Working in tech driven by a childhood passion and donating the majority of my income. Exploring working on compute governance in my free time.
Was seeking a community of people trying to optimize their impact and made the above decisions after engaging with EA core ideas.
I think the usual path at the start is depicted accurately. Companies try to avoid investing in many people so labour with a given skill/experience is often scarse resource. In my industry, experienced people are approached with a new opportunity (many from well-known firms in the field) each week by headhunters without even asking for it. So when you get the message that work is needed in AI, the natural reaction is “just tell me where I should apply” and the answer usually is the 80k job board or similar. There is a gap there.
So I really like the Visualising your journey figures, I think these help a lot to set appropriate expectations. (I personally spent 5-15h/w on my transition in the last two years and still waiting for the first offer which meets the bar I’ve set for myself.)
So far, I mostly felt the lack of context limiting in the early days when I was actually trying to gain more context. The reason I think was similar (opportunities like 80k advising and EAGx also exected significant context). This makes sense, but I think there’s room for improvement by being more transparent saying things like “we expect this opportunity to be most useful for (and hence prioritizing) people with basic knowledge about EA e.g. after doing the intro course” Note that I think my background (hardware) puts me in the nieche bucket so context not coming up as a limiting factor in job applications aligns with the text.
Are there existing cause-agnostic communities of donors? I’d be interested to join.
Is there a proposed/proven way of coordinating on the prioritization?
Without a good feedback loop I can imagine the majority of the people just jump on the same path which could then run into diminishing returns if there isn’t sufficient capacity.
It would be intersting to see at least the number of people at different career stages on a given path. I assume some data should be available from regular surveys. And maybe also some estimates on the capacity of different paths.
And I assume the career coaching services likely have an even more detailed picture including missing talent/skills/experience that they can utilize for more personalized advice.
I’d encourage you to consider separating your personal runway from your donations. Even if you are thinking of taking career breaks/pay cuts to invest in yourself for a higher overall impact you may even want to separate these from your personal safety-net bucket.
Otherwise I think you listed the main points. I’d only add that if you are happy to trust expert grantmakers you can donate now to normal funds (may not help with cause are prioritization though but I think you may find some expert opions on that also) or patient funds (e.g. Founders Pledge Patient Philanthropy Fund) as well and let them take care of the rest.
When I tried to look for advice on investing a few months earlier I only found a few relevant posts with detailed advice. Of those I found this one the most useful (check appendixes as well): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YjN6cGoXxPZeqCh4Z/eas-and-ea-orgs-should-move-cash-from-low-interest-to-high
You may also search for “impact investing” about minimizing bad / maximizing good of your investments. I personally felt that it does not worth the effort of going deep into this.
Great to hear there’s work in progress on this! Looking forward to it!
Also thanks for the suggestions, will try to get the most out of these!
This is really encouraging, thanks for writing it!
I filled the form and am also planning to apply for CDTF but to be honest I’m pretty uncertain about what the next steps should be in my case. Having a pure tech background (I think I qualify for #1) I find it really hard to navigate the policy space. I’m struggling with questions like which opportunities to apply for, what skills to learn/improve. I think mentoring would also be crucial for transitions like this. Is there also a programe out there to help with that? (Relevant fellowships seem to be flooded with good applicants right now).
Thanks for sharing all these details!
I’d also be interested in CLR’s view on funding and talent constraints. The post says:
This budget would allow us to hire more researchers
At the same time currently it seems there is a large interest of good candidates for at least the entry level opportunities. E.g. the 2023 summer fellowship:
We were surprised by the high number of good applications this year, meaning that competition was particularly strong.
So is talent constraint a main bottleneck right now and what are the expectations for the coming years? Also if the following rough guidline on Earning to Give on the CRS Career advice page seems appropriate:
we would recommend earning to give if you have the potential to make a lot of money (donating $200,000 per year or more, as a rough guideline)
Would also be interested how it went and if there are plans for a second round.
Thanks for clarifying, I think the arguments makes sense! The FAQ is clear on this and it’s good to see some of it’s background.
I can accept that it’s a tricky situation and the overall best way to handle it is to consider a resign.
