I work as head of the one on one team for 80,000 Hours. Previously I worked at the Global Priorities Institute, ran Giving What We Can and was a Fund Manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund.
Comments here are my own views only, not my present or past employers’, unless otherwise specified.
Wow, what an achievement! Amazing work. Enjoyed your write up of it
That’s great news! Thanks for all the work going through the investigation, and strengthening the teams has likely been.
I’m really sad to hear you feel that 80k isn’t talking to you. Fwiw, I work at 80k now and think of myself as talking to you.
It seems like an understatement to say ‘I call it earning to give’. What you’ve done over the last decade seems like solidly, clearly earning to give to me.
I wish it were easier to get away from comparative style labels, and what can feel like an incessant pressure to always be doing more for the world. To me, the ways I’m falling short compared to others are particularly salient, compared to things I’m doing that are helpful. My intuitive response to your post is that I’ve always felt like you were a more ‘real EA’ than me. But it would be nice if we could just all feel glad about our contributions.
Good point, I hadn’t appreciated that. Thanks!
Those do seem like good compromises.
I think in general people find it easier to notice criticisms of things than appreciate positives. But I think having more ‘picking out surprising positives’ is a useful way of learning, and in addition leads to a much more appreciative environment than picking out negatives.
I worry that we currently have overly high standards for writing about positives because in addition to it being kind of tricky to notice them, there are other difficulties around things like dislike of glorifying people. My guess is that we could create a happier, more collaborative community if we had slightly lower standards for appreciation / noticing the positives type discussions.
I’m really glad you found it helpful!
<3
I’m really excited that Zach will be coming on as CEO of CEA. After so many nominations and evaluations, it’s extremely gratifying to have found someone so qualified for the role. I’m grateful to the hard work everyone put into this, particularly to Max for coordinating and project managing incredibly smoothly, and for Oscar and Caitlin helping a tonne behind the scenes.
Running CEA is an enormous responsibility, and one I’m glad to be able to trust Zach with. I very much look forward to watching him take CEA into the future.
Sorry to hear you didn’t find what you were looking for in the 80,000 Hours career guide. You could consider checking out this website that maintains a list of social purpose job boards. I’d guess that going through some of those would yield some good options for full stack web-dev roles at organisations with a broad range of missions, hopefully including some inspiring ones!
Thanks for the announcement. I’m really glad to feel that EV is going to continue being in safe hands going forward (both given Rob’s extensive experience and knowing from personal experience how responsible he is).
Thank you so much for your work on EV. Taking on a hugely complex organisation at a time of such turmoil was always going to be extremely challenging. You really stepped up at a time when many of us were struggling just to continue our usual jobs. And then over the start of 2023 instead of getting a break it felt as if a series of separate things happened to keep making the role more challenging. As a staff member of one of the projects EV houses, it’s been really reassuring to know that someone with such great judgement and who is so ceaselessly dedicated was stewarding things, so that we could get on with our object level work without needing to worry much about the background entity.
From a personal standpoint, I’m even more grateful for the years we got to work together at 80,000 Hours. I’ve learned a huge amount from you in the various different roles we’ve each had. Most influentially, as my manager you did an really astounding job of helping me actually live up to my values and grow, while ensuring I always felt supported and was working sustainably. I’m very much going to miss being able to rely on your advice and support, and I hate that you’re moving to the other side of the world. I’m glad we’ll be continuing to work on the same mission, even if we won’t be next to each other to do it.
(I work at 80,000 Hours but on the 1on1 side rather than website.) Thanks for writing out your thoughts so clearly and thoroughly Nick. Thanks also for thinking about the issue from both sides—I think you’ve done a job job of capturing reasons against the changes you suggest. The main one I’d add is that having a lot more research and conversations about lots of different areas would need a very substantial increase in capacity.
I’m always sad to hear about taking away the impression that 80,000 Hours doesn’t care about helping present sentient creatures. I think the hardest thing about effective altruism to me is having to prioritise some problems over others when there are so many different sources of suffering in the world. Sometimes the thing that feels most painful to me is the readily avoidable suffering that I’m not doing anything about personally, like malaria. Sometimes it’s the suffering humans cause each other that it feels like we should be able to avoid causing each other, like cutting apart families on the US border. Sometimes it’s suffering that particularly resonates with me, like the lack of adequate health care for pregnancy complications and losses. I so much wish we were in a world where we could solve all of these, rather than needing to triage.
