I love the spirit of this post and I agree with almost everything Charles said. My only difference of opinion is that I don’t think people are taxed on gift income, so long as a giver provides under $16,000 in a year to any single individual and under $12.06MM in their lifetime. Letting participants keep the tax savings could be a polite way to compensate them for their involvement without dampening their altruistic glow.
I’d be excited by a project that explored surrogate donation from employees of these companies to multiply the impact of our giving. I expect the cap on Meta’s Giving Tuesday match will barely scratch the surface of EAs’ personal donations this year. My preliminary thoughts to scale this idea would be:
Learn the fine print of the programs. Some employers explicitly disallow donating money that is given to an employee for this purpose.
Try to form a nuanced understanding of the long term incidence of doing this. I imagine many companies would discontinue or scale back their charity benefits if it was exploited in this way.
I suspect that it would still be net good because of which charities would get bonus funding, but companies price in the fact that most employees don’t utilize donation matching & I suspect they would adjust their offering if it were used more.Focus on employees of companies with the most generous matches first. Possibly establish a fund where EAs could pool their money and funnel them through each surrogate donor to max out the donor’s gift cap.
I want to reiterate what Charles said about disassociating this from EA, and I recommend speaking to a(t least one) lawyer before making any moves. This feels like the type of ends-justifying-means action that is righteous in intent, but underhanded in public appearance.
Feel free to reply here or PM me if you’d like to flesh this out. I think it’s a great idea, thanks for sharing!
Thank you for this thoughtful comment, Tyler—I appreciate your perspective and I think it will help readers improve their decision-making.
On point 1: I suspect this is less true for entry level roles, especially those that don’t specify an advanced degree or technical skill requirement. But it’s valuable to know that this was your experience when reviewing applications, and this updates my opinion.
On point 2: I agree there are more early career EAs looking for EA jobs than entry level EA job openings at any given time, but I disagree with the conclusion that early career EAs should apply to fewer EA jobs.
It seems hard to get the same level of mentorship, relevant skills, at most “non-EA” orgs. If you’re working as e.g. an SWE for FAANG, your employer’s incentives are to invest in your professional development insofar as that increases your productivity and job satisfaction (for retention). If you’re working as e.g. a researcher for the Center for Global Development, your employer’s incentives are to invest in your professional development to maximize your lifetime impact on your & CGD’s shared mission (agnostic as to whether you achieve that impact while working at CGD or elsewhere).
You might be a great culture fit, or have a particularly relevant background that headhunters or EA orgs wouldn’t know about unless you actively apply.
Of the current entry level roles on 80k’s job board, there are a pretty diverse array of functions. I agree that applying to all 224 wouldn’t be a good use of time, but regularly checking back in and applying to promising leads seems like a good idea to me (especially keeping an eye out for jobs matching any specialized background/knowledge base you might have, like in policy, academia, development economics, ML, infectious disease, etc.)
I personally made the mistake of applying to a bunch of stuff all at once, feeling disappointed about not getting anything, and giving up until I felt motivated to apply again later. I think I should have applied consistently and internalized that the EV of an application working out (in my opinion) makes the application process worth it.
The post and this comment each have the tacit asterisk that individuals’ situations are unique, and that I’d be excited for the hypothetical average early-career reader to apply for more EA jobs/get more involved with EA projects on the margin. Some people don’t have the time/financial runway to apply for lots of jobs or volunteer for EA projects, and I hope my advice isn’t perceived as one-size-fits-all.
On point 3: Couldn’t agree more :)
I know 80k used to recommend careers in management consulting pretty strongly for skill development, and these days my read is that they’re starting to recommend more “direct work” roles right away. I’d love to learn 80k’s current view, and I would recommend that a reader weight the perspectives of the professionals (those with recruiting/hiring experience like Tyler, and those who research the EA job landscape like 80k) much stronger than my perspective when deciding what makes most sense for their personal career circumstances.