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by Tristan W
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Career choiceCareer advisingCareer capitalCareer frameworkCollections and resourcesPersonal fitWorking at EA vs. non-EA orgs
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TLDR: I went through the entirety of the career choice, career advising, career framework, career capital, working at EA vs. non-EA orgs, and personal fit tags and have filtered to arrive at a list of all posts[1] relevant to figuring out the career aspect of the EA journey[2] up until now (10/25/25).

The “Career Choice” section walks through: different career frameworks (how to go about making a career), career factors (aspects specific to yourself which change what sort of career you might have), cause area advice (focusing on how one might make a career in various causes), graduate school and career advice (what studies or careers might be pathways to impact, and what working in them looks like), and community experiences (how others have made career choices and lessons learned). The “Job Search” section walks through searching, applying, and getting rejected from jobs, as well as a section on how EA recruitment works (to better understand the process), and on the EA job market (how it’s looking now and how it has changed over time).

Introduction

Behold! After trudging in the hellscape of tabs for many hours (see my atrocious window below) and trying to craft an overarching structure within which to fit all the advice, the herald post is here! I’ll answer a couple of questions quickly, and then we’ll get underway with the resources.

How did I sort the relevant posts from the others? I mostly sorted out types of posts in these tags that wouldn’t be helpful to someone undergoing the career choice/job search process (old posts announcing open positions, stuff that is tagged but doesn’t fit there, etc.)

Why do this? As someone undergoing both of these processes now, it’s hard to sort through all the noise on the forum to find these, and took me over a year to understand the differences of opinion on how to best build your career (e.g. whether to focus on aptitudes vs a cause). It’s my hope that those new to EA can skip some of that and use this post to more quickly get a bird's eye view and figure out more precisely what they want to learn about, rather than just generally read through everything tagged career choice. This post serves as a test of this framework to get useful input and refine it to be even better[3] such that once we’ve settled on something, this can hopefully be incorporated into the EA Forum tagging system so that people have a clutter free, well defined, way to navigate the EA career advice space. So it both acts as a temporary repository, and as an introduction of a framework or high level view of the space that should help people undertaking this journey.

How did I create the framework here? I first introduced a distinction between what I’ll call career career choice and job search. Career choice I take to be the sort of thing 80k specializes in: the generation of a life scale career goal or plan that looks something like deciding “I want to work on AI”. Job search occurs at the next level of specificity, the part of the process where you know where you want to go but are simply having trouble getting there (i.e. “I want to be a technical AI researcher that works somewhere like Anthropic”). From there the subsections were mostly just intuitive and developed from trying to find useful commonalities between posts.

How should you interact with this? Hell if I know! Just kidding, but I think I might highlight a strand present in some of these readings, which is: read and think, but make sure to take action fairly early on. If this is all new to you, I’d suggest maybe reading 5 or 6 of the posts that stand out here to you, if somewhat experienced in EA thought, maybe 3 or 4. Then, I would begin doing by making a plan, starting a course, talking to people or applying to jobs. Another way to think about this is that focusing on career choice is super important, but it's only one side of a coin. Job search may be more painful and less interesting, but it is what will ultimately allow you to reorient your 80,000 hours in the way that you would like.

A brief note on extensions of this and cause prioritization: My basic take is that a little bit of cause prio is great, but that generally focusing too much on this early on isn’t that useful. Even so, I did some of this early on myself to identify the areas I was most interested in, and did consider some of that quite useful, so a way to extend this work here would be to dig through the cause prioritization tag (1518 posts as of writing) and pull out the relevant posts there for someone trying to do EA career choice.

Random housekeeping notes: I generally tried to include a summary for everything, but if a summary was either not needed or hard to render quickly, I decided to forgo. “[question]” means that you probably want to read the replies, generally even more so than reading the original post. If I included a year “ex. (2015)” beside an article, it's an indication that it is at least partially dated and generally less useful. Finally, a highlight means I’ve read that article and found it insightful, such that it might be worth reading first[4].

Some advice: If I were to try to summarize what I’ve read quickly, thinking particularly of those just learning about EA and still thinking about what to do with their career, I’d say[5] “apply to lots of stuff, figuring out your career is hard and 80k nor EA is going to do it for you, focus on building aptitudes rather than working on a specific cause, probably start outside EA orgs unless you’re from an ivy or incredibly talented, and be patient (accept that this is a process that can take years to get right).” 

Finally, thank you to all of those who took the time to write these posts, your work is greatly appreciated. All that said, onto the post itself!

