New releases - Page 26 of 46 - 80,000 Hours

Help build our career guide as a freelance web engineer

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published February 24th, 2016

We’d like to hire a freelance web engineer to work 2-3 days per week developing our career guide for the next six months.

The role will be similar to the product engineer position we advertised in the fall, except freelance and for six months.

In the next few months, you’d work on: (i) adding features to the career quiz and testing them (ii) restructuring the site around a new package of intro materials (iii) testing ways to boost our key conversions. You’d also play the role of lead developer, and act as the point person for any technical issues in the team.

The ideal candidate would have one year web development experience, and an eye for design. The site is built in WordPress, though we use angular JS for the front-end of the quiz.

For more info, contact direct.ben at 80000hours.org.

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New career review: web designer

Blog post by Roman Duda · Published February 23rd, 2016

What is the best career for someone whose main strengths are in visual design?

To start figuring that out we’ve released a new career review on web design.

Here’s a quick summary:

Pros

Web designers can work on a broad range of high impact projects because they are in-demand across many types of organisations, including charities, governments and startups.
As a backup, web designers can enter paths with good pay, like UX design ($80,000 median salary), and earn to give.

Cons

Good design is hard to measure, which makes it hard to prove your abilities to potential employers, meaning entry and progression can be difficult.

Who should do it?

You should consider web design if you studied graphic design or a related field; you’ve already spent several years developing web-design skills; and you are persuasive enable you to get a foot in the door when you’re starting out.
However if you have the technical skills to do web development, we recommend you do that instead, since it wins over web design on most dimensions (salary, number of jobs, job growth rate, quality of work is easier to measure).

Read the full review.

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Design

What the literature says about the earnings of entrepreneurs

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published February 19th, 2016

This piece is part of our series on high impact entrepreneurship. Sign up to our newsletter and we’ll email you with the rest of the series.

Summary

Until recently, academics lumped ‘entrepreneurs’ together with all the ‘self-employed’. A new paper, however, split the self-employed into those who owned incorporated businesses and those who don’t. (Though note that the incorporated self-employed are still very different from startup founders.)
Self-employed people who own incorporated businesses earn about 50% more than people with regular jobs.
Most of this is due to them being more educated and working harder. However, even if you correct for these factors, it seems like shifting into owning an incorporated business boosts income by about 18%.
The unincorporated self-employed (mostly running things like hairdressers, restaurants, corner shops etc.) earn less than salaried workers on average.
Once you try to compare like-for-like workers, you find that when people switch into unincorporated self-employment, 50% earn less than they would as a salaried worker (but gain more freedom), and 30% earn more. The overall average is about the same.

Introduction

It’s widely believed that entrepreneurs earn more than salaried workers. However, until recently the research did not seem to back this up. In fact, the findings of several studies in 1989 presented a puzzle: entrepreneurs appeared to earn less than their salaried counterparts.

In his 2013 book The Founder’s Dilemmas,

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Use our tool to decide whether you’re on the right career path

Blog post by Roman Duda · Published February 18th, 2016

You know how you should review your career at least once a year to make sure that you’re on the right path and set goals for the coming year?

You did that already, right?

Oh, no?

Well, in that case we’ve created a tool to make it quick and easy. Just answer the questions, and we’ll email you your answers when you’re done. There are only six key questions:

Do your annual career review

Once you’re done and have decided what steps to take, you can relax about your career trajectory for another 12 months!

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Is nursing or headhunting the best career for you?

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published February 17th, 2016

Read our full review of nursing.
Read our full review of executive search.

One of the most frequent criticisms of our career recommender is that it usually recommends highly competitive options that are beyond the reach of most people. Furthermore, it disproportionately recommends careers for people with strong mathematical skills.

To begin to address this we have written two shallow career reviews of options that are both less competitive and less quantitative – nursing and executive search (also known as headhunting). Both are primarily ‘earning to give‘ careers.

