New releases

Announcing the effective altruism handbook

Blog post by · Published June 15th, 2015

Effective Altruism HandbookA new Effective Altruism handbook has been released, which features some of 80,000 Hours’ ideas about high impact careers.

This handbook is made up of blog pieces and essays that are freely available online, and has been compiled by Ryan Carey, and released with some assistance from the Centre for Effective Altruism.

It has 24 mini-chapters altogether, split into five sections What is Effective Altruism, Charity Evaluation, Career Choice, Cause Selection and Organizations. Its foreword by Will MacAskill and Peter Singer, is new, as are concluding letters by seven effective altruist organizations. A lot of discussions have gone into deciding which writings are the best for describing the main concepts of effective altruism, so that’s another reason to check it out.

The rest of the essays are freely available online, and were compiled by Ryan Carey with the support of the Centre for Effective Altruism.

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New profile on a new career path: data science

Blog post by · Published June 13th, 2015

Data science

We’ve released a new exploratory profile on data science.

Our recommendation in the profile:

If you have a PhD in a quantitative subject, or if you’re the type of person who would enjoy a quantitative PhD, you should consider data science as an option. You are particularly likely to be well suited if you want to do research that produces immediate and tangible results, and are able to clearly present quantitative findings to people without technical backgrounds.

Read the rest of the profile.

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New in-depth profile on software engineering

Blog post by · Published June 11th, 2015

We’ve released a major update to our career profile on software engineering.

See the updated profile here and the full report on which it’s based here.

Our recommendation in the profile:

Software engineering at large tech-firms is a highly promising option that’s especially easy to test out. If you have good analytical skills (even if you are from a humanities background), you should strongly considering testing it.

Topics explored in the full report include:

  • How to test out your fit for software engineering.
  • Using software engineering to pursue high-impact projects on the side.
  • A comparison of US and UK earnings – we found that average salaries are 40% higher in the US than in the UK, 80% higher in Silicon Valley than in London, and starting salaries for bootcamp graduates are around twice as high in Silicon Valley as in London.
  • What software engineering is like day to day and the key stages of progression.

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The winner takes all economy

Blog post by · Published June 10th, 2015

It’s said that we live in an increasingly “winner takes all” economy. The following chart provides a nice illustration.

From “The Rich are Getting Richer” by The Investor Field Guide (click image for link)
From “The Rich are Getting Richer” by The Investor Field Guide (click image for link)

It shows that from the mid-90s, the companies with the largest profit margins have seen their profit margins expand dramatically – from about 15% to over 20%.

Those at the bottom have seen their profit margins shrink, and the middle 60% have seen little change. The winners are increasingly taking it all.

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Donating to Giving What We Can is higher impact than donating to GiveWell recommended charities.

Blog post by · Published June 9th, 2015

Giving What We Can is fundraising. When I last checked, they had only reached £70,000 of their £150,000 target.

Last year, more than $28m was donated to Give Directly, AMF, SCI and Deworm the World – the charities recommended by GiveWell and Giving What We Can.1 In contrast, Giving What We Can (GWWC) spent under $200,000. My claim in this post is that if you donate to these top recommended charities, you’ll have even more impact (at the margin) if you donate to Giving What We Can instead.

GWWC is closely affiliated with 80,000 Hours, so I’m likely to be biased in GWWC’s favour. However, I feel strongly enough that I think it’s worth writing on the topic anyway.

Here’s three reasons why to donate to GWWC.

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The rise of income inequality and what it means for your career

Blog post by · Published June 8th, 2015

One of the most important (though maybe regrettable) long-term trends effecting the outlook of many careers is the rise in income inequality. In countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, the difference in earnings between the best and worst paid has risen sharply for the last few decades, with the top earners taking a higher and higher proportion of total income. From the early 1900s to the 1970s, income inequality gradually decreased. However, in Anglo-Saxon countries it began to rise again from the late 1970s. The rise was sharpest in the United States, where the income share of the top decile of earners rose from 33% to 48% in forty years, while the share of the top percentile rose from 8% to 17%.1 In Japan and the rest of Western Europe on the other hand, inequality was either steady or rose much more gradually.

Increasing income inequality means a better outlook for many high-earning careers. It may also reflect trends in which skills are most in-demand and useful as technology changes, making it important to understand if you want good career capital in the future. Finally, it may mean the financial rewards of being at the top of a profession (compared to the middle) are increasing, and this means the importance of personal fit is increasing.

