting too much on 80k. They have hundreds of jobs in many different areas listed on their website, and it’s a very daunting task to evaluate each one of them when the evaluators are generalists who often have to rely on (conflicting) opinions from people in the community. On top of that, what is career capital for one person could plausibly be direct impact for some other person, so it doesn’t really seem one size fits all.
If somebody can’t evaluate jobs on the job board for themselves, I’m not that confident that they’ll take a good path regardless. People have a tendency to try to offload thinking to places like 80k, and I actually think it could be bad if 80k made it easier to do that on extremely fine grained topics like individual jobs.
I do like the idea of having comments on particular jobs. And it also would be good for 80k to be more clear they don’t expect all these jobs to necessarily have direct impact.
I don’t know whether it’s the case that many people on the internet are looking at the job board and deciding which jobs to apply to when they don’t have a strong engagement with EA ideas, and that these sorts of people are the types who would actually get the jobs. If that’s the case (80k would know better than me), then I think it maybe does make sense to restrict to jobs that aren’t going to be bad if such a person gets them. That seems like an empirical question.
If each job[1] will have a clear place to discuss it, where someone can comment “I think this is harmful because...” and someone else can reply “I think this is wrong because...”, and even the org itself (or 80k) can reply with their take—I would personally say this is a good situation.
Extra bonuses from this solution:
If I want an impactful job, I have a clear place to check if anyone pushed back on this job and why (and also: seeing no pushback is a useful data point)
We get a healthy [in my opinion] conversation about impact within the community
As you said, not “putting too much on 80k”, which I also endorse
How would you plan this exactly? Comments per job posting or per organisation?
On the one hand job postings come and go, so if you think anyone working at [Effective Consultancy] is doing a bad thing, you don’t want to have to keep looking for their postings and re-comment.
On the other hand, maybe you think their [Consultancy Safety] team is currently doing good work, and you want to endorse it temporarily while not endorsing the rest of EC.
(I see that this is old) Etsy’s product reviews for every product in the seller’s shop are all on every product page. There might be some fancy sorting bringing the more relevant reviews to the top, I’m not sure. So with a model like this, you could review one job posting, and people could see that job posting review on all the company’s other job postings.
I disagree—I think it’s okay if 80,000 Hours occasionally makes mistakes, but I’d prefer it if their policy was to only add jobs to their job board that they believe would make a positive difference to the world. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
I’d worry that this leads to a false sense of security. Just like jobs that people take purely for career capital require some active thinking on the part of the person about when it’s enough and when to pivot, one could make a case that most highly impactful jobs wouldn’t be exceptionally impactful without “active thinking” of a similar kind.
For instance, any sort of policy work has more or less impact depending on what specific policies you advocate for, not just how well one does it.
Unfortunately, I think it’s somewhat rare that for-profit organizations (especially outside of EA) or governments have streamlined missions and the type of culture that encourages “having impact” as a natural part of one’s job description. Hospitals are the main counter-example I could think of, since your job description as a doctor or nurse or even as almost any hospital staff is literally about saving lives and may include instructions for working under triage conditions. By contrast, the way I envision work in policy (you obviously know more about this than I do) or things like biosecurity research, I’d imagine it depends a lot on the specific program / group and that people can make a big difference if they have personal initiative – which are things that require paying close attention to one’s path to impact (on top of excelling at one’s immediate job description).
What IMO could be quite useful is if 80k would say how much of a given job’s impact comes from “following the job description and doing well in a conventional sense” vs. “introducing particular ideas or policies to this organization based on EA principles.”
I kind of don’t see the point of the job board if it’s just “these are jobs, some are good and some are bad, good luck”? Why would I use their job board at all? I’d prefer a job board where the rationale for posting each role was something like”80k thinks you should consider whether you’d have significant impact in this role based on your individual circumstances.”
80k doesn’t even need to change how they write about their jobs, if that’s your concern, and I agree people should still use critical thinking—but I don’t think they should list jobs that are likely negative impact or only useful for career capital.
(As a data point I currently don’t use their job board, but I’d be more likely to if they at least aimed to know list jobs that would have a significant positive impact on the world.)
Personally I’m super grateful 80,000 Hours posts roles that are good for career capital, even if they are at organisations that have questionable overall impact, and even if the roles themselves may actively do harm. This is because I’m still fairly young and am interested in building career capital!
It’s plausible a software engineering role at Facebook might do harm, but I still think many EAs would rightly jump at this opportunity, and I’d rather have an EA in the role than a non-EA.