Try our career recommender to get personalised career ideas.

Join our newsletter for regular updates about all our new career reviews.

What were the bottom lines?

is quite well paid in some countries, with a low risk of unemployment
provides a launching pad for a career in medical management
is satisfying work for most nurses, with flexibility around hours, though nurse ‘burn out’ at unusually high rates
offers the opportunity to study advanced nursing degrees which are even better paid.

On the other hand,

we expect more nurses in the developed world will improve health outcomes only a small amount
we are cautious about recommending a nursing degree to high-school leavers because it won’t be much use to them if they decide not to become nurses –

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Medicine

How important is finding a career that matches your strengths?

Blog post by Roman Duda · Published February 17th, 2016

One of the most common ideas in career advice is that finding a good career is a matter of finding the role that uniquely matches who you are. You’ll be fantastic at the career that best matches you, and terrible at other careers, so the mission should be to find the career that’s the best match.

We haven’t found much support for this idea so far. The most in-depth attempt to study “match” is Holland-types, but several meta-analyses have found no or only a very weak relationship between Holland-type match and performance (or job satisfaction). On the other hand, we’ve encountered some important general predictors of success. For instance, hundreds of studies have found that the smarter you are, the more likely you are to succeed in almost every career. With a general predictor like intelligence, more is always better – it’s not that it means you’ll do well in some jobs but worse in others depending on your “match”.

However, a new line of research into “strengths” might shift the picture. There have been two attempts – the Virtues in Action (VIA) Signature Strengths test and Strengths Finder – to determine people’s character strengths, and study the importance of leading a career in line with them.

We did a review of the literature to see whether we should incorporate them into our advice, which we summarise below. We found that strengths don’t seem especially useful for choosing a career in the first place;

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Doing good through for-profits: Wave and financial tech

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published February 15th, 2016

Get the rest of our series on doing good through start-ups by signing up to our newsletter.

Wave is one of the most high potential social impact for-profit startups we’re aware of, and it was co-founded by someone in our effective altruism community – Lincoln Quirk. Wave allows immigrants to send money from North America to relatives in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia with much lower fees than if they used Western Union or MoneyGram. (Though Wave existing is nothing to do with 80,000 Hours, someone we recently coached chose to work for Wave and help them expand into the UK.)

Why is Wave such an important company? Previously, if immigrants wanted to send remittances, they had to use Western Union or MoneyGram. Both the sender and receiver would have to go to a physical outlet to make the transfer, and worst of all, the sender would have to pay 10% in transfer costs! Lincoln Quirk and his cofounder Drew Durbin have built software that allows instant transfers from a mobile phone in the US or Canada to a mobile phone in Eastern Africa or Ethiopia – and they only charge 3%, a saving of 7%.

For each dollar of revenue that they make, they are saving $2.33 for someone in the world’s poorest countries. Assuming a 20% profit margin, the figure is $12 in savings for each $1 of profit.

The potential positive impact of this idea is huge.

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Rule-breaking in children predicts future success

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published February 11th, 2016

A paper was recently released looking into which personality factors in childhood predict success in education and work. The study followed participants over a 40 year period and attempted to control for intelligence and socioeconomic background. Much of it is exactly what you would expect. But here are some quotes that are more surprising (emphases ours). Note of course that the result has not yet been replicated:

In general, we found significant relations for childhood IQ and SES [socioeconomic status] with educational attainment that is in line with the sociological and psychological models (see Blau & Duncan, 1967; Eccles, 2005). As there is much previous research on the validity of these predictors for educational success (e.g., Gottfredson, 2002; Gustafsson & Undheim, 1996; Kuncel et al., 2004), we will focus our discussion on student characteristics and behaviors.

