This is an anonymous account (Avila is not a real person and is only a pseudonym).
Avila
Karma: 209
I hadn’t thought of this before, and it does make me reconsider the value of these types of questions early on—even if it burdens applicants.
I’m very glad to hear this—thank you Sash!
Thank you very much Stephen, this was a nice comment to receive, and it does provide some much-needed reassurance and good advice. I’m going to widen my search now.
I also hope my post provided some reassurance to others in my situation.
Thank you for your advice! I will say that my part-time job was research, which is crucial if I want to get research positions or into PhD programs in the near future. The clubs I lead are also very relevant to the jobs I’m applying to, and I think they may be quite impactful (so I’m willing to do them even if they harm my own odds).
Regardless of my specific situation, I think EA orgs should conduct hiring under the assumption that a significant portion of their applicants don’t have the time for multiple multi-hour work tests in early stages of the application process (where most will be weeded out).
This would definitely reduce the time cost.
I’d also worry, though, about the application having only certain kinds of questions which do not bring out the best in (some/many) people. I’ve definitely seen some applications where I thought I wasn’t given the chance to show my worth, and others where I was. This app would have to be drafted with a lot of care.
Also thank you @elizabethcooper for taking initiative on this!
Thank you! I’ll try this.
Yes, I’ve had two calls with them. Maybe it wasn’t very clear from my background but I’ve been pretty deeply involved with EA for about 2 years (also went to multiple EAGs).
How do you think 80k career advice would help in my situation?
I just don’t have the time. I’m often at absolute capacity with college assignments, clubs, work, etc.
Especially if many orgs decided to have longer work trials, I might be unable to apply to many or may end up submitting subpar work tests because of this.
Also, I’ll point out that oftentimes EA orgs have *initial applications* that take 2-4 hours. This seems like clearly too much. I think a quick first round that verifies the following would be best:
The applicant is legally able to work for us.
The applicant satisfies our minimum experience/knowledge cutoff (looking at the resume and asking one question about their degree of engagement with, e.g., AI safety).
The applicant seems value-aligned or understands our mission (one question about why they want to apply or work in X area).
Longer questions about career plans, work-trial-y questions, reasoning and IQ-test-y questions, research proposals, and everything else should belong in later stages, when you’ve already filtered out people that just really did not belong in the application process.
Thank you so much Joseph! I really appreciate that.
I’ll think about it, and if I get over my strong desire for anonymity I’ll reach out.
This is even more puzzling to me now, because I think I clearly satisfied all of these (I looked back over my responses, which I saved in a GDoc).
But thank you for the offer! If I get over my strong desire for anonymity I’ll be sure to reach out.
Edit: I say “clearly” not to add emphasis to my response (I didn’t mean for it to sound contrarian), but because these particular criteria seem easy to judge: they’re mostly not “how good are you at X” but rather “have you done X.”
Thanks for pointing this out! It’d be great for EA orgs to converge on some best practices (to some degree, I think they already do).
You all raise valid points. I agree that if they assign a low value to a PhD they shouldn’t disclose that information. That said, people with PhDs also had the opportunity to show that they can do independent research well, and if you care about people having years of independent research under their belt, then you would expect to hire mostly PhDs.
Still, it doesn’t have to be a PhD, but orgs could say that they expect the most competitive applicants to… “have shown the ability to do independent research (>1 year)” or “successfully manage a team (>6 months)” or whatever.
Whatever markers you’re actually looking for (not the ones that merely correlate with them): I’d love to know more!
Thank you, Nick. I was also unsure about this (quick take vs. post). If people could weigh in by agreeing or disagreeing, I would appreciate it.
EA group organizers should be careful when listing this as experience when applying for certain jobs, especially in policy.