General Advice

  • How to have an impact when the job market is not cooperating: As an advisor, I now speak with lots of people who have indeed considered it and very much want it – they don't need persuading. What they need is help navigating a tough job market. I want to use this session to spread some messages I keep repeating in these calls and create common knowledge about the job landscape.
  • There is No EA Sorting Hat: My sense is some EAs act like/hope they will be assigned the perfect impactful career by some combination of 80,000 Hours recommendations (and similar) and ‘perceived consensus views in EA’. But, your life is full of specific factors, many impactful jobs haven’t yet been spotted by other EAs and career advice is importantly iterative. Instead of simply deferring, I recommend a combination of: Your own hard work figuring out your path to impact. // (Still) Integrating expert advice. // Support from the community, and close connections who know your context.
  • Avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career: Namely: Taking 80,000 Hours’ rankings too seriously, Not trying hard enough to fail, Feeling like you need to optimise for having the most impact now, Feeling like you need to work directly on AI immediately, Not taking a role because you think you’ll be replaceable, Constantly considering other career options, Overthinking or over-optimising career choices, Being unwilling to think things through for yourself, Ignoring conventional career wisdom, Doing community work even if you’re not suited to it.
  • Career advice the Probably Good team would give our younger selves
  • SHOW: A framework for shaping your talent for direct work: If your career as an EA has stalled, you’ll eventually break through if you do one (or more) of four things: gaining skills outside the EA community, assisting the work of more senior EAs, finding valuable projects that EAs aren’t willing to do, or finding projects that no one is doing yet.
  • Advice to a new EA org employee: Beware burnout and intertwined professional and social spheres.
  • When to get off the train to crazy town?: In this post, I want to use this metaphor to clarify a couple of problems that I often encounter regarding career choice and other moral considerations.
  • Be grateful
    • Grateful for Job Choice: When we look across all jobs globally, many of us in the EA community occupy positions that would rank in the 99.9th percentile or higher by our own preferences within jobs that we could plausibly get. Be grateful.
  • On taking breaks
    • I went on a (very) long walk, and it was a great career decision: I was hesitant to embark on this epic journey, because I was concerned about what it would do to my career. How it might stall my professional journey. How it might even make it regress. I could not have been more wrong. This post is about why taking a break from your career, to do something that doesn’t seem at all related to your career, could be great for it.
    • The Impact Case for Taking a Break from Your Non-EA Job: More professionals should consider taking a leave of absence - a paid or unpaid break from their day job. Leaves of absence provide space to reflect on life, recharge, explore EA, and evaluate high-impact career opportunities in a low-risk and intentional way. We know a few people who’ve found these breaks to be useful in their careers and think they could be useful for more people in similar situations.
  • Self-doubt

Career Choice

Resources

General

  • Summary of 80,000 Hours’ key ideas: Get good at something that lets you effectively contribute to big and neglected global problems.
  • More like 88,000 hours? In defence of “career longtermism” – a personal perspective: If I had to provide one takeaway from this post and my experiences, it would be - don’t be so hard on yourself. Some people need more time, more life experience and to make more career twists and turns (not mistakes) until they find what they want to do and/or do something more impactful. Unless you are very unfortunate, the likelihood is that you’ll have the opportunity for a long and hopefully successful career, provided you maintain some motivation to make a difference one day. You might just have to be a bit patient first.
  • How to make career decisions and have impact: Want an insider's view into what successful career exploration looks like? Want to understand why particular approaches fail? Read on!
  • For the non-elite
    • Career Advice For The Everyday Effective Altruist: There are many organizations which give career advice to effective altruists, but their advice can be intimidating for many people (80,000 Hours in particular is targeting a relatively small elite). So in this post, I will try to give some general guidance for the average person.
    • Vocational Career Guide for Effective Altruists: Hello, I’m Kyle, and I’ve written this guide to help anyone find an EA career. In particular, it is aimed at people who do not have or intend to pursue a 4-year college degree. Some people aim to pursue trade school, or work right after high school / GED. If that sounds like you, keep reading.
  • On factors relevant to career choice
    • Critique of the notion that impact follows a power-law distribution: In this essay, I argue that it is not always useful to think about social impact from an individualist standpoint. I argue that the claim that there are massive differences in impact between individual interventions, individual organisations, and individual people is complicated and possibly problematic.
    • What are you getting paid in?: You can pay people in lots of currencies. Among other things, you can pay them in quality of life, prestige, status, impact, influence, mentorship, power, autonomy, meaning, great teammates, stability and fun.
    • Flexibility and dedication: EAG Boston 2023 talk: On the tension between dedicating yourself to one project and being flexible enough to switch to another more effective opportunity if it were to come along.

Career Frameworks

By Cause Area (path) ala 80k

  • Summary of 80,000 Hours’ key ideas
  • General
    • Problem areas beyond 80,000 Hours' current priorities: But even if some issue is 'the most pressing'—in the sense of being the highest impact thing for someone to work on if they could be equally successful at anything—it might easily not be the highest impact thing for many people to work on, because people have various talents, experience, and temperaments. Moreover, the more people involved in a community, the more reason there is for them to spread out over different issues. Many of our advisors guess that it would be ideal if 5-20% of the effective altruism community's resources were focused on issues that the community hasn't historically been as involved in, such as the ones listed below. We think we're currently well below this fraction, so it's plausible some of these areas might be better for some people to go into right now than our top priority problem areas.
    • A model about the effect of total existential risk on career choice: Which existential risk cause should you focus on? The cause where you have the largest impact on decreasing total existential risk. That's not the same as working on the cause where you have the largest impact when seen in isolation. What follows is a super math heavy demonstration of this concept.
    • Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations: Roles outside explicitly EA organizations are most people’s best career options. Sometimes these roles aren’t as visible to the community, including to 80,000 Hours, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t highly impactful. Many especially impactful roles require specific skills. If none of these roles are currently a great fit for you, but one could be if you developed the right skills, it can be worth it to take substantial time to do so. You should use 80,000 Hours to figure out what your best career is and how to get there, not what “the” best careers are.
    • Monetary and social incentives in longtermist careers: In this post I talk about several strong non-epistemic incentives and issues that can influence people to pursue longtermist career paths (and specifically x-risk reduction careers and AI safety) for EA community members. I'm worried that these incentives lead people to feel (unconscious & conscious) pressure to pursue (certain) longtermist career paths even if it may not be the right choice for them.
    • What I would do if I wasn’t at ARC Evals: I list 9 projects that I would work on if I wasn’t busy working on safety standards at ARC Evals, and explain why they might be good to work on.
  • Reasoning Against
    • The case against “EA cause areas”: While cause prioritization is extremely important and should continue, having the EA movement identified with specific cause areas has negative consequences. The one I’m mostly worried about is the feeling that if I work on a cause that is not particularly prioritized by the movement (like feminism) then what I do "is not really EA", even if I use evidence and reason to find the most impactful avenues to tackle the problem they try to solve
    • Towards Better EA Career Advice (see comments also): Making thoughtful and informed career choices in order to have a more positive impact on the world is a core part of the practice of Effective Altruism. New and existing EAs are usually directed to the 80,000 Hours website for career advice, but it has a number of issues and gaps that make it poorly-suited for this purpose in many or most cases.
    • Career choice: Evaluate opportunities, not just fields: 80,000 Hours has a lot of great research on promising career fields for effective altruists. But one thing I've discovered while doing my own career planning is that the difference between opportunities in a single field seems to matter just as much as the difference between fields. Opportunity-level analysis of job prospects is a great complement to looking at field-level overviews, and I think it can significantly improve career decisions.
    • Plan Your Career on Paper: I used to expect 80,000 Hours to tell me how to have an impactful career. Recently, I've started thinking it's basically my own personal responsibility to figure it out. I think this shift has made me much happier and much more likely to have an impactful career.
    • Test fit for roles / job types / work types, not cause areas: I think rather than testing fit for particular cause areas, students should test fit for different roles / job types / work types, such as entrepreneurship / operations, policy / advocacy and a range of different types of research.