Educational attainment was best predicted by defiance of parental authority, [lack of] sense of inferiority, and teacher-rated studiousness. The effects were still significant after including IQ and parental SES as predictors.
…
First, students with high rule breaking and defiance of parental authority might be more competitive in the school context and more visible in interactions in the classroom. This might lead to at least higher oral grades compared with students with lower levels of rule breaking and defiance and to more demanding and encouraging teacher behavior. Rosenbaum (2001) demonstrated that teachers used not only the students’ cognitive abilities to determine grades but also students’ noncognitive behaviors.

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Personal fit

We can learn a lot from Tara, who left pharmacy to work in effective altruism

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published February 10th, 2016

Tara saved lives working as a pharmacist in Bhutan – no really we checked, and she totally did – but she nevertheless left to try to find something better.

This is part of our series of profiles of people who changed their career in a major way in order to have more impact because of their exposure to 80,000 Hours.

Today Tara Mac Aulay is the head of operations in the Centre for Effective Altruism. But just two years ago she was working as a pharmacist. How and why did she make this transition? Her career path is sufficiently fascinating it’s worth telling the story form the start.

Tara was extremely conscientious and hard-working from a very young age. As a result she was able to finish high school and start studying at university at the young age of 16, rather than the usual 18 or 19. She managed to do this while at the same time i) redesigning the staff and inventory management for an Australian restaurant chain, then, because this saved them so much money, being promoted to a more senior role to ii) travel around the country to make major changes to failing stores to save them from closure. As a teenager! Needless to say, this entrepreneurialism and ambition allowed her to develop a wide range of professional skills at a young age.

At the age of 15 she applied to study pharmacy,

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Plan change story: interview with Dillon Bowen, founder of Effective Altruism group at Tufts University

Blog post by Roman Duda · Published February 8th, 2016

I recently interviewed Dillon Bowen, who runs the EA student group at Tufts University, about how his career plans changed as a result of interacting with 80,000 Hours. Dillon’s original plan was to do a Philosophy PhD and then go into philosophy academia. After going to a talk at Tufts by our co-founder Will MacAskill and receiving career coaching from 80,000 Hours, he started taking classes in economics, now intends to do an Economics PhD instead.

More details of the key points from the interview are below.

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The value of coordination

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published February 8th, 2016

This article is now superceded by a more in-depth piece.

This post is intended for people who are already familiar with our key content. If you’re new, read the basics first.

In assessing your positive impact on the world, you need to look at the additional good you do after taking into account what would have happened if you hadn’t acted. But how can you evaluate this?

One way is the “single player approach” – consider what would happen if you act and what would happen if you don’t act, holding everyone else constant, and then look at the difference between the two scenarios.

This approach worked pretty well in the early days of effective altruism, but it starts to break down once you’re part of a community of thousands of people who will change their behaviour depending on what you do.

When you’re part of a community, the counterfactuals become more complex, and doing the most good becomes much more of a coordination problem – it’s a multiplayer rather than a single player game.

In this post, I’ll list five situations where this insight can help us to become even more effective, and I’ll suggest new rules of thumb that I think might be the best guide in a multiplayer world. This is a complex topic, so the answers I give are still tentative.

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10 steps to a job in politics

Blog post by Tildy Stokes · Published January 27th, 2016

Sacia B and Hugh T speak to Maria A while campaigning for the Greens in Canada.

I recently interviewed 4 people who work in government, the civil service, and political parties in the UK. Here is a synthesis of the steps they consider most useful for starting a career in politics.

Net-work to get-work. Go to as many political and think tank events as you can. Talk to people. Ask advice. Make friends.

Copy your heroes. Read biographies of people whose careers/impact you’d like to emulate. Copy what they did.

Be there. Physically spend time in the places you’d like to end up. That means visiting Parliament (you can sit and watch the Commons and Lords, and attend select committees). Have a drink at the Red Lion pub, where MPs and researchers hang out. Attend the annual Party Conference of your Party.

Enter the meme-space of the political class. Listen to the Radio 4 Today Programme every morning. (Have a break at weekends). How would you answer the interviewer’s questions? What questions would you ask? Watch Newsnight in the evening.

