Also don’t worry about repeated rejections. Even if you are rejected, your application had an expected value, it increased the probability that a strong hire was made and that more impact was achieved. The strength of the applicant pool matters. Rejection of strong applicants is a sign of a thriving and competitive movement. It means that the job that you thought was important enough to apply to is more likely to be done well by whoever does it.
Rejection should not be taken as evidence that your talent or current level of experience is insufficient. I think that (for most people reading this forum) it’s often less a lack of the trust/vetting issue, and more a bit of randomness. I’ve applied lots of places. In some I did not even make it into the first round, totally rejected. In others I was a top candidate or accepted. I don’t think this variance is because of meaningfully differing fit or competitiveness, I think it’s because recruiting, grantmaking, any process where you have to decide between a bunch of applications, is idiosyncratic. I’m sure anyone who has screened applications knows what I’m talking about, it’s not an exact science. There’s a lot of applicants and little time, sometimes snap judgements must be made in a few seconds—at the end we pick a hopefully suitable candidate, but we also miss lots of suitable candidates, sometimes overlooking several “best” candidates. And then there’s semi-arbitrary differences in what qualities different screeners emphasize (the interview? a work task? EA engagement? Academic degrees?). When there’s a strong applicant pool, it means things are a bit more likely to go well.
(All that said, EA is big enough that all this stuff differs a lot by specific org as well as broader cause area)
Another factor which may play a role in the seeming arbitrariness of it all, is that orgs are often looking for a very specific thing, or have specific values or ideas that they emphasize, or are sensitive to specific key-words, which aren’t always obvious and legible from the outside—leading to communications gaps. To give the most extreme example I’ve encountered of this, sometimes people don’t indicate that they know what EA is about in their initial application, perhaps not realizing that they’re being considered alongside non-EA applicants or that it might matter. For specific orgs, communication gaps might get more specific. If you’re super interested in joining an org, getting a bit of intel on this can really help (and is a lot easier than trying to get experience somewhere else before re-applying!).
Great thoughts, ishaan. Thanks for your contributions here. Some of these thoughts connect with MichaelA’s comments above. In general, they touch on the question of whether or not there are things we can productively discover or say about the needs of EA orgs and the capabilities of applications that would reduce the size of the “zone of uncertainty.”
This is why I tried to convey some of the recent statements by people working at major EA orgs on what they perceive as major bottlenecks in the project pipeline and hiring process.
One key challenge is triangulation. How do we get the right information to the right person? 80000 Hours has solved a piece of this admirably, by making themselves into a go-to resource on thinking through career selection from an EA point of view.
This is a comment section on a modestly popular blog post, which will vanish from view in a few days. What would it take to get the information that people like you, MichaelA, and many others have, compile it into a continually maintained resource, and get it into the hands of the people who need it? Does that knowledge have a shelf life long enough to be worth compiling, yet general enough to be worth broadcasting, and that is EA-specific enough to not be available elsewhere?
I’m primarily interested here in making statements that are durably true. In this case, I believe that EA grantmakers will always need to have a bar, and that as long as we have a compelling message, there will consequently always be some people failing to clear it who are stuck in the “zone of uncertainty.”
With this post, I’m not trying to tell them what they should do. Instead, I am trying to articulate a framework for understanding this situation, so that the inchoate frustration that might otherwise result can be (hopefully) transmuted into understanding. I’m very concerned about the people who might feel like “bycatch” of the movement, caught in a net, dragged along, distressed, and not sure what to do.
That kind of situation can produce anger at the powers that be, which is a valid emotion. However, when the “powers that be” are leaders in a small movement that the angry person actually believes in, it could be more productive to at least come to a systemic understanding of the situation that gives context to that emotion. Being in a line that doesn’t seem to be moving very fast is frustrating, but it’s a very different experience if you feel like the speed at which it’s moving is understandable given the circumstances.
With this post, I’m not trying to tell them what they should do.
I think that conflicts with some phrasings in this post, which are stated as recommendations/imperatives. So if in future you again have the goal of not telling people what they should do but rather providing something more like emotional support or a framework, I recommend trying to avoid that kind of phrasing. (Because as mentioned in another comment, I think this post in effect provides career advice and that that advice is overly specific and will only be right for some readers.)