By Career Aptitudes ala Holden

  • My current impressions on career choice for longtermists: 80,000 Hours tends to emphasize "paths'' to particular roles working on particular causes; by contrast, I emphasize "aptitudes" one can build in a wide variety of roles and causes (including non-effective-altruist organizations) and then apply to a wide variety of longtermist-relevant jobs (often with options working on more than one cause). Example aptitudes include: "helping organizations achieve their objectives via good business practices," "evaluating claims against each other," "communicating already-existing ideas to not-yet-sold audiences," etc.
  • General
    • 80,000 Hours’ new series on building skills: If we were going to summarise all our advice on how to get career capital in three words, we’d say: build useful skills.
    • Career Suggestion: Earning to Skill: Something I am not hearing really at all, though it has been advocated before, is that people seek out regular industry jobs where they will grow and learn a lot. My name for this is Earning to Skill. Skills definitely matter. There's a lot you don't get from university degrees that you will learn from spending a few years in an at least moderately functional workplace with good mentorship.
    • [exercise] Reflect on Your Career Aptitudes: Holden Karnofsky's aptitudes framework has been one of my favorite ways to think about career decisions. I led a career aptitude reflection exercise targeted at students and early-career folks interested in longtermism. The goal is to make thinking about career aptitudes more interactive and get people applying the aptitudes framework to their own lives/careers and it takes about 45-60 minutes. You can access the Google Doc version or see the text below.
    • What skills would you like 1-5 EAs to develop?: You can also contribute to the EA community by developing rarer skills. There are many particular skillsets which would be very useful for a few EAs to develop. Although these skills may never turn into full-time jobs, I'd like to see people develop them because I think they could be quite useful.
  • Communicator aptitudes
  • Entrepreneurship aptitudes
    • How to increase your odds of starting a career in charity entrepreneurship: We’re often asked what you can do to increase your odds of starting a career as a charity entrepreneur. While each person’s answer will be different given their background and traits, here are the three most common things people can do: do a self-initiated project with no oversight, teach yourself and practice good decision-making, and become an expert in Effective Altruism.

  • Management aptitudes[6] 

    • How to manage up using these delegation tips: Managing up can be worth the investment if you want to demonstrate or practice your management skills but don’t have direct reports of your own, or if you’re currently not getting what you need from your own manager.

Career Factors

Cause Prioritization (incomplete)

  • Taking prioritisation within 'EA' seriously: For any given person, their best future ‘EA career paths’ are at least an order of magnitude more impactful than their median ‘EA career path’. For over 50% of self identifying effective altruists, in their current situation: Thinking more carefully about prioritisation will increase their expected impact by several times. // There will be good returns to thinking more about the details of prioritising career options for yourself, not just uncritically deferring to others or doing very high-level “cause prioritisation”.  // They overvalue personal fit and prior experience when determining what to work on.      
  • What if you’re working on the wrong cause? Preliminary thoughts on how long to spend exploring vs exploiting: If your main contribution to EA is time, how long should you spend trying to figure out the best thing to do before you switch to taking action? In this article I will show my current best guess at the answer to the question.
  • My personal cruxes for focusing on existential risks / longtermism / anything other than just video games: an exploration of what cruxes lead me to focus on existential risk, longtermism, or anything other than self-interest in the first place, and what I’d do if I became much more doubtful of each crux.
  • A guided cause prioritisation flowchart: The flowchart would ideally be accompanied by guidance assisting making informed decisions throughout the flowchart. I haven’t finalised this guidance, although present a sample for one particular decision in the flowchart. At this point I am attempting a proof of concept rather than delivering a final product, and so would welcome feedback on both the idea and the preliminary attempt.
  • Important Between-Cause Considerations: things every EA should know about: In this post I claim that, to make the best choice on preferred cause area, EAs should have at least a high-level understanding of various ‘Important Between-Cause Considerations’ (IBCs). An IBC is an idea that a significant proportion of the EA community takes seriously, and that is important to understand (at least at a high-level) in order to aid in the act of prioritising between the potentially highest value cause areas, which I classify as: extinction risk, non-extinction risk longtermist, near-term animal-focused, near-term human-focused, global priorities research and movement building. I provide illustrations of the concept of an IBC, as well as a list of potential IBCs.