Apply for the Civil Service Fast Stream. It’s an amazing, underrated and potentially high-impact career. The assessment process in itself is good practice, and you’ll meet some cool people if you get through to the assessment center. If you don’t get in first time, keep trying.

Organise a meeting with your local MP.

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Party Politics

Just how bad is being a CEO in big tobacco?

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published January 21st, 2016

In 1994 the CEOs of the largest tobacco companies all testified before congress that they thought nicotine was not addictive and were widely mocked. How much were they paid relative to the damage they were doing?

Last year I wrote about the most harmful careers and had encouraging smoking at the top. But how bad is it exactly?

Two researchers recently put together some data that can help us estimate this and the numbers are pretty remarkable.

They compared the number of deaths caused by a cigarette company with the amount the CEO was paid. For this they used market share in the cigarette industry as a proxy for harm, and the WHO’s old estimate that 5.6 million people die due to cigarettes each year – now up to 6 million.

Doing some calculations, it looks to me like across the companies they could track, which collectively make up 45% of the global market, CEOs are paid $23 for each premature death resulting from the existence of their firms.

Note that there are other moral and practical reasons not to take jobs that do harm, but here we will focus just on the direct damage caused.

The authors draw a comparison to the life-saving treatments available if these CEOs wanted to make up for their harmful work by donating to charity:

If it is assumed that all of the CEOs analyzed are attempting to maximize their income in order to give to charities to save lives [25],

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Is now the time to do something about AI?

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published January 13th, 2016

Open Philanthropy recently released a review of research on when human level artificial intelligence will be achieved. The main conclusion of the report was we’re really uncertain. But the author (Luke Muehlhauser, an expert in the area) also gave his 70% confidence interval: 10-120 years.

That’s a lot of uncertainty.

And that’s really worrying. This confidence interval suggests the author puts significant probability on human-level artificial intelligence (HLAI) occurring within 20 years. A survey of the top 100 most cited AI scientists also gave a 10% chance that HLAI is created within ten years (this was the median estimate; the mean was a 10% probability in the next 20 years).

This is like being told there’s a 10% chance aliens will arrive on the earth within the next 20 years.

Making sure this transition goes well could be the most important priority for the human race in the next century. (To read more, see Nick Bostrom’s book, Superintelligence, and this popular introduction by Wait But Why).

We issued a note about AI risk just over a year ago when Bostrom’s book was released. Since then, the field has heated up dramatically.

In January 2014, Google bought Deepmind for $400m. This triggered a wave of investment into companies focused on building human-level AI. A new AI company seems to arrive every week.

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Existential risk

Where should you donate to have the most impact during giving season 2015?

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published December 24th, 2015

Many of our readers choose to give away substantial sums over the ‘giving season’ around Christmas and New Year. Where should they give so that their money has the biggest social impact?

This post is based on a combination of my existing knowledge, some judgement calls based on three years working in effective altruism, and brief consultation with the people involved in the groups below. It’s not based on in-depth research, and the recommendations could easily change. Take this post as a starting point for your own analysis.

Note that we’re looking for the charities that help others the most, treating everyone’s welfare as equal. If you have a particular attachment to a specific cause, you’ll need to factor that in separately.

This flowchart is a summary of the advice below. Read on for more details.

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Donating effectively

Podcast with Ben West, who expects to donate tens of millions for charity through tech entrepreneurship

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published December 24th, 2015

I recently interviewed Ben West (second to left), the founder of Health eFilings. After reading 80,000 Hours’ website, Ben entered tech entrepreneurship – from software engineering – in order to ‘earn to give’. Amazingly, Ben pledged to donate any money he made above the minimum wage. His company helps American physicians file paperwork with the US government, and collect ‘performance based pay’, much more easily. Several other 80,000 Hours alumni have ended up working in his company. You can read a summary of the key points from the interview below.

