Hi Arepo, I think you are describing a tiny portion of EA software development, but are using the term “EA tech” to describe that small portion. I would suggest changing your post to something like “small EA organizations should hire an agency instead of hiring <=1 FTE of developers” and drop the term “EA tech work” unless it’s something that genuinely applies to all EA tech work.
The claim “EA tech work is bad for technical career capital” seems particularly unsubstantiated.
I care about this not so much because it affects your agency proposal, but more that I worry software developers who are reading this won’t understand that the experiences you describe are not representative, unless they read very closely.
As some justification:
Perhaps the most obvious definition of “EA tech work” is to filter the 80 K job board for “engineering” positions. When I do this, the current top positions are at the UK government, DeepMind, OpenAI, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Microsoft. These positions generally do not suffer from the problems you mentioned, like looking bad on a resume.
The 80 K job board is sometimes criticized for being too longtermist-oriented. My guess is that most short-termist EA engineers are at places like Wave, which employ dozens to hundreds of developers, and similarly don’t suffer from the difficulties you mention here, though there is not an equivalent job board to check.
In part II you say:
At any given time in the last few years, there have been perhaps 5-10 software developers working full time in EA nonprofits.
CEA, my current employer, single-handedly employs this many full-time software developers.[1] The same is true of my former employer Ought. I expect it’s also true of Redwood or Anthropic. It’s also true of EA-aligned animal rights organizations like The Humane League and Global Health and Development charities like GiveDirectly. So I’m guessing you are also excluding from consideration “EA nonprofits which have dedicated software development teams.”
My best guess is that you are considering only EA organizations which hire <=1 FTE of software developers. This is an important target audience to consider, but is very different from all of “EA tech work”.
You noted that 100% of the people who said they were worried about compensation being too low were just factually wrong about EA compensation. I suspect a similar thing is true regarding career capital, and would not want your post to reinforce that misimpression.
Hi Arepo, I think you are describing a tiny portion of EA software development, but are using the term “EA tech” to describe that small portion. I would suggest changing your post to something like “small EA organizations should hire an agency instead of hiring <=1 FTE of developers” and drop the term “EA tech work” unless it’s something that genuinely applies to all EA tech work.
The claim “EA tech work is bad for technical career capital” seems particularly unsubstantiated.
I care about this not so much because it affects your agency proposal, but more that I worry software developers who are reading this won’t understand that the experiences you describe are not representative, unless they read very closely.
As some justification: Perhaps the most obvious definition of “EA tech work” is to filter the 80 K job board for “engineering” positions. When I do this, the current top positions are at the UK government, DeepMind, OpenAI, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Microsoft. These positions generally do not suffer from the problems you mentioned, like looking bad on a resume.
The 80 K job board is sometimes criticized for being too longtermist-oriented. My guess is that most short-termist EA engineers are at places like Wave, which employ dozens to hundreds of developers, and similarly don’t suffer from the difficulties you mention here, though there is not an equivalent job board to check.
In part II you say:
CEA, my current employer, single-handedly employs this many full-time software developers.[1] The same is true of my former employer Ought. I expect it’s also true of Redwood or Anthropic. It’s also true of EA-aligned animal rights organizations like The Humane League and Global Health and Development charities like GiveDirectly. So I’m guessing you are also excluding from consideration “EA nonprofits which have dedicated software development teams.”
My best guess is that you are considering only EA organizations which hire <=1 FTE of software developers. This is an important target audience to consider, but is very different from all of “EA tech work”.
You noted that 100% of the people who said they were worried about compensation being too low were just factually wrong about EA compensation. I suspect a similar thing is true regarding career capital, and would not want your post to reinforce that misimpression.
Note that CEA includes some umbrella projects like EA Funds and GWWC