Yes, the wellbeing argument still applies even after the paycut if you’re still substantially above the regional minimum. But if you compare it to your original wage, given that you only committed to a barely noticable sacrifice, which the paycut itself likely even surpasses signifficantly, that additional 10% might just be too big of an ask.
However if one is also just fine with earning around the lower wage and even donating from that, then I think considering something like taking the further pledge may also be an interesting idea.
I might be underthinking this but to me the 10% pledge is only about acknowledging that I earn significantly above the minimum wage in the region and hence giving up on 10% will likely not have a significant effect on my wellbeing.
Then for factoring in the tradeoffs related to direct work, a starting point I could think of so far is if funding would be available to cover them. If you think about it, you decided to take a tradeoff to pursue a direct work opportunity. You could have also just kept earning and started donating the difference to a fund. Now imagine someone else comes with a funding application to the same fund. This other project has the exact same expected returns as your direct work project. The only difference is that this other project requires funding. Assume that the amount required is the same as the difference you’d donate. You might see where this goes. The two projects are equivalent from the fund’s perspective (for each project to get done the fund is worse off by X money). This means—if I did not mess it up—you taking the tradeoff for the project is at least as good as donating the difference to the fund (assuming the fund would be happy to trade off this amount of money for the project you are doing).
So I’m not sure if taking a tradeoff like this would technically count for the pledge, but I think the result would be at least as good as donating the difference to a given fund. And so far I assumed that this is what matters.
(Note that I also had a likely not too successful attempt of writing up this idea from a different perspective)
Great to hear that there’s something in mind. Also thanks for highlighting the difficulties. I definitely wanted to use software for it but if it’s not as easy as it first sounds, then I’ll just save myself from the struggle and leave it to an experienced person.
Just re-found this piece, looking forward to reading it!
Are there plans to have an audio version? I remembered at the Avoding the Worst post there were suggestions on how to convert text to audio. If it’s not in progress/planned I might give it a try.
+1 part-timer here. I was very frustrated back then. Having learnt a lot of interesting ideas about using one’s career for social impact I felt that I do not have sufficient time to explore these ideas to the depth I wanted to. I wanted to head towards a transition but I felt that I got stuck. So earlier this year I told my employer that I’m thinking of quitting because of this (note that I’m in a furtunate position of having experience that is currently in high demand, so I could relatively easily find a job similar to my previous if needed). But they suggested that I could do part-time instead if I wanted to and I accepted their offer.
It did not just give me time to explore the research around high-impact careers but now also allows me to spend signifficant time on applications, work trials and volunteering projects for testing my fit and upskilling.
One thing that I’m still thinking about is that I was in a fortunate position of being able to afford this financially. It just does not feel right that I decided to “spend” these resorces (my time/the salary I did not earn) on this “project” without crosschecking with experts (e.g. grantmakers) that my “project” meets the bar of being an effective use of these resources. (Tried to summarize this here as my first forum post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4TiBZxD7NLsSTsHDn/career-investments-vs-giving-in-the-short-term)
I think the effect you describe makes sense, you can’t just grow a field arbitrarily fast.
But I think it might be useful to talk more about wheter we still think that trying to get into one of these very competitive programmes is currently still the best use of the talented people who are happy to use their career to do the most good.
I was wondering about the same and was quite surprised why there is no EA investment option available or at least an official step-by-step guidance on non-EA investment.
We are planning to buy a house in the not too distant future and have ~100.000€ savings.
It’s currently in an investment option offered by the local government for local citizens which pay ~1% above inflation (guaranteed). But I heard that even ~3% is realistic. I’d be happy to earn that 3% and donate the difference as well.
I’m thinking of looking into the topic myself but it would be way better if someone who’s already familiar gave some practical guidance.
Thank you for taking a look and for the suggestions! Not saying I’ve tried super hard to talk these through with an advisor but my attempts did not get much attention so far.
Completely agree that one should prioritize long-term impact. I’m just saying that in case of a temporary funding constraint, choosing not to donate may prevent other, at least equally promising candidates who are in need of funding from investing into their own careers.
Great to have a virtual event as well! I may have missed but I can’t find which timezone is the event aligned with? Thanks!
It’s definitely the “how to find a better job” thing.
Will book then, thanks!
Adding the new service of Longview here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WRGBW8DMNhRGWA9xB/longview-is-now-offering-ai-grant-recommendations-to-donors-1