Example paragraph that’s stated as about what people should do:
Don’t try to wake up and save the world. Don’t be bycatch. Take 15 years and become a domain expert. Take a career and become a macrostrategy expert. Mentor. Run small and non-EA projects. Circle back to EA periodically with your newfound skills and see what a difference you can make then. There is absolutely no way we can have a longtermist movement if we can’t be longtermist about our own lives and careers. But if we can, then we can.
I can see how you might interpret it that way. I’m rhetorically comfortable with the phrasing here in the informal context of this blog post. There’s a “You can...” implied in the positive statements here (i.e. “You can take 15 years and become a domain expert”). Sticking that into each sentence would add flab.
There is a real question about whether or not the average person (and especially the average non-native English speaker) would understand this. I’m open to argument that one should always be precisely literal in their statements online, to prioritize avoiding confusion over smoothing the prosody.
What would it take to get the information that people like you, MichaelA, and many others have, compile it into a continually maintained resource, and get it into the hands of the people who need it?
I guess the “easy” answer is “do a poll with select interviews” but otherwise I’m not sure. I guess it would depends on which specific types of information you mean? To some degree organizations will state what they want and need in outreach. If you’re referring to advice like what I said re: “indicate that you know what EA is in your application”, a compilation of advice posts like this one about getting a job in EA might help. Or you could try to research/interview to find more concrete aspects of what the “criteria +bar to clear on those criteria” is for different funders if you see a scenario where the answer isn’t clearly legible. (If it’s a bar at all. For some stuff it’s probably a matter of networking and knowing the right person.)
Another general point on collecting advice is that I think it’s easy to accidentally conflate “in EA” (or even “in the world”) with “in the speaker’s particular organization, in that particular year, within that specific cause area” when listening to advice…The same goes for what both you and I have said above. For example, my perspective on early-career is informed by my particular colleagues, while your impression that “funders have more money than they can spend” or the work being all within “a small movement” etc is not so applicable for someone who wants to work in global health. Getting into specifics is super important.
But I think rejection should be taken as evidence that your talent or current level of experience is insufficient. Rejection from any one round is weak evidence, because there are lots of other factors + random noise that might also explain the result. But if you applied to a similar type of role 100 times and were rejected 100 times without making it through the initial screening, that would be strong evidence. (Caveat that this might just be semantics/pedantry and we might already agree)
I agree, a single rejection is not close to conclusive evidence, but it is still evidence on which you should update (though, depending on the field, possibly not very much)
I agree with your first comment, and am sad to see it downvoted. As I mentioned in my comment above, I think for a lot of people, at least a lot of people who do think they’d be interested in EA jobs or grants, it really makes sense to apply to both EA and non-EA things. And it makes sense to apply to lots of things, even though / because any given application probably has a low chance of success. (And when success happens, that’s usually a really big positive for both the applicant and the org/grantmaker, such that it can make up for the cost of many applications.)
I do think it’s possible for people to spend too long applying to things, but I think it’s probably more common to make too few applications and so end up either with no offers or with a less good offer than one could’ve gotten. And I certainly think it’s possible for people to focus too much on EA orgs/grants and not apply enough to non-EA ones, but I think often (not always) the real problem there is that they’re not applying to enough non-EA stuff, rather than that they’re applying to too much EA things.
All that said, I disagree with “Rejection should not be taken as evidence that your talent or current level of experience is insufficient”, taken literally. Rejection should be taken as (very) weak evidence of. Consider: If you were accepted, this would be evidence that you are a good fit for the role. And you started out thinking there was some chance you’d be accepted. So a rejection has to be some evidence that you aren’t a fit. (See also.)
I think people often update too strongly on that weak evidence, and it’s good to caution against that. But the evidence can still matter—e.g., if you’ve now had 5-10 rejections for one type of role and got an offer for another type, your decision about whether to accept the latter role or keep looking should take into account the now weak/moderate evidence you’re not a great fit for the former.
Heh, I was wondering if I’d get called out on that. You’re totally right, everything that happens in the world constitutes evidence of something!
What I should have said is that humans are prone to fundamental attribution error and it is bad to privilege the hypothesis that it’s evidence of real skill/experience/resume signalling/degree etc, because then you risk working on the wrong things. Rejections are evidence, but they’re mostly evidence of a low baseline acceptance rate, and only slightly evidence of other things.