Career Stage

  • College
  • Early Career
    • Maybe let the non-EA world train you: It can be really hard to get that first job out of university. If you don’t get your top picks, your less exciting backup options can still be great for having a highly impactful career. If those first few years of work experience aren’t your best pick, they will still be useful as a place where you can ‘learn how to job’, save some money, and then pivot or grow from there.
    • What's surprised me as an entry-level generalist at Open Phil & my recommendations to early career professionals
    • How to Signal Competence in Your Early-Stage Career: This post highlights alternative methods for early career professionals to demonstrate competence beyond relying solely on academic credentials. As we evaluate applications to our programs, these are the things we consider.
    • When Planning Your Career, Start Early: In my experience, many aspiring EAs don’t start career planning until fairly late in their undergraduate degree, and many don’t start until they’ve completely finished their studies. A lot of first and second year undergraduates feel like their graduation is far away and that they can worry about their career later — but I think that there are a lot of big wins people can capture early on. Additionally, these first and second year undergraduates likely don’t have many friends who are thinking about their career so early on, and so career planning may not even be on their radar (even if they are involved in EA).
    • Stop procrastinating on career planning: Rationally, I really should have applied to speak to 80000 hours 2+ years ago! If I had done this 2 years ago, I probably could have made more progress in whichever direction I'd settled on. If like me you're procrastinating on career planning, take this as a nudge to apply to 80000 hours. I've had a career planning Google Doc for a long time, but I was shocked by how much more carefully I was thinking about things when I knew that I'd be sharing the plan with someone else.
    • Lifeguards: People often ask us for advice as they consider next steps in their careers. Sometimes, we suggest ambitious things that go beyond someone’s default action space. The issue is that she assumes that someone else more qualified than her is going to do it. In EA, that’s often just not the case. It’s good to check, of course. Sometimes, there are competent teams who are taking care of things. But sometimes, there is not an imaginary team with years of experience that is coming to save us. There is just us.
    • More undergraduate or just-graduated students should consider getting jobs as research techs in academic labs: A lot of EA advice seems to presume that the reader is already a top-tier student or young professional who just needs to have their endless font of potential pointed in the right direction. This is not most people. This is not even most EAs. This is certainly not me. By the time I figured out what I wanted to be doing with my life, I had to claw and scrape and jump on whatever bus was heading vaguely in the direction I wanted to go. I wasn’t in that bad shape. I could code, kind of, and my mediocre state school had an excellent physics department. But I just didn’t look that good on paper. If you are an undergraduate or recently-graduated student and this sounds like you, and you aren’t really sure where to go next, consider working as a research assistant at a university.
    • Unsolicited Career Advice: Get technical: compete for roles with smaller pools of qualified candidates. Get experience: become one of the people who meet the unwritten bar, elsewhere. Stay elsewhere: in the context of the whole economy, there are not many EAs, and there is much left undone.
  • Middle Career
    • Challenges from Career Transitions and What To Expect From Advising: Leading over 400 advising sessions with more than 200 mid-career and senior professionals, we, at Successif, have observed some common patterns and practices that supported a majority of advisees in their transition success. This article aims to normalize the common struggles of career transitions, set realistic expectations for the journey ahead, and illuminate how a collaborative advising relationship can empower you to navigate this exciting, yet demanding, new chapter.
    • Why experienced professionals fail to land high-impact roles (FBB #5): The post argues that lack of context is one of the most important factors in experienced professionals getting rejected.
    • Mid-career people: strongly consider switching to EA work: In this post I want to provide encouragement and information for mid-career people who are sympathetic to EA ideas but haven’t seriously tried doing EA work. Basically, I think there’s tons of amazingly impactful, fun, well-compensated work that skilled mid-career people could do, and that this is maybe much less obvious from the “outside” than it is for a relative EA-insider like me.
    • Successif: helping mid-career and senior professionals have impactful careers: Successif, previously known as EA Pathfinder and created over a year ago, is an organization designed to support mid-career and senior professionals transition into high-impact work. We adopt a holistic approach focused on cause prioritization, personal fit, and aptitude building. We offer collective workshops, one-on-one mentoring, women leadership workshops, peer support groups, and match-making.
    • Helping newcomers be more objective with career choice (read comments): It seems that people often waste time when discovering EA by being too attached to career plans they had before finding EA.
    • Getting into an EA-aligned organisation mid-career: In this article, I'll share my journey of joining an effective altruism (EA) organisation in the middle of my career. I'll talk about the misconceptions I initially held, how I came to understand the fundamental ideas of EA, increased my involvement in the community, and started connecting with more experienced members. I will also share how I became more active through volunteer work and then intentionally worked towards transitioning my career to have more impact.
    • Advice I Give to People Who Don't Currently Have an EA Job and are thinking of transitioning: A collection of recommended next steps and things to do if you find yourself in this position, with lots of links.
    • You should join an EA organization with too many employees: value that is harder to capture by the market is more neglected, so actually, there's a lot of opportunities of helping more people per employee in altruistic sectors, so not doing that is an opportunity cost.
    • On feeling overqualified
      • Thoughts on being overqualified for EA positions: The most important is that it equivocates between "an analogous profit maximizing entity might not hire a senior person" and "senior people don't provide much benefit". It's basically always possible to do things faster/cheaper/with fewer errors/with a better user experience/etc.
  • Late Career
    • From Comfort Zone to Frontiers of Impact: Pursuing A Late-Career Shift to Existential Risk Reduction: This updates my March 2025 post about pursuing a late-career shift to existential risk reduction. I did it! On June 3, 2025, I became the new Operations Director for MATS. To do this, I had to step out of my comfort zone, build new relationships, and constantly seek opportunities that felt directionally correct. I persisted, was open to serendipity, and continually tested where my existing strengths could make the greatest impact.

