Michelle_Hutchinson
Bio
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.
Posts 53
Comments390
I do not have the spirit to throw myself into a direct work project[3]
Fwiw, GTP seems like reasonably little evidence about whether you could find a role you enjoyed that you also thought had substantial direct impact. There are so many different roles with direct impact, and setting up your own charity start up is very different from working at existing charity in a more defined role, or working in government, or for a large tech company.
Obviously, changing direction in your career is a substantial undertaking, and it's reasonable to not want to do it. But the reason shouldn't be that you hated doing GTP - there are a lot of other options out there that you might find yourself intrinsically motivated by. Seems at least worth a chat with 80k about?
[1]
- ^
Not at all biased by how very much I enjoyed working with you at GWWC/CEA :-p
One type of specialist we're pretty bottlenecked on is people who work in cybersecurity, and have a good sense of how to succed in that industry.
On advisees, we're particularly keen to speak to people later on in their careers, who can credibly join government agencies who care a lot about years of experience.
I would say that it's reasonably even on these right now, and actually what we're most bottlenecked on is hiring to our team. If you know someone who you'd appreciate getting career advice from, please encourage them to apply!
Thanks for the question! We find specialists in lots of different ways, including:
- People working at high impact orgs who we actively reach out to because we are fans of their work.
- People who applied for coaching themselves in the past
- Meeting them at conferences (we try to attend both generalist conferences like EA Global and more specialist ones like the AI Security Forum).
- People referred to us by others already in our network.
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.
This post really resonates with me, and its vision for a flourishing future for EA feels very compelling. I'm excited that you're thinking and writing about it!
Having said that, I don't know how to square that with the increased specialisation which seems like a sensible outcome of doing things at greater scale. Personally, I find engaging on the forum / going to EAGs etc pretty time/energy-intensive (though I think a large part of that is because I'm fairly introverted, and others will likely feel differently). I also think there's a lot of value in picking a hard goal and running full pelt at it. So from my point of view, I'd prefer solutions that looked more like 'create deliberate roles with this as the aim' and less like 'harangue people to take time away from their other roles'.