Also, I feel like it’s pretty easy for me to know which roles are directly impactful and which are for career capital (or which are both). For example, roles that aren’t clearly related to one of 80K’s top problems are usually going to be there for career capital reasons—these are also usually at very well known orgs. 80K actually gives some examples of organisations some people might think are harmful but which they still recommend roles for in their guidance—these being Amazon, Facebook and the US military. It seems pretty obvious to me as someone who has read the rest of 80K’s guidance how to judge the roles for myself and I’m just grateful 80K has listed them for me.
So I think it would be a big loss if 80,000 Hours stopped posting these roles. Should they make it clearer which roles are immediately directly impactful and which aren’t? Maybe. This would be catering for people who can’t figure it out for themselves, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing…
Are you, as a software developer, not aware of roles at Facebook unless you see 80,000 Hours advertise them? I’m struggling to see the value add of advertising a role like that
You might not be aware of them if you haven’t signed up for Facebook careers alerts or look at the Facebook careers website regularly.
Of course you might say “just sign up for the careers alerts then”. But you’d then want to do this for all of the impressive organisations that you would potentially want to work for, of which there may be quite a few. Two possible downsides of this are:
You might miss a few good options accidentally. Maybe the places to work as a software engineer are pretty obvious, but this won’t always be the case. For example, maybe someone looking to build career capital in policy won’t be aware of all of the good options available, including individual think tanks or other organisations that do impactful policy work. I work at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) which surprisingly many people aren’t aware of (I met Will MacAskill one time and he hadn’t heard of it!) - but it’s got a pretty good reputation and soon after I joined the CBI someone left to become Executive Director of the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation, a pretty high impact and EA-relevant role. Furthermore I don’t think the role she came from at the CBI was a directly high impact role (by EA lights), so the role she came from would have been excluded from 80K’s job board under your preference. In short, I doubt everyone is automatically aware of all good career capital roles.
It might be annoying to have loads of career alert emails when you could see them all in one place. I quite like getting the email from 80,000 Hours reminding me to look at the job board and then seeing everything in one place. Makes life kind of easy! I don’t 100% rely on the 80K job board, but if the 80K job board covers all bases then one could rely on it guilt-free, and it might make life easier for them.
This is a much simpler problem that I’m happy to help with [1] [2] [3].
The problem of finding impactful roles is much harder
And that’s where I need (and I think others too) help from an org like 80k.
Facebook
This is not an example of a company that worries me.
“roles that aren’t clearly related to one of 80K’s top problems are usually going to be there for career capital reasons”
I think:
Some of these are potentially overly damaging
Roles that are related to 80k’s top causes might also be there for career capital
“I’m just grateful 80K has listed them [Amazon, Facebook and the US military] for me”
Again, I think it would be very easy to list roles like this without help from 80k experts. If it seems to be a pain point, perhaps we could talk about it.
“This [saying which roles are impactful and which not] would be catering for people who can’t figure it out for themselves”
I think this is useful in a similar way to how Givewell are useful. They do the analysis so we don’t all need to do it individually. Not a perfect example, but points to something I mean.
I can also tell you in practice that many developers (dozens?) expect this from 80k, and also see the Twitter poll at the top of the post, which I think hints this is a problem for many people
This is a much simpler problem that I’m happy to help with
Just flagging that you’re referring to the problem of “getting career capital as a SW engineer” and not “getting career capital”, which is in general much harder.
Though the problem you are talking about is in my opinion somewhat more complex than you think.
This is a much simpler problem that I’m happy to help with
I’d rather all roles be summarised in one place for simplicity. If people are concerned about not knowing which roles are for career capital vs direct impact then 80K can signpost that—which I think I am in favour of. I’m not sure why removing the career capital roles would be the better approach—I think it would be a loss of value.
Some of these are potentially overly damaging
Can you give some examples? I’m interested.
“I’m just grateful 80K has listed them for me”
When I said this I was referring to all roles they list not just the career capital ones by the way.
What IMO could be quite useful is if 80k would say how much of a given job’s impact comes from “following the job description and doing well in a conventional sense” vs. “introducing particular ideas or policies to this organization based on EA principles.”
If somebody can’t evaluate jobs on the job board for themselves, I’m not that confident that they’ll take a good path regardless. People have a tendency to try to offload thinking to places like 80k, and I actually think it could be bad if 80k made it easier to do that on extremely fine grained topics like individual jobs.