I can imagine someone concluding things like “I’d better get a PhD in the subject so I can signal as qualified and then try again” in a scenario where maybe the thing that would’ve shifted their chances is rewording a cover letter, spending a single day researching some examples of well-designed CEAs before the work task, or applying on a different year.
Also don’t worry about repeated rejections. Even if you are rejected, your application had an expected value, it increased the probability that a strong hire was made and that more impact was achieved. The strength of the applicant pool matters. Rejection of strong applicants is a sign of a thriving and competitive movement. It means that the job that you thought was important enough to apply to is more likely to be done well by whoever does it.
Rejection should not be taken as evidence that your talent or current level of experience is insufficient. I think that (for most people reading this forum) it’s often less a lack of the trust/vetting issue, and more a bit of randomness. I’ve applied lots of places. In some I did not even make it into the first round, totally rejected. In others I was a top candidate or accepted. I don’t think this variance is because of meaningfully differing fit or competitiveness, I think it’s because recruiting, grantmaking, any process where you have to decide between a bunch of applications, is idiosyncratic. I’m sure anyone who has screened applications knows what I’m talking about, it’s not an exact science. There’s a lot of applicants and little time, sometimes snap judgements must be made in a few seconds—at the end we pick a hopefully suitable candidate, but we also miss lots of suitable candidates, sometimes overlooking several “best” candidates. And then there’s semi-arbitrary differences in what qualities different screeners emphasize (the interview? a work task? EA engagement? Academic degrees?). When there’s a strong applicant pool, it means things are a bit more likely to go well.
(All that said, EA is big enough that all this stuff differs a lot by specific org as well as broader cause area)
Another factor which may play a role in the seeming arbitrariness of it all, is that orgs are often looking for a very specific thing, or have specific values or ideas that they emphasize, or are sensitive to specific key-words, which aren’t always obvious and legible from the outside—leading to communications gaps. To give the most extreme example I’ve encountered of this, sometimes people don’t indicate that they know what EA is about in their initial application, perhaps not realizing that they’re being considered alongside non-EA applicants or that it might matter. For specific orgs, communication gaps might get more specific. If you’re super interested in joining an org, getting a bit of intel on this can really help (and is a lot easier than trying to get experience somewhere else before re-applying!).
Great thoughts, ishaan. Thanks for your contributions here. Some of these thoughts connect with MichaelA’s comments above. In general, they touch on the question of whether or not there are things we can productively discover or say about the needs of EA orgs and the capabilities of applications that would reduce the size of the “zone of uncertainty.”
This is why I tried to convey some of the recent statements by people working at major EA orgs on what they perceive as major bottlenecks in the project pipeline and hiring process.
One key challenge is triangulation. How do we get the right information to the right person? 80000 Hours has solved a piece of this admirably, by making themselves into a go-to resource on thinking through career selection from an EA point of view.
This is a comment section on a modestly popular blog post, which will vanish from view in a few days. What would it take to get the information that people like you, MichaelA, and many others have, compile it into a continually maintained resource, and get it into the hands of the people who need it? Does that knowledge have a shelf life long enough to be worth compiling, yet general enough to be worth broadcasting, and that is EA-specific enough to not be available elsewhere?
I’m primarily interested here in making statements that are durably true. In this case, I believe that EA grantmakers will always need to have a bar, and that as long as we have a compelling message, there will consequently always be some people failing to clear it who are stuck in the “zone of uncertainty.”
With this post, I’m not trying to tell them what they should do. Instead, I am trying to articulate a framework for understanding this situation, so that the inchoate frustration that might otherwise result can be (hopefully) transmuted into understanding. I’m very concerned about the people who might feel like “bycatch” of the movement, caught in a net, dragged along, distressed, and not sure what to do.
That kind of situation can produce anger at the powers that be, which is a valid emotion. However, when the “powers that be” are leaders in a small movement that the angry person actually believes in, it could be more productive to at least come to a systemic understanding of the situation that gives context to that emotion. Being in a line that doesn’t seem to be moving very fast is frustrating, but it’s a very different experience if you feel like the speed at which it’s moving is understandable given the circumstances.
I think that conflicts with some phrasings in this post, which are stated as recommendations/imperatives. So if in future you again have the goal of not telling people what they should do but rather providing something more like emotional support or a framework, I recommend trying to avoid that kind of phrasing. (Because as mentioned in another comment, I think this post in effect provides career advice and that that advice is overly specific and will only be right for some readers.)