Summary of the interview

Ben West was influenced by Peter Singer’s work when he was young to start donating his income. Four years ago he was a software engineer donating to New Harvest, a meat substitute organisation.
He spent almost a decade at a large healthcare IT company, which helped to prepare him for what he’s doing now. He doesn’t think he could have successfully started this company without having experience in the health IT sector first.
He learned about 80,000 Hours through a link on the blog Overcoming Bias. Reading our work on entrepreneurship made him willing to consider starting his own business despite the fact that he’s risk averse by nature. He then spoke with some other well-informed people, including Carl Shulman (who volunteered for 80,000 Hours in the early days), who gave him more information about what the path involved.

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Who should found a startup? Podcast with the founder of Entrepreneur First

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published December 21st, 2015

I recently interviewed Matt Clifford (left), the Co-founder & Chief Executive at Entrepreneur First, which describes itself as “Europe’s leading pre-seed investment programme for technical founders who want to work on hard problems.” You can read a summary below.

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Earning to Give

Even if we can’t lower catastrophic risks now, we should do something now so we can do more later

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published December 18th, 2015

Does that fit with your schedule Mr President?

A line of argument I frequently encounter is that it is too early to do anything about ‘global catastrophic risks’ today (these are also sometimes called ‘existential risks’).

For context, see our page on assessing the biggest problems in the world, evaluation of opportunities to lower catastrophic risks and our review of becoming an AI safety researcher.

This line of argument doesn’t apply so much to preventing the use of nuclear weapons, climate change, or containing disease pandemics – the potential to act on these today is about at the same level as it will be in the future.

But what about new technologies that don’t exist yet: artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, atomically precise manufacturing, and others we haven’t thought about yet? There’s a case that we should wait until they are closer to actually being developed – at that point we will have a much better idea of:

what form those technologies will take, if any at all;
what can be done to make them less risky;
who we need to talk to to make that happen.

Superficially this argument seems very reasonable. Each hour of work probably does get more valuable the closer you are to a ‘critical juncture in history.’ Things clearly could have been done directly to change nuclear weapons policy and the direction of the Cold War in the 40s and 50s.

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Existential risk

What’s the easiest way anyone can have a big social impact?

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published December 16th, 2015

Many people want a career that contributes to the world, that helps others live happier lives. To do this, some become teachers, some work in the nonprofit sector, and others work in many other sectors. Sometimes this involves significant personal sacrifice – at the very least, “socially good” jobs usually have lower earnings.

Let’s suppose you want to minimise sacrifice and maximise social impact. What should you choose then? What would be good is a career option that’s:

Open to most of our audience (college grads in developed countries).
Involves little or no sacrifice.
Has as large a social impact as possible, with high confidence.

I think a path like this exists, as I’ll argue in the rest of this post. I call it the easy baseline:

Take whichever job you’d find most personally fulfilling.
Give 10% of your income to the world’s poorest people.

As of 2008, you can give your income to the world’s poorest people through GiveDirectly, a charity that provides one-off cash transfers to the poorest people in Kenya via mobile app. Every $1 you give results in $0.90 in the hands of one of the world’s poorest people. This intervention could soak up billions of dollars in the coming years, so could be pursued by many people.

If you want to have a social impact with your career, giving 10% is the easiest thing you can do, and I think almost everyone reading this should do it. You can take a public pledge to do so in just a few minutes.

Below I’ll explain in more detail why doing so is such an attractive option.

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Earning to Give

Plan change story: from neuroscience academia to cost-effectiveness research

Blog post by Roman Duda · Published December 8th, 2015

Hauke did a PhD in Neuroscience and was planning to go into academia. But after reading our research, he changed his plans and applied to jobs in German politics, consulting, tech-startups and our parent organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism. He’s now Director of Research at Giving What We Can, where he researches which charities most effectively alleviate extreme poverty.

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