I often agree with something in this direction in specific cases, when there is some skill that is present in both the job choosing and job performing endeavour. I think job choosing is often largely about ‘having good judgement and caring a lot’ whereas doing well in a job often does not rely on ‘having good judgment’.
I think there are many examples of solid software engineers, operations staff, marketers etc. where having good judgement does not seem to be particularly important for their role (although that’s not to say good judgement and these roles are anticorrelated or that good judgment isn’t ever required here).
I think you’re right and it’s worth thinking about these cases. That being said, I think tail impact is going to come from people who have good judgement including on how to develop their careers, open new opportunities, and select future jobs across their career. It’s unclear to me which group the 80k job board should be catering to, but plausibly those most extremely self-motivated people don’t need a job board to show them their options.
If somebody can’t evaluate jobs on the job board for themselves, I’m not that confident that they’ll take a good path regardless.
That was also my instinctive reaction to this post. At least in the sense of “if someone can’t distinguish what’s mostly for career capital vs. where a specific role ends up saving lives or improving the world, that’s a bit strange.”
That said, I agree with the post that the communication around the job board can probably be improved!
If you’d know that there are many developers (including senior ones) who don’t want to do an effectiveness analysis and mainly want to go work somewhere useful, and expect this to be the 80k job board, would that change your mind?
Or would you say something like “we don’t want to hire those people”?
Thanks, those are good examples and I think you’re changing my mind a bit! If the board just lists all kinds of jobs at a particular org and that org also hires for developers (or some other role that requires comparatively little involvement with organizational strategy, perhaps operations in some cases – though note that operations people often take on various responsibility that shape the direction of an organization), that could be quite misleading. This would be a problem even if we don’t expect 80k to directly recommend to developers to take developer jobs at an org that they don’t think has positive impact.
“does this AI company do more safety or more capabilities?”
That’s yet another challenge, yeah. Especially because there may not even always be a consensus among thoughtful EAs on how much safety work (and what sort of org structure) is enough.
there may not even always be a consensus among thoughtful EAs on how much safety work (and what sort of org structure) is enough.
My current best suggestion is “let there be a place for the community to discuss this, and then job seekers can at least see the discussion, at least see what the main arguments are of if they even exist”.
What do you think?
I think this is putting too much on 80k. They have hundreds of jobs in many different areas listed on their website, and it’s a very daunting task to evaluate each one of them when the evaluators are generalists who often have to rely on (conflicting) opinions from people in the community. On top of that, what is career capital for one person could plausibly be direct impact for some other person, so it doesn’t really seem one size fits all.
If somebody can’t evaluate jobs on the job board for themselves, I’m not that confident that they’ll take a good path regardless. People have a tendency to try to offload thinking to places like 80k, and I actually think it could be bad if 80k made it easier to do that on extremely fine grained topics like individual jobs.
I do like the idea of having comments on particular jobs. And it also would be good for 80k to be more clear they don’t expect all these jobs to necessarily have direct impact.
I don’t know whether it’s the case that many people on the internet are looking at the job board and deciding which jobs to apply to when they don’t have a strong engagement with EA ideas, and that these sorts of people are the types who would actually get the jobs. If that’s the case (80k would know better than me), then I think it maybe does make sense to restrict to jobs that aren’t going to be bad if such a person gets them. That seems like an empirical question.
My vision (agreeing but elaborating):
If each job[1] will have a clear place to discuss it, where someone can comment “I think this is harmful because...” and someone else can reply “I think this is wrong because...”, and even the org itself (or 80k) can reply with their take—I would personally say this is a good situation.
Extra bonuses from this solution:
If I want an impactful job, I have a clear place to check if anyone pushed back on this job and why (and also: seeing no pushback is a useful data point)
We get a healthy [in my opinion] conversation about impact within the community
As you said, not “putting too much on 80k”, which I also endorse
Or each org, I’m not sure
How would you plan this exactly? Comments per job posting or per organisation?
On the one hand job postings come and go, so if you think anyone working at [Effective Consultancy] is doing a bad thing, you don’t want to have to keep looking for their postings and re-comment.
On the other hand, maybe you think their [Consultancy Safety] team is currently doing good work, and you want to endorse it temporarily while not endorsing the rest of EC.
(I see that this is old) Etsy’s product reviews for every product in the seller’s shop are all on every product page. There might be some fancy sorting bringing the more relevant reviews to the top, I’m not sure. So with a model like this, you could review one job posting, and people could see that job posting review on all the company’s other job postings.
