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.”
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.