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Conor Barnes š¶
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I was surprised to read the content of the post because the title is something I strongly agree with, but the post itself isnāt really about the philosophy of moving fast and breaking things. Instead, itās a rant about the opportunity cost of spending money on long shots.
I think conversations around risk tolerance and our tolerance for mismanaged money are very important, but I think posts like this donāt do a good job of moving these conversations forward. There are good arguments to be made on both the risk-neutral and the risk-averse sides, but the effect of one side getting screamed at is likely to just raise hackles. Because these conversations are important, they should be conducted with the patience and grace appropriate to any major problem. I donāt think this sort of post is good for the forum.
Hi Nicolae,
From my perspective as the 80,000 Hours job board manager, two things explain the difference in experience between hiring managers and job applicants:
Applicants often have great credentials, but still arenāt exactly a fit for the roles, which often require high context (whether in EA or in AI safety) and a particular skillset.
āWe need more people working on these neglected issuesā doesnāt necessarily mean that orgs have the management capacity to absorb more people. You ask āDo they sometimes keep teams small because adding more people adds coordination, meetings and review overhead?ā, and I think this underweights just how tricky coordination is. Being able to scale and integrate more talent is very difficult.
More on both of these in my recent blogpost.
Iāll also note that there are lots of impactful roles outside of EA orgs (which are indeed very competitive). For example, we mostly donāt highlight EA orgs in our top career review.
Great points. I would love to see more of this too!
The claim that ābiosecurity often selects for people who already have a wealth of experience in their respective fieldsā doesnāt seem that obvious to me. Looking at the number of biosecurity roles weāve posted on the 80,000 Hours job board in 2025, broken down by experience tag, I see:
Entry-level: 32
Entry-level + Junior (1-4 yrs): 12
Junior (1-4 yrs): 69
Junior (1-4 yrs) + Mid (5-9 yrs): 31
Mid (5-9 yrs): 73
Mid (5-9 yrs) + Senior (10+ yrs): 20
Senior (10+ yrs): 40
Multiple experience levels: 10
I agree with you that there arenāt a ton of opportunities for junior people, but I think the above data indicates it isnāt because of orgs focusing more on people with more experience. This seems like an important part of your claims, though I think some of your recommendations are robustly good (specializing can be the right call, building career capital elsewhere can be the right call).
Obvious caveats apply: We arenāt perfect at finding every biosecurity opportunity on the 80,000 Hours org, what we post is shaped by our own values.
What an upgrade, especially the top nav. Nice job!
There are some great replies here from career advisorsāIām not one, but I want to mention that I got into software engineering without a university degree. Iām hesitant to recommend software engineering as the safe and well-paying career it once was, but I think learning how to code is still a great way to quickly develop useful skills without requiring a four-year degree!
@Sudhanshu Kasewa has enlisted me for this one!
I think earning to give is a really strong option and indeed the best option for many people.
Lack of supply is definitely an issue, though it can be helped by looking for impactful opportunities outside of āEA orgsā per seāI donāt know if this is your scenario, but this is often a problem. Knowing nothing about a personās situation and location, Iād prompt:
Can you look for roles in government in order to work on impactful policy?
Are there start-ups or other learning opportunities you could apply to in order to develop career capital?
Is there a niche in the world youāre suited to fill? Could you find a co-founder and start filling it?I say a bit more here.
A clarification: We would not post roles if we thought they were net harmful and were hoping that somebody would counterfactually do less harm. I think that would be too morally fraught to propose to a stranger.
Relatedly, we would not post a job where we thought that to have a positive impact, youād have to do the job badly.
We might post roles if we thought the average entrant would make the world worse, but a job board user would make the world better (due to the EA context our applicants typically have!). No cases of this come to mind immediately though. We post our jobs because we consider them promising opportunities to have a positive impact in the world, and expect job board users to do even more good than the average person.