I disagree—I think it’s okay if 80,000 Hours occasionally makes mistakes, but I’d prefer it if their policy was to only add jobs to their job board that they believe would make a positive difference to the world. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
I’d worry that this leads to a false sense of security. Just like jobs that people take purely for career capital require some active thinking on the part of the person about when it’s enough and when to pivot, one could make a case that most highly impactful jobs wouldn’t be exceptionally impactful without “active thinking” of a similar kind.
For instance, any sort of policy work has more or less impact depending on what specific policies you advocate for, not just how well one does it.
Unfortunately, I think it’s somewhat rare that for-profit organizations (especially outside of EA) or governments have streamlined missions and the type of culture that encourages “having impact” as a natural part of one’s job description. Hospitals are the main counter-example I could think of, since your job description as a doctor or nurse or even as almost any hospital staff is literally about saving lives and may include instructions for working under triage conditions. By contrast, the way I envision work in policy (you obviously know more about this than I do) or things like biosecurity research, I’d imagine it depends a lot on the specific program / group and that people can make a big difference if they have personal initiative – which are things that require paying close attention to one’s path to impact (on top of excelling at one’s immediate job description).
What IMO could be quite useful is if 80k would say how much of a given job’s impact comes from “following the job description and doing well in a conventional sense” vs. “introducing particular ideas or policies to this organization based on EA principles.”
I kind of don’t see the point of the job board if it’s just “these are jobs, some are good and some are bad, good luck”? Why would I use their job board at all? I’d prefer a job board where the rationale for posting each role was something like”80k thinks you should consider whether you’d have significant impact in this role based on your individual circumstances.”
80k doesn’t even need to change how they write about their jobs, if that’s your concern, and I agree people should still use critical thinking—but I don’t think they should list jobs that are likely negative impact or only useful for career capital.
(As a data point I currently don’t use their job board, but I’d be more likely to if they at least aimed to know list jobs that would have a significant positive impact on the world.)
Personally I’m super grateful 80,000 Hours posts roles that are good for career capital, even if they are at organisations that have questionable overall impact, and even if the roles themselves may actively do harm. This is because I’m still fairly young and am interested in building career capital!
It’s plausible a software engineering role at Facebook might do harm, but I still think many EAs would rightly jump at this opportunity, and I’d rather have an EA in the role than a non-EA.
Also, I feel like it’s pretty easy for me to know which roles are directly impactful and which are for career capital (or which are both). For example, roles that aren’t clearly related to one of 80K’s top problems are usually going to be there for career capital reasons—these are also usually at very well known orgs. 80K actually gives some examples of organisations some people might think are harmful but which they still recommend roles for in their guidance—these being Amazon, Facebook and the US military. It seems pretty obvious to me as someone who has read the rest of 80K’s guidance how to judge the roles for myself and I’m just grateful 80K has listed them for me.
So I think it would be a big loss if 80,000 Hours stopped posting these roles. Should they make it clearer which roles are immediately directly impactful and which aren’t? Maybe. This would be catering for people who can’t figure it out for themselves, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing…
Are you, as a software developer, not aware of roles at Facebook unless you see 80,000 Hours advertise them? I’m struggling to see the value add of advertising a role like that
You might not be aware of them if you haven’t signed up for Facebook careers alerts or look at the Facebook careers website regularly.
Of course you might say “just sign up for the careers alerts then”. But you’d then want to do this for all of the impressive organisations that you would potentially want to work for, of which there may be quite a few. Two possible downsides of this are:
You might miss a few good options accidentally. Maybe the places to work as a software engineer are pretty obvious, but this won’t always be the case. For example, maybe someone looking to build career capital in policy won’t be aware of all of the good options available, including individual think tanks or other organisations that do impactful policy work. I work at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) which surprisingly many people aren’t aware of (I met Will MacAskill one time and he hadn’t heard of it!) - but it’s got a pretty good reputation and soon after I joined the CBI someone left to become Executive Director of the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation, a pretty high impact and EA-relevant role. Furthermore I don’t think the role she came from at the CBI was a directly high impact role (by EA lights), so the role she came from would have been excluded from 80K’s job board under your preference. In short, I doubt everyone is automatically aware of all good career capital roles.
It might be annoying to have loads of career alert emails when you could see them all in one place. I quite like getting the email from 80,000 Hours reminding me to look at the job board and then seeing everything in one place. Makes life kind of easy! I don’t 100% rely on the 80K job board, but if the 80K job board covers all bases then one could rely on it guilt-free, and it might make life easier for them.