Personal Fit

  • Personal fit is different from the thing that you already like
  • A do-gooder's safari: lays out different archetypes in a highly readable format that helps gain a bit of clarity on what archetype you most identify with (and where you might need improvement).
  • My bargain with the EA machine: I plan to make a career decision. When doing so, what will I be optimizing for? The EA answer is that I should pick the career that would allow me to have the most positive impact on the world. This will be part of my calculation, but it won’t be everything. I intrinsically value enjoying my life and career – not just as a means to the end of generating impact, but for its own sake.
  • Comparative advantage does not mean doing the thing you're best at: Are you the best in the world at a specific task, such as optimising your company's database? This still might not be the highest impact thing for you to do because sometimes the world needs a 40th percentile graphic designer at an EA organisation more than a 99.999th percentile obscure-proprietary-database-optimizer at some other organisation.
  • Comparative advantage in the talent market:  EAs should prioritise personal fit for deciding what to work on, even if this means working in a cause area that they don’t consider a top priority. Finally, I’ll consider some common objections to this.
  • Be Specific About Your Career: It doesn't matter whether meta-EA is better than biosecurity research in general; what matters is whether biosecurity research is better than meta-EA for Alice. An analysis of Alice's individual impact screens off any analysis of average impact. I often see people think about their careers from the perspective of abstract cause prioritization. Besides such broad analysis, they should construct specific narratives linking potential career paths to impact.

Location

  • Advice
    • EA career guide for people from LMICs: Individuals from Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) engaging with EA often find that existing EA career advice does not address various frequently arising questions and challenges. This post attempts to address that gap by sharing the tentative outcomes of discussions between the authors (who are all from LMICs) on the pros and cons for various career paths.
  • Considerations
    • Moving to a hub, getting older, and heading home: This post is about something I haven’t seen discussed on the EA forum but I often talk about with my friends in their mid 30s. It’s about something I wish I'd understood better ten years ago: if you are ~25 and debating whether to move to an EA Hub, you are probably underestimating how much the calculus will change when you’re ~35, largely related to having kids and aging parents.

Working Outside vs. Inside EA

  • Why outside
    • We need EA people working for non-EA orgs: This forum—and the EA community surrounding it—is a bit of an echo chamber. We need people who care about EA values in the rest of the world for several reasons: influence and evangelism, cross-pollination, reality checks, and pragmatism.
    • The career and the community: for the first few years of their careers, and potentially longer, most effective altruists should focus on building career capital (which isn’t just 'skills’!) rather than doing good or working at EA organisations. However, there are social dynamics which push new grads towards working at EA orgs, which we should identify and counteract. Note that there are a lot of unsubstantiated claims in this post, and so I’d be grateful for pushback on anything I’m incorrect about (throughout the post I’ve highlighted assumptions which do a lot of work but which I haven’t thoroughly justified).
    • The availability bias in job hunting:  EA talent is currently suboptimally allocated, resulting in lower impact for the movement due to availability bias around certain jobs.
    • EA is a Career Endpoint: The movement doesn't have to invest in training neophytes into the highly capable people it needs. Instead, the neophytes can go make a difference in the world beyond EA, then return to the movement ready to make a big EA impact with the skills and resources they've gained along the way.
    • More EAs should consider “non-EA” jobs: I argue that working in certain non-neglected fields is undervalued as a career option for EA-aligned individuals and that working at EA-organizations is potentially overvalued. I argue that by bringing an EA-perspective to non-EA spaces, EA-aligned folks can potentially have a substantial impact.
    • Consider a wider range of jobs, paths and problems if you want to improve the long-term future: My impression is that many people whose top career goal is 'improve the long-term future of humanity' are overly focused on working at a handful of explicitly EA/longtermist/AI-related organizations. There are additional problems, additional careers and additional jobs to be focused on, mentioned in this article.
    • High absorbency career paths: Some career paths may be highly impactful but are limited in the number of positions available before they reach saturation. Other career paths have a far greater capacity for involving more people. This factor could be considered the “scale” of the career path, or to use a less commonly used phrase in EA, it could be considered to have high absorbency. I think the importance of a career path’s absorbency has been undervalued in the EA movement thus far. Career choice is often framed from an individual viewpoint, but when the needs of the broader movement are considered, you sometimes end up with a different perspective.