Example paragraph that’s stated as about what people should do:
I can see how you might interpret it that way. I’m rhetorically comfortable with the phrasing here in the informal context of this blog post. There’s a “You can...” implied in the positive statements here (i.e. “You can take 15 years and become a domain expert”). Sticking that into each sentence would add flab.
There is a real question about whether or not the average person (and especially the average non-native English speaker) would understand this. I’m open to argument that one should always be precisely literal in their statements online, to prioritize avoiding confusion over smoothing the prosody.
I guess the “easy” answer is “do a poll with select interviews” but otherwise I’m not sure. I guess it would depends on which specific types of information you mean? To some degree organizations will state what they want and need in outreach. If you’re referring to advice like what I said re: “indicate that you know what EA is in your application”, a compilation of advice posts like this one about getting a job in EA might help. Or you could try to research/interview to find more concrete aspects of what the “criteria +bar to clear on those criteria” is for different funders if you see a scenario where the answer isn’t clearly legible. (If it’s a bar at all. For some stuff it’s probably a matter of networking and knowing the right person.)
Another general point on collecting advice is that I think it’s easy to accidentally conflate “in EA” (or even “in the world”) with “in the speaker’s particular organization, in that particular year, within that specific cause area” when listening to advice…The same goes for what both you and I have said above. For example, my perspective on early-career is informed by my particular colleagues, while your impression that “funders have more money than they can spend” or the work being all within “a small movement” etc is not so applicable for someone who wants to work in global health. Getting into specifics is super important.
I agree with most of the things you said.
But I think rejection should be taken as evidence that your talent or current level of experience is insufficient. Rejection from any one round is weak evidence, because there are lots of other factors + random noise that might also explain the result. But if you applied to a similar type of role 100 times and were rejected 100 times without making it through the initial screening, that would be strong evidence. (Caveat that this might just be semantics/pedantry and we might already agree)
I agree, a single rejection is not close to conclusive evidence, but it is still evidence on which you should update (though, depending on the field, possibly not very much)
I agree with your first comment, and am sad to see it downvoted. As I mentioned in my comment above, I think for a lot of people, at least a lot of people who do think they’d be interested in EA jobs or grants, it really makes sense to apply to both EA and non-EA things. And it makes sense to apply to lots of things, even though / because any given application probably has a low chance of success. (And when success happens, that’s usually a really big positive for both the applicant and the org/grantmaker, such that it can make up for the cost of many applications.)
I do think it’s possible for people to spend too long applying to things, but I think it’s probably more common to make too few applications and so end up either with no offers or with a less good offer than one could’ve gotten. And I certainly think it’s possible for people to focus too much on EA orgs/grants and not apply enough to non-EA ones, but I think often (not always) the real problem there is that they’re not applying to enough non-EA stuff, rather than that they’re applying to too much EA things.
All that said, I disagree with “Rejection should not be taken as evidence that your talent or current level of experience is insufficient”, taken literally. Rejection should be taken as (very) weak evidence of. Consider: If you were accepted, this would be evidence that you are a good fit for the role. And you started out thinking there was some chance you’d be accepted. So a rejection has to be some evidence that you aren’t a fit. (See also.)
I think people often update too strongly on that weak evidence, and it’s good to caution against that. But the evidence can still matter—e.g., if you’ve now had 5-10 rejections for one type of role and got an offer for another type, your decision about whether to accept the latter role or keep looking should take into account the now weak/moderate evidence you’re not a great fit for the former.
Heh, I was wondering if I’d get called out on that. You’re totally right, everything that happens in the world constitutes evidence of something!
What I should have said is that humans are prone to fundamental attribution error and it is bad to privilege the hypothesis that it’s evidence of real skill/experience/resume signalling/degree etc, because then you risk working on the wrong things. Rejections are evidence, but they’re mostly evidence of a low baseline acceptance rate, and only slightly evidence of other things.
I can imagine someone concluding things like “I’d better get a PhD in the subject so I can signal as qualified and then try again” in a scenario where maybe the thing that would’ve shifted their chances is rewording a cover letter, spending a single day researching some examples of well-designed CEAs before the work task, or applying on a different year.