I’m so happy for you, Samantha! EA at its best pairs rigorous analysis with deep care for others, then having the courage to act ambitiously. You embody all three. I couldn’t be more excited to see you lead Ambitious Impact!
Huon Porteous
Karma: 163
Thanks for your questions! I run the advising team at 80,000 Hours, and I’m glad for the opportunity to clarify.
On question 1, I think there’s no definitive answer here, but this information might help you decide:
We still plan to talk to people considering work on any of our top problems (which includes animal welfare), and I believe we still have a lot of useful advice on how to pursue careers in these areas.
However, we will be applying a higher bar to applicants that aren’t primarily interested in working on AI.
The application only asks two substantive questions. It asks for the problem areas the applicant thinks are most pressing and for a sketch of career options they’re considering. I think that answering these questions is a worthwhile activity for anyone trying to plan an impactful career, regardless of whether or not they’re accepted.
That said, I know that there are costs to being rejected. I was rejected from 80k advising back when I was organising my university group! In general, I struggled a lot with rejection when I was trying to find impactful work. Some of these rejections sapped all the momentum from job searches, and I suspect slowed down my trajectory substantially. (I’d also love to plug Luisa’s excellent article on coping with career rejection!)
Ultimately, if I were in your shoes, I would encourage and support people in answering for themselves which problems they find most pressing, and what that implies about which careers they should consider.
Having answered those, and provided they’re interested in the top problems we list, the application for 80k advising will be very quick. If rejection isn’t too worrying, then they should definitely spend the 10 minutes needed to apply in my opinion
On question 3, that sounds right to me!
Thanks for all the questions! Giving the perspective for the advisor round:
The application process will vary depending on the candidate but will likely involve: A short screening call, a ~2–4 hour work test, an interview, a 2–5 day in-person (if possible) work trial, if we think it’s at least 50% likely we’d offer you the role.
As for how fast we will move through those rounds, it’s unfortunately quite hard to say! How quickly I can move it along will depend in part on what other work lands on my plate. This is my first time running a hiring round, so I don’t have personal experience. But the in the last advisor hiring round, we were able to get back to most candidates about whether they progressed to the interview or not within 3 weeks of the application closing. For applicants who make it through to the work trial stage, there might be a delay depending on how difficult it is for them to fit a work trial into their schedule.
The advisor role is very autonomous! We hire people who we trust to react to a persons individual situation with sensible recommendations, not people who can learn a script. This isn’t limitless, for example, I would expect advisors to flag if they think their colleagues would disagree with a piece of advice they are giving.
Thanks for your interest in our work!
Advising calls are entirely over zoom, so it’s all from a desk. That said, this gives advisors a lot of flexibility to design their work schedule around other constraints, such as childcare.
A typical day probably looks like spending ~1 hour preparing for calls, ~3 hours delivering calls, ~1 hour following up with previous advisees, and the remaining time working on projects for the team or on personal development. Team projects range from hiring, to identifying useful resources and opportunities to share with advisees, to streamlining our application process. Personal development often looks like learning about our top problems, or setting up systems to improve personal productivity.
I’m glad to hear you’re interested! I loved my time as an advisor, the conversations can be a lot of fun and very fulfilling!
I think of advising as a generalist position, we all talk to people interested in all sorts of careers and causes. Not having academic or professional experience in a top priority area certainly doesn’t rule you out.
That said, being familiar with the context around our top problems is important. Personally, I think I mostly picked up this context from listening to the 80,000 hours podcasts over the years, but there are lots of ways to gain this familiarity. In terms of trying to make your application strong without anything you can point to on your CV that relates to our top problems, I’d recommend making sure you’re happy with your answers on the form. Particularly question 10: “What do you think is the most promising way of helping the most people? Why does that need more attention (relative to other things)?”
Answering for myself and the advising round, I’ll try to answer questions as they come in.
As for whether an exceptional candidate might get an offer before the closing date has elapsed, I think this is basically not possible for this round. In theory, I’d be open to this, because we have quite a good sense of what the talent pool for advising looks like from previous hiring rounds. In practice, I’d want to work trial anyone before making them an offer, and there just wouldn’t be time to organise that so quickly.
To add on to Abby, I think it’s true of impactful paths in general, not just AI safety, that people often (though not always) have to spend some time building career capital without having much impact before moving across. I think spending time as a software engineer, or ML engineer before moving across to safety will both improve your chances, and give you a very solid plan B. That said, a lot of safety roles are hard to land, even with experience. As someone who hasn’t coped very well with career rejection myself, I know that can be really tough.
I was rejected from career advising when I applied! So I definitely am aware it can be costly. I won’t name names, but I also know of some other people who have gone on to have successful careers in the space who were rejected. Sometimes, this is because reviewing is hard, and we make mistakes. Sometimes, this is because the thing the applicant needs most is to just read more of 80k’s broad advice before trying to tailor it specifically to them. We’re trying to use our time as best we can and to provide support to the people who would most benefit from our advice, so if we can cast a wider net and get more of those people to apply, we want to do that. But I hope we can minimize these costs anyone experiences. I know some people benefit just from thinking through the questions in the application, and we’ve updated the application to make it less work for people. And we really encourage people not to take it as a strong negative signal if they don’t get an advising call — I’d appreciate any additional suggestions on how to convey this message!
> Is there a way that people can orient towards applying even though there is a high chance of rejection?
While it’s easier said than done, I’d try to think of applying as being mostly upside—the application is a useful exercise for career planning in and of itself, and then if we think it makes sense to have a call, you’ll get some extra advice.
My guess is that in a lot of cases, the root cause of negative feelings here is going to be something like perfectionism. I certainly felt disenchanted when I wasn’t able to make as much progress on AI as I would have liked. But I also felt disenchanted when I wasn’t able to make much progress on ethics, or being more conscientious, or being a better dancer. I think EA does some combination of attracting perfectionists, and exacerbating their tendencies. My colleagues have put together some great material on this, and other mental health issues:
Howie’s interview on having a successful career with depression and anxiety
Luisa on dealing with career rejection and imposter syndrome
That said, even if you have a healthy relationship with failure/rejection, feeling competent is really important for most people. If you’re feeling burnt out, I’d encourage you to explore more and focus on building aptitudes. When I felt AI research wasn’t for me, I explored research in other areas, community building, earning to give, and others. I also kept building my fundamental skills, like communication, analysis and organisation. I didn’t know where I would be applying these skills, but I knew that they’d be useful somewhere.
Hi Dom! I run the Career Services team at 80,000 hours. We’re also in the early stages of trying to build a product in this space! I feel very excited about the vision of scalably helping users find their comparative advantage in the impactful job landscape.
That said, when we’ve been working on these early prototypes, we’ve realised that there are a bunch of different visions for how to use AI to achieve this and we don’t have capacity to really try every option. So I’d love to see competition in the space to increase the chance that one of us finds a great product. You can see some of our beta-versions here and here. We also all have different audiences, so I can imagine that we might each end up with different products that are tailored to our own audience.