    • Recap - why do some organisations say their recent hires are worth so much? (Link): [from link] Nonetheless, for other reasons, I do think (i) some of the organizations in the survey have a lot of impact and (ii) there are large differences in productivity between hires, such that some staff have a very high value-add. This means that at least some positions at these organizations are likely to have a very large impact. This would suggest that, if these jobs are among your shortlist, it’s valuable to find out if you might be able to end up as one of these high value-add staff. However, it’s important to do this while bearing in mind that the highest impact positions are not all in these organizations. It’s also important to keep in mind that the base rate for any application being accepted is under 10% – sometimes well under, with only 20 to 40 positions opening a year. This means that even someone who has promising fit can’t be confident of landing a position. In the same way that no-one looking for their first consulting job would plan their career around working at one specific firm, no-one should plan their career around getting a job at these 20 or so organizations, which between them have fewer job openings than a large consulting firm.
    • Paths to Impact for EA Working Professionals: The EA movement needs several career paths which can absorb a large number of people that have clear paths to impact and are highly regarded by the community. We also believe that having support for those career paths can lead to EA having a bigger tent and generally allowing healthier community norms. The goal of this post is to provide some inspiration to people in the private sector on possible ways to make a difference and support them on their journey to maximize their impact.
    • (Incorrectly) Overemphasizing Effective Careers: Effective careers are great, but making them the only "real" way to be an Effective Altruist should be strongly rejected. The mistaken analysis goes as follows; if we are balancing priorities, and take a consequentialist view, we should prioritize our decisions on the basis of overall impact. However, effective altruism has shown that different interventions differ in their impact by orders of magnitude. Therefore, if we give any non-trivial weight to improving the world, then it is such a large impact, it will overbalance other considerations. I think that many people who are new to EA, and those who are very excited about it don't pay enough attention to their own needs and priorities for their careers. Having a normal job and giving 10% of your income is a great choice for many Effective Altruists. Having a job at an effective organization is a great choice for many other Effective Altruists.
    • The case for not pursuing a career in an EA organization: I think the focus on having an EA career (employment in EA, founding something EA) might be the wrong advice for most people. I think the other two major options are earning to give, which is no longer prioritized, and raising awareness. So, simplifying, it comes down to having an EA career or convincing others to have it. I think we have much better options that are practical and don’t require you to change pathways. I think having 1% of humanity lightly engaged in EA-related activities is more valuable than having 0,0001% deeply engaged.
    • EAs working at non-EA organizations: What do you do?: There has been discussion recently (sparked by Denise Melchin, here) that EAs might not recognize the kinds of impactful opportunities at non-EA organizations. I think one contributing factor is that it's easier to see how you'd have an impact at a "mainstream EA organization" than at a non-EA organization. As a result, I think it could be useful to hear some examples of EAs who decided to work at/for non-EA organizations.
    • Getting People Excited About More EA Careers: A New Community Building Challenge (read comments): The discussion around the current EA org hiring landscape has highlighted that some people may disproportionately favor working at explicit EA organizations over other EA careers. Strengthening ‘core’ community building within professional groups and finding new signals to quickly demonstrate EA commitment and understanding may help to make a larger variety of careers exciting to committed EAs and thus reduce the effect.
    • Keeping everyone motivated: a case for effective careers outside of the highest impact EA organizations: More people should consider two alternative pathways for effective impact (that compliment each other well): running local groups to keep people value aligned in the long term and skilling up in their own respective fields to help move them in an EA direction."
  • Why inside
    • Working at EA organizations series: Why work at an EA organization?: Three main reasons. People tend to underestimate how much career capital work at EA organizations brings you. Jobs are high in exploration value and skill-building. The replaceability argument may be overstated.
    • EA jobs provide scarce non-monetary goods
    • What it’s like
      • A subjective account of what it's like to join an EA-aligned org without previous EA knowledge: We (Healthier Hens (HH), a CE-incubated EA-aligned animal welfare charity) have hired a mid-career Country Manager for our operation in Kenya. He had no previous EA knowledge or experience. We asked him 15 questions about his experience entering the EA world, learning about the key concepts and the community in general. This post is an overview of his subjective experiences including overarching themes such as what seemed common and different. Some of the benefits felt upon entering EA and his perspective on EA awareness and community. Finally, we reflect on the above from the organisation’s standpoint.
  • Other relevant factors