Hey,
Regarding jobs for building career capital
This is a much simpler problem that I’m happy to help with [1] [2] [3].
The problem of finding impactful roles is much harder
And that’s where I need (and I think others too) help from an org like 80k.
Facebook
This is not an example of a company that worries me.
“roles that aren’t clearly related to one of 80K’s top problems are usually going to be there for career capital reasons”
I think:
Some of these are potentially overly damaging
Roles that are related to 80k’s top causes might also be there for career capital
“I’m just grateful 80K has listed them [Amazon, Facebook and the US military] for me”
Again, I think it would be very easy to list roles like this without help from 80k experts. If it seems to be a pain point, perhaps we could talk about it.
“This [saying which roles are impactful and which not] would be catering for people who can’t figure it out for themselves”
I think this is useful in a similar way to how Givewell are useful. They do the analysis so we don’t all need to do it individually. Not a perfect example, but points to something I mean.
I can also tell you in practice that many developers (dozens?) expect this from 80k, and also see the Twitter poll at the top of the post, which I think hints this is a problem for many people
Just flagging that you’re referring to the problem of “getting career capital as a SW engineer” and not “getting career capital”, which is in general much harder.
Though the problem you are talking about is in my opinion somewhat more complex than you think.
I’m talking to guy one on one about what complexity I’m missing and he may share anything I say
I’d rather all roles be summarised in one place for simplicity. If people are concerned about not knowing which roles are for career capital vs direct impact then 80K can signpost that—which I think I am in favour of. I’m not sure why removing the career capital roles would be the better approach—I think it would be a loss of value.
Can you give some examples? I’m interested.
When I said this I was referring to all roles they list not just the career capital ones by the way.
Examples: Discussing one here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YCMgg6x6zWJmran5L/criticism-of-the-80k-job-board-listing-strategy?commentId=zZHtmpFRXGg8SK43b
Are you sure you linked to the right place? I don’t see an example of a role you think is very harmful
I’m not against keeping career capital roles in if they’re clearly marked
I think you meant to reply to Yonatan Cale and not me?
And you’re right. I wonder why I can’t delete it?
Big upvote to:
This would not solve everything, but it would improve a lot.
I often agree with something in this direction in specific cases, when there is some skill that is present in both the job choosing and job performing endeavour. I think job choosing is often largely about ‘having good judgement and caring a lot’ whereas doing well in a job often does not rely on ‘having good judgment’.
I think there are many examples of solid software engineers, operations staff, marketers etc. where having good judgement does not seem to be particularly important for their role (although that’s not to say good judgement and these roles are anticorrelated or that good judgment isn’t ever required here).
I think you’re right and it’s worth thinking about these cases. That being said, I think tail impact is going to come from people who have good judgement including on how to develop their careers, open new opportunities, and select future jobs across their career. It’s unclear to me which group the 80k job board should be catering to, but plausibly those most extremely self-motivated people don’t need a job board to show them their options.
+1
People who don’t need a job board don’t need a job board
That was also my instinctive reaction to this post. At least in the sense of “if someone can’t distinguish what’s mostly for career capital vs. where a specific role ends up saving lives or improving the world, that’s a bit strange.”
That said, I agree with the post that the communication around the job board can probably be improved!
If you’d know that there are many developers (including senior ones) who don’t want to do an effectiveness analysis and mainly want to go work somewhere useful, and expect this to be the 80k job board, would that change your mind?
Or would you say something like “we don’t want to hire those people”?
This is extra true for complicated calculations like “does this AI company do more safety or more capabilities?”
[example link for why this matters]
Thanks, those are good examples and I think you’re changing my mind a bit! If the board just lists all kinds of jobs at a particular org and that org also hires for developers (or some other role that requires comparatively little involvement with organizational strategy, perhaps operations in some cases – though note that operations people often take on various responsibility that shape the direction of an organization), that could be quite misleading. This would be a problem even if we don’t expect 80k to directly recommend to developers to take developer jobs at an org that they don’t think has positive impact.
That’s yet another challenge, yeah. Especially because there may not even always be a consensus among thoughtful EAs on how much safety work (and what sort of org structure) is enough.
Thanks for saying!
Regarding
My current best suggestion is “let there be a place for the community to discuss this, and then job seekers can at least see the discussion, at least see what the main arguments are of if they even exist”. What do you think?