I’m glad that Probably Good exists to try out a different approach from us, and add capacity more generally to the space of people trying to figure out how to use their career to help the world most. You’re right that Probably Good currently has far lower reach than 80,000 Hours. But it’s far earlier in its journey than 80,000 Hours is, and is ramping up pretty swiftly.
:-p
A few things, selected somewhat randomly and somewhat for being possibly useful to others. They’re mostly marginal, but I think overall I have been able to make a noticeable change to my hard-workingness over time.
Co-working with others. In particular, working in ‘pomodoros’ where each person sets an intention for the next half hour and then reports back. Some combination of social accountability and comraderie.
Thinking through consciously how many hours I endorse working. I went through a period after having a kid where I felt both guilty for not working hard enough and for not being a good enough mother. That led me to set up my life with insufficient childcare (because it felt like more would make me a bad mother) but was then often wanting to somehow make up for that. Thinking directly about what I thought it looked like to be a good parent (and talking to people I trusted about it) led to me setting up a system I better endorsed and was more sustainable, with more childcare and more hours deliberately set aside for work.
Planning ahead and having policies for ways of making time productive.
For example, I have a personal policy of buying internet on long haul flights. In the moment it feels expensive and dubiously worth it given that it’s not that reliable. But I think it’s a significant motivator for me to continue working for at least half of a 10 hour flight, which I’m reliably happy I did. (Though I’m answering this as part of my work time on a flight, so it’s not clear it causes me to prioritise optimally ;-) ).
Other things that helped on this trip: thinking a couple of weeks in advance about who I ought to meet with while in the Bay and setting that up while people still had space in their calendar; having a battery pack with me for my phone so I could use it continuously including to hotspot; getting a data plan for while I was in the US so while I was at places where I didn’t have wifi I could still work
Using melotonin and a podcast I find soporific so that I’m more liable to fall asleep easily and don’t need to stop working as long before bedtime
Asking for help on things that are causing me to work less / less productively:
Debugging an aversive thing with a friend / colleague
Tech help eg to figure out how to listen on my phone to something I need to read/watch while travelling to use that time better.
Thank you for the prompt.
Thanks very much for all your work on EV over the years. Your contribution to my work and to me personally have been significant enough that anything in the way of ‘thanks’ feels kind of trite and inadequate, and hopefully obvious to you. But I still want to mark the change by expressing some of the gratitude I feel for the work you’ve done at EV over the years.
Amongst other things, in your role stewarding EV you co-founded all three of the orgs I’ve spent my working life at (GWWC, 80k, GPI). In my (wholly unbiased! :-p) opinion, setting those up has been tremendously valuable. You’ve also provided me with much needed coaching, support and advice over the years.
I’ve really enjoyed feeling that EV was in safe hands, knowing you were on the board. I’m crossing my fingers we get to work together again soon. I very much hope that you feel proud of everything EV has achieved over the last (more than) decade, to match the deep awe I feel when I think about what you guys built.
Thanks for writing this! It seems really useful for people getting started on their career to hear concrete experiences others have had.
I’m so impressed with your persistence in finding roles that help others as much as possible. In your place finding it difficult to get the roles I wanted, I can imagine selecting for roles I’d enjoy and would pay well, rather than continuing to look for roles that helped others like in animal advocacy. I also imagine feeling kind of bitter about my bad luck. I’m so grateful for how resiliently you’ve stuck with the project of longrun having impact, and how kindhearted rather than frustrated you’ve continued to be.
A couple of other thoughts about the ideas in the post:
One way people might think of getting short term grants is as being analogous to getting post docs in academia—doing one post doc is expected, two is fine, but after that if you’re not finding longterm positions you probably want to be considering non-academic jobs in addition to academic ones.
How good/bad it is to have a stable job vs being on a grant varies a lot by person, and by life stage. Personally, I really value stability (eg living in the same place) and prefer having a manager, but have reasonable financial stability. Some of my friends really appreciate variety and independence. Others need more financial stability than I do. It could easily be the right decision for a person never to be willing to work on a grant rather than taking a stable job, even though the grant would be a much better option for someone else.