Other Factors

  • Career capital
  • Coordination
  • Parenting
    • My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career: An example of a working parent who also thinks a lot about 80,000 Hours’ advice and discussion of some of the ways having kids is likely to affect the impact you have in your career, for people who want to consider that when deciding whether to have kids.
  • Timing
    • Does most of your impact come from what you do soon?: Over the last couple months I’ve noticed myself flipping back and forth between two mindsets: “I should try to be useful soon” and “I should build skills so that I am more useful in 5+ years.” I’ve compiled arguments for each view in this post. Note that a lot of this is specific to undergrads who want to reduce AI risk.
    • Crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations: Should you try to influence “current” events that affect the future “directly”? E.g., improve the chances that, if AGI is developed in the next decade, that transition goes well. Or should you try to build your ability to do “direct work” later in your life? E.g., gain networks and skills that position you for reducing risks from AGI development decades from now Or should you try to “punt to the future”? E.g., engage in movement-building or abstract strategic research. This post will overview the crucial questions that we (Convergence) believe do or should influence different longtermists’ views and choices regarding the best timing of work and donations.

Cause Area Advice

Animal Welfare

AI

Biosecurity

Community Building        

Earning to Give

  • Your Sacrifice Portfolio Is Probably Terrible: Arguing that, for many, direct work is unlikely to be the path that makes the most sense when all factors are taken into account.      
  • E2G help available: If you’re interested in having a meaningful EA career but your experience doesn’t match the types of jobs that the typical white collar, intellectual EA community leans towards, then you’re just like me. I have been earning to give as a nuclear power plant operator in Southern Maryland for the past few years, and I think it’s a great opportunity for other EA’s who want to make a difference but don’t have a PhD in philosophy or public policy.
  • Could this be an unusually good time to Earn To Give?
  • 10 years of Earning to Give: A couple of peers interned at Giving What We Can. At the same time, I did my own internship in finance, and my estimate of my earning potential quadrupled. One year after that, I graduated and took the Giving What We Can pledge myself. While my pledge form read that I had committed to donate 20% of my income, my goal was to hit far higher percentages. How did that go?
  • Earn To Give $1M/year or Work Directly?: Many people aren’t sure if it would be more impactful for them to earn to give or to work at an EA aligned org. I suggest a solution to solve this problem quickly: Ask the org you are applying to.
  • Earning to give may be the best option for patient EAs: The upshot of this is that ETG may well be the highest impact thing for many EAs to do, conditional on them finding one or more of the arguments for patient altruism compelling and having personal fit for ETG
  • Bringing back earning to give: ETG is underemphasized as a career path due to three factors: Entrepreneurship requires significant risk appetite and overcoming of inertia; It’s a fairly lonely path with looser bonds to the rest of community; and There’s no clear roadmap on how to acquire enough the requisite skills and professional networks required to substantially increase odds of success. Solutions are discussed.
  • Finance Careers for Earning to Give: Many altruists are interested in earning to give, but don’t know where to start. Finance is an attractive option, and with good reason. It offers very high expected earnings, opportunities to use a wide variety of skillsets, and a wide range of career possibilities with different combinations of competitiveness, demandingness and compensation. Finance can be a good fit for someone who is good at analytical thinking, works well with other people, and willing to work hard in a serious environment.
  • Should Earners-to-Give Work at Startups Instead of Big Companies?: Effective altruist earners-to-give might be able to donate more money if, instead of working at big companies for high salaries, they work at startups and get paid in equity. Startups are riskier than big companies, but EAs care less about risk than most people. Working at a startup is easier than starting one. It doesn't pay as well, but based on my research, it looks like EA startup employees can earn more than big company employees in expectation.
  • Entrepreneurship ETG Might Be Better Than 80k Thought: In 2014, Ryan Carey estimated that YCombinator-backed startup founders averaged $2.5M/year. I repeat his analysis, and find that this number is now substantially higher: $3.8-9.9M/year. These numbers seem fairly high, and may indicate that earning to give through entrepreneurship is a good path for those who have solid personal fit.
  • [Unendorsed] — An update in favor of trying to make tens of billions of dollars: Since this post was written, it has come out that SBF has committed large-scale fraud, though the details are still unclear. In the process, he's also lost the large majority of his net worth. Original key points: Sam Bankman-Fried was able to make over $20 billion in just 4 years. By staying in quant trading, he’d have made several orders of magnitude less money over that period. Presumably, (way?) fewer than 100 EAs tried something similar. If that’s our base rate, then maybe more EAs should try to found multi-billion dollar companies.

GCR Reduction

  • Common Points of Advice for Students and Early-Career Professionals Interested in Global Catastrophic Risk: GCRI runs a recurring advising and collaboration program in which we connect with people at all career points who are interested in getting more involved in global catastrophic risk.The post covers the following themes: Seek a mix of advice; There are many paths to success in global catastrophic risk; Get the right balance between specialization and generalization; Work across the divide between (A) humanities-social science-policy and (B) engineering-natural science; Know your allies; Some graduate school options; Some fellowship programs; Advice for graduate students; Professional networking and etiquette

Global Health

Meta EA

Nuclear

  • Nuclear weapons safety and security - Career review: Nuclear weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity. Reducing the risk means getting nuclear countries to improve their actions and preventing proliferation to non-nuclear countries. We’d guess that the highest impact approaches here involve working in government (especially the US government), researching key questions, or working in communications to advocate for changes.

Graduate School Advice

Specific Career Advice

Projects

Charities

Communications

Consulting

  • Resources
  • Maximizing impact during consulting: building career capital, direct work and more: In this article we describe several ways in which you can optimize your consulting career both for immediate impact and for building career capital to have more impact in the future. We are comparing possible options within consulting once you are already in the field, rather than arguing that any of these are the most impactful things you could be doing out of all possible options.
  • EA needs consultancies: EA organizations like Open Phil and CEA could do a lot more if we had access to more analysis and more talent, but for several reasons we can't bring on enough new staff to meet these needs ourselves, e.g. because our needs change over time, so we can't make a commitment that there's much future work of a particular sort to be done within our organizations. Consultancies are one solution.
  • Management Consulting
    • Considerations and advice on entering management consulting: In this article, we will cover the key considerations when thinking about entering the management consulting career path if you’re trying to maximize the social impact you have in your career. We also outline the steps needed to enter the consulting field and provide some practical advice.
    • Exit opportunities after management consulting:  As a management consultant, you will likely have acquired a broad range of skills that are useful in different sectors and roles. Consulting can provide some great exit opportunities, so it’s important to consider how to leverage your career capital to have more impact when you leave.

Grantmaking

Managing

Operations

Policy

Research 

Startups

Other Careers

Community Experiences

Job Search

The Application

The Rejection

  • Rejected from all the “EA” Jobs you applied for? - What to do now?: Hi, have you been rejected from all the 80K listed EA jobs you’ve applied for? It sucks, right? Welcome to the club. What might be comforting is that you (and I) are not alone. EA Job listings are extremely competitive, and in the classic EA career path, you just get rejected over and over.
  • The Application is not the Applicant
  • If you're unhappy, consider leaving
  • Celebrating rejection: The basic idea is to create a system to log, share, and celebrate rejections with a relatively small group of people.The piece unpacks why rejection is so tough, illustrates how this system came to be, and what about it helps people effectively manage rejection.
  • Rejection thread: stories and tips: Getting rejected from jobs can be crushing — but learning how to deal with rejection productively is an incredibly valuable skill. And hearing others' rejection stories can make us feel less alone and judged, and generally help us orient toward rejection in more productive ways.
  • Recovering from Rejection: A story about how I reacted poorly to my first few EA job rejections, and what I learned from reflecting on my mistakes.
  • The Cost of Rejection: Rejection hurts. Specifically, rejection from a job that's considered high impact (which, for many, implicitly includes all jobs with EA organizations) hurts a lot. And I think that hurt has a negative impact that goes beyond the suffering involved.
  • Benefits of being rejected from CEA’s Online team: People who have been rejected from the CEA Online team have gotten concrete job opportunities that they would not have gotten if they had never applied and if you're rejected, I can also give you advice and connect you to other opportunities.
  • Experiences
    • Advice on job rejection / grief that follows: What advice do you have for navigating these moments — when you gave your all, came so close, and still fell short?
    • Dispatches from the job hunt: I’ve been actively searching since January, having left my last role at Sentience Politics (Swiss animal advocacy org, funded by EA Animal Welfare Fund et al) in April.