Hi Geoffrey,
Iām curious to know which roles weāve posted which you consider to be capabilities developmentāour policy is to not post capabilities roles at the frontier companies. We do aim to post jobs that are meaningfully able to contribute to safety and arenāt just safety-washing (and our views are discussed much more in depth here). Of course, weāre not infallible, so if people see particular jobs they think are safety in name only, we always appreciate that being raised.
I strongly agree with @Bellaās comment. Iād like to add:
I encourage job-seekers to not think of EA jobs as the one way to have impact in oneās career. Almost all impactful roles are not at EA orgs. On the 80,000 Hours job board we try to find the most promising ones, but we wonāt catch everything!
Our co-worker Laura GonzĆ”lez SalmerĆ³n has a great talk on this topic.
Even if the movement is not talent-constrained, the problems weāre trying to solve are talent-constrained. The world still needs way more people working on catastrophic risks, animal welfare, and global health, whether or not there are EA organisations hiring for roles.
Earning to give remains a wonderful option.
If your strategy is to just apply to open hiring rounds, such as through job ads that are listed on the 80,000 Hours job boards, you are cutting your chances of landing a role by ~half. Itās hard to know the exact figure, but I wouldnāt be surprised if as many as 30-50% of paid roles in the movement arenāt being recruited through traditional open hiring rounds ā¦
This is my impression as well, though heavily skewed by experience level. Iād estimate that >80%+ of senior āhiresā in the movement occur without a public posting, and something like 20% of junior hires.
As an aside and as ever though, Iād encourage people to not get attached to finding a role āin the movementā as a marker of impact.
I really appreciated reading this. It captured a lot of how I feel when I think about having taken the pledge. Itās astounding. I think itās worth celebrating, and assuming the numbers add up, I think itās worth grappling with the immensity of having saved a life.
Hey Manuel,
I would not describe the job board as currently advertising all cause areas equally, but yes, the bar for jobs not related to AI safety will be higher now. As I mention in my other comment, the job board is interpreting this changed strategic focus broadly to include biosecurity, nuclear security, and even meta-EA workāwe think all of these have important roles to play in a world with a short timeline to AGI.
In terms of where weāll be raising the bar, this will mostly affect global health, animal welfare, and climate postings ā specifically in terms of the effort we put into finding roles in these areas. With global health and animal welfare, weāre lucky to have great evaluators like GiveWell and great programs like Charity Entrepreneurship to help us find promising orgs and teams. Itās easy for us to share these roles, and I remain excited to do so. However, part of our work involves sourcing for new roles and evaluating borderline roles. Much of this time will shift into more AIS-focused work.
Cause-neutral job board: Itās possible! I think that our change makes space for other boards to expand. I also think that this creates something of a trifecta, to put it very roughly: The 80k job board with our existential risk focus, Probably Good with a more global health focus, and Animal Advocacy Careers with an animal welfare focus. Itās possible that effort put into a cause-neutral board could be better put elsewhere, given that thereās already coverage split between these three.
I want to extend my sympathies to friends and organisations who feel left behind by 80kās pivot in strategy. Iāve talked to lots of people about this change in order to figure out the best way for the job board to fit into this. In one of these talks, a friend put it in a way that captures my own feelings: I hate that this is the timeline weāre in.
Iām very glad 80,000 Hours is making this change. Iām not glad that weāve entered the world where this change feels necessary.
To elaborate on the job board changes mentioned in the post:
We will continue listing non-AI-related roles, but will be raising our bar. With some cause areas, we still consider them relevant to AGI (for example: pandemic preparedness). With others, we still think the top roles could benefit from talented people with great fit, so weāll continue to post these roles.
Weāll be highlighting some roles more prominently. Even among the roles we post, we think the best roles can be much more impactful than others. Based on conversations with experts, we have some guess at which roles these are, and want to feature them a little more strongly.
Become conversational in Spanish so I can talk to my fianceĆ©ā²s family easily.
