I’m a recruiter at GiveWell. Before that I taught math at a charter high school in Memphis. I learned about EA in 2014 when I stumbled on Scott Alexander’s blog.
Any writing on this account is personal and not endorsed by my employer (the only exception is if I answer questions on GiveWell’s job posts). If you’d like to see more of my personal writing, check out my Substack blog, Varia.
JP, thanks for your work on the forum and digests! Wishing you all the best in what’s next. :)
Hi Marna, your questions (and sorry for the delay on this; I didn’t see your post until today):
In the last two years, for junior hiring rounds across our teams, we’ve...
received in the range of thousands of applications per round. Application volume is usually somewhat lower for more senior roles.
made 3 to 5 hires per round. This isn’t always apparent from our people page because new junior hires sometimes take on different job titles at the beginning of their employment or shortly thereafter.
We last hired Research Analysts in 2022, but the job duties and team placement of that role were different than the role of the same name advertised above. We last opened a Content Editor hiring round (the most similar role to this one) in 2023. From that round we made 4 hires, all of whom are on our staff today.
We don’t plan to share information about passthrough rates for each stage of the hiring process, except to say that passthrough rates generally increase with each stage.
Hi Chinwe, yes! From the JD:
We may employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis. We require that employees either work in time zones shared by the continental U.S. or, if working outside those time zones, be willing to work hours that are compatible with regular meetings scheduled around U.S. time zones.
We currently have many non-US employees, and we’re happy to bring on more.
Bruno, it was really great to meet you at EAG!! Thank you for the work you’re doing in Brazil :D
To extend your comment about lower standards for EA criticism, I thought the remainder of Venkatasubramanian’s quote was quite interesting (bolding mine):
″...Terminator, blah blah blah,’” Venkatasubramanian said. “I think it’s important to ask, what is the basis for these claims? What is the likelihood of these claims coming to pass? And how certain are we about all this?”
The EA community has written quite a bit about the basis, likelihood, and certainty of its claims about AI risk. A few minutes of Googling and reading EA content could have disabused the reporter of the notion that EA has unserious, careless opinions about long-term AI risk.
I wonder if either of these things are happening:
The reporter or the outlet or both don’t like EA, so they’re not doing basic due diligence to sense-check their bias.
The reporter could have attempted basic due diligence but mainly encountered sources that have a very negative take on EA. This seems reasonable because most easily-accessible articles about EA are negative. (Source: I just Googled “effective altruism AI” and the first result is this Wired article with a very negative take on EA and AI. There are a few top-level results from 80K and EA.org, but most of the remaining first-page results from MSM sources are skeptical or negative takes on EA.)
Either way, EA’s public image (specifically regarding AI) is not ideal. I like your suggestion about making a greater effort to visibly signal cooperativeness!
Agree with the above—fwiw I and hiring managers I work with have solicited applications and hired candidates based on seeing their personal writing here and elsewhere. That’s definitely not a sure-fire path to getting hired and you shouldn’t Goodhart it, but if you have the urge to write and are holding yourself back for any reason, I’d endorse you pushing through it. As @Mjreard notes, this sort of writing is a hard-to-fake signal of intellectual investment and productivity, and hiring managers are hungry for such signal.