How EA Recruitment Works

The EA Job Market

  • Is EA still 'talent-constrained'?: Since January I’ve applied to ~25 EA-aligned roles. Every listing attracted hundreds of candidates (one passed 1,200). It seems we already have a very deep bench of motivated, values-aligned people, yet orgs still run long, resource-heavy hiring rounds.
  • After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation: In the past 12 months, I applied for 20 positions in the EA community. I didn’t get any offer. At the end of this post, I list all those positions, and how much time I spent in the application process. Before that, I write about why I think more posts like this could be useful.
  • Is it still hard to get a job in EA? Insights from CEA’s recruitment data: How hard is it to get a job in an EA-aligned organisation? CEA can contribute to this conversation by sharing some insights from our recruitment data. In this post we look at the recruitment process for 12 vacancies, which were recruited for between January 2021 and April 2022. The 12 roles were recruited for in two categories: CEA Core roles, which represent the main rounds, and Expressions of Interest (EOIs), which we were open to hiring but not actively focused on. In brief, there was a 1.85% hiring rate (average of 54 applicants to each job) and roughly 2 hours of time investment beyond the initial screen on average.
  • EA is vetting-constrained: So scale up the vetting! Then fund more orgs! And all of those amazingly competent people will eventually find a job in one of them, and who knows, net utility of EA might end up orders of magnitude larger.
  • Dealing with Network Constraints (My Model of EA Careers): My impression is that EA is talent constrained, management constrained, and mentorship constrained. Overall: network constrained.
  • “EA” doesn’t have a talent gap. Different causes have different gaps.: There’s been a lot of discussion and disagreement over whether EA has a talent or a money gap and the reason for the misunderstanding is that we have been referring to the entire EA movement instead of breaking it down by cause area. In this blog post I do so.
  • EA Organizations Hiring Frustration: I have found it very difficult to land a career in EA -- and I have a couple hypotheses why (saturated market, and elitist hiring).
  • Identifying Talent without Credentialing In EA: In this article, I explain the concerns with existing credentialing systems and try to speculate on which idiosyncrasies of EA would enable us to avoid them.
  • What's wrong with the EA-aligned research pipeline?; This post briefly highlights some things that I (and I think many others) have observed or believe, which I think collectively demonstrate that the current processes by which new EA-aligned research and researchers are “produced” are at least somewhat insufficient, inefficient, and prone to error.
  • Cross-post: Think twice before talking about ‘talent gaps’ – clarifying nine misconceptions, by 80,000 Hours: After pushing the idea of ‘talent gaps’ in 2015, we’ve noticed increasing confusion about the term. This is partly our fault. So, here’s a quick list of common misconceptions about talent gaps and how they can be fixed. This is all pretty rough and we’re still refining our own views, but we hope this might start to clarify this issue, while we work on better explaining the idea in our key content.
  • A Framework for Thinking about the EA Labor Market: Since 2015, the EA community has increasingly discussed talent constraints. I argue that standard frameworks like labor supply and demand models can provide considerable insight into why EA organizations and the broader EA community experience shortages (and surpluses) of various skills and how to resolve these imbalances.
  • Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people: In the rest of this post, I make some rough guesses at total committed funds compared to the number of interested people, to see how the balance of funding vs. talent might have changed over time. This will also serve as an update on whether effective altruism is growing – with a focus on what I think are the two most important metrics: the stock of total committed funds, and of committed people.
  • Many EA orgs say they place a lot of financial value on their previous hire. What does that mean, if anything? And why aren't they hiring faster?: These factors mean that existing staff are very valuable, but the expected returns of hiring new staff may not be high - and in particular, may not beat the returns of other activities.
  • The career coordination problem: If we keep recommending pursuing careers that alleviate current bottlenecks for too long after they've been identified, then when the bottlenecks are finally alleviated there will be a flood of talented people coming after, crowding over the same limited jobs.
  • "The job interview process is borderline predatory": The strenuous, drawn out, and impersonal interview process described in this article is exactly what I have experience attempting to apply to EA jobs. Dozens of interviews and countless trials over weeks and weeks of not hearing back or knowing what is next
  1. ^

     This is making use of Cunningham's Law, because I’m sure I missed some and did cut some due to space, but I also reasonably I think I can say I’ve captured over 95% from those posts within the tags

  2. ^

     I want to mention straight out the gate that though much of this specifically pertains to EA direct work jobs, a lot also applies to those seeking to apply the EA framework to jobs elsewhere, and the Job Search section in particular involves more general advice that anyone job searching can find value in.

  3. ^

     So comments and suggestions are even more welcome for this post than usual.

  4. ^

     I did not read all of the posts, nor did I highlight all of the posts I read and liked. I mostly just did this when I remembered and had time, so take it as a good signal for those highlighted, but as not representing much for those that aren’t highlighted.

  5. ^

     If you’d like to consult me as your EA forum career advice oracle, feel free to book a time to chat.

  6. ^

     Not mentioned in the original post by Holden, but seems to be a skillset in need in the community.

  7. ^

     Interestingly, I think we came up with the name “career factors” entirely separately, which is pretty cool. But another way to expand this document would be to import more of Vaidehi’s factors into the structure of this doc.

    8. Show all footnotes

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