Work out ten times per month (3x/āweek with leeway)
Submit 12 short stories about transformative AI to publishers this year.
More details here. Ongoing mission: get a literary agent for my novel!
One example I can think of with regards to people āgraduatingā from philosophies is the idea that people can graduate out of arguably āadolescentā political philosophies like libertarianism and socialism. Often this looks like people realizing society is messy and that simple political philosophies donāt do a good job of capturing and addressing this.
However, I think EA as a philosophy is more robust than the above: There are opportunities to address the immense suffering in the world and to address existential risk, some of these opportunities are much more impactful than others, and itās worth looking for and then executing on these opportunities. I expect this to be true for a very long time.
In general I think effective giving is the best opportunity for most people. We often get fixated on the status of directly working on urgent problems, which I think is a huge mistake. Effective giving is a way to have a profound impact, and I donāt like to think of it as something just āfor mere mortalsāāI think thereās something really amazing about people giving a portion of their income every year to save lives and health, and I think doing so makes you as much an EA as somebody whose job itself is impactful.
Hi there, Iād like to share some updates from the last month.
Text during last update (July 5)
OpenAI is a leading AI research and product company, with teams working on alignment, policy, and security. We recommend specific positions at OpenAI that we think may be high impact. We do not necessarily recommend working at other jobs at OpenAI. You can read more about considerations around working at a leading AI company in our career review on the topic.
Text as of today:
OpenAI is a frontier AI research and product company, with teams working on alignment, policy, and security. We post specific opportunities at OpenAI that we think may be high impact. We do not necessarily recommend working at other positions at OpenAI. You can read concerns about doing harm by working at a frontier AI company in our career review on the topic. Note that there have also been concerns around OpenAIās HR practices.
The thinking behind these updates has been:We continue to get negative updates concerning OpenAI, so itās good for us to update our guidance accordingly.
While itās unclear exactly whatās going on with the NDAs (are they cancelled or are they not?), itās pretty clear that itās in the interest of users to know thereās something they should look into with regard to HR practices.
Weāve tweaked the language to āconcerns about doing harmā instead of āconsiderationsā for all three frontier labs to indicate more strongly that these are potentially negative considerations to make before applying.
We donāt go into much detail for the sake of length /ā people not glazing over themāmy guess is that the current text is the right length to have people notice it and then look into it more with our newly updated AI company article and the Washington Post link.
This is thanks to discussions within 80k and thanks to some of the comments here. While I suspect, @Raemon, that we still donāt align on important things, I nonetheless appreciate the prompt to think this through more and I believe that it has led to improvements!
I interpreted the title to mean āIs it a good idea to take an unpaid UN internship?ā, and it took a bit to realize that isnāt the point of the post. You might want to change the title to be clear about what part of the unpaid UN internship is the questionable part!
Update: Weāve changed the language in our top-level disclaimers: example. Thanks again for flagging! Weāre now thinking about how to best minimize the possibility of implying endorsement.
Hi Jian,
Good question! I agree with Probably Goodās view of the trifecta between us (and Iād also highlight Animal Advocacy Careers for their animal welfare focus!).
Iād say that the recommendation comes down to the userās focus. If the job seeker wants to find the best opportunities in light of expecting transformative AI in the coming years, the 80,000 Hours job board selects roles in light of that question, including roles for building career capital. If the job seeker is ambivalent on timelines to transformative AI, other boards will have more variety for them.
As to non-curatorial differences:
We all have different filters in light of our audiencesā needs, and in general I expect the experience to differ slightly between each board.
The team behind our advisor bot is also pushing hard to make it very useful to job seekers, and I have some exciting features planned for the end of the year that leverage 80kās capacity. So you might actually see growing variance between the boards!
Iām sorry itās frictive to recommend many boards, but I will say Iām also quite glad that we have multiple strong boards sharing excellent roles based on our different philosophies!