The top decile income share: Europe and the U.S., 1900-2010
This graph is taken from Pikkety (2014) 2

In the rest of this post, we’ll look at the reasons economists have put forth for the increase in income inequality, and speculate on whether the trend will continue.

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Why I stopped Earning to Give

Blog post by · Published June 6th, 2015

I have earned to give for 2.5 years as an Analyst and then Associate in the mergers and acquisitions team of an industrial conglomerate in Sweden. I stopped in mid-2014, and I do not plan to earn to give again. Instead, I am now writing a master’s thesis in philosophy, and I aim for a career in that field. In this post, I will describe my primary reasons for not earning to give with a focus on my main thought—that it seems easier to perform in work that one loves. My aim is not to argue against anyone earning to give; I think it is good that there is more awareness these days that earning to give is an option and others may find that it suits them better than it suits me. My purpose is rather to share my experience in case it might be of interest to people considering earning to give. Also, the recommendation from 80,000 Hours is only earn to give if you have good personal fit with the career, which fits my impression.

My three main reasons for not earning to give are:

  1. I seem to perform much better when I work directly on issues that that I think are most important from an altruistic perspective. I feel that it is difficult to be enthusiastic enough about the work in business.
  2. I see few giving opportunities that I would like to support through earning to give.
  3. It is challenging to have different values from one’s colleagues.

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New TEDx talk released!

Blog post by · Published May 18th, 2015

Check out the TEDx talk video by our Executive Director and co-founder Benjamin Todd.

In it, Ben sets out what we’ve learned through our research about finding fulfilling work. Rather than following your passion, find something you’re good at that helps others. If you aim to do what’s valuable, passion for your work will emerge. And you can also make a big difference with your life.

If you like what you see, please go ahead and share the video. We’d like to get it listed on the main TED channel!

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New in-depth profile on management consulting

Blog post by · Published May 11th, 2015

We’ve released a major update to our career profile on management consulting.

See the updated profile here.

See the new in-depth report upon which it’s based here.

Overall, our recommendation is similar to before:

Consider a job in consulting if you have strong academic credentials and you aren’t sure about your long-term plans and want to experience work in a variety of business environments, or you want to pursue earning-to-give but not a good fit for quantitative trading or technology entrepreneurship.

But we’ve gone much more in-depth into:

  • The chances of becoming a partner, showing that it’s about 10% but requires a great deal of dedication.
  • Common exit options, showing that consultants enter a very wide range of fields when they leave.
  • What proportion of people who want to become consultants actually make it.
  • The potential for direct impact, arguing it’s worse than other common alternatives.

This is our first ‘medium-depth’ career profile, and we hope it will act as a template for further work.

Thank you to Nick Beckstead for carrying out the research.

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The four big challenges

Blog post by · Published April 23rd, 2015

The 80,000 Hours community is involved with many different causes – from scientific research to social justice – but there are four big (rather ambitious!) causes that have, so far, gathered the most support.

These are the four big challenges our community has set itself. They are all huge, but they also seem especially solvable, or especially neglected, and this means working within them offers the opportunity to make huge difference over the coming decades…

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10 new organisations founded due to 80,000 Hours

Blog post by · Published April 9th, 2015

One of our key reasons for founding 80,000 Hours was the “multiplier argument”:

When we graduated, we had two options: (i) pursue whichever career paths we thought were highest impact or (ii) do research to find even better career paths and spread that research to enable hundreds of people to take those paths instead of us, having hundreds of times as much impact. Given our progress at that point, it seemed like the second option was possible, and therefore higher-impact.

So, three years later, how is it turning out?

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Get paid to do existential risk reduction research

Blog post by · Published April 7th, 2015

cser

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is hiring for postdoctoral researchers. Existential risk reduction is a high-priority area on the analysis of the Global Priorities Project and GiveWell. Moreover, CSER report that they have had a successful year in grantwriting and fundraising, so the availability of research talent could become a significant constraint over the coming months. Here is Sean’s announcement:

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (University of Cambridge; http://cser.org) is recruiting for postdoctoral researchers to work on the study of extreme risks arising from technological advances. We have several specific projects we are recruiting for: responsible innovation in transformative technologies; horizon-scanning and foresight; ethics and evaluation of extreme technological risks, and policy and governance challenges associated with emerging technologies.

However, we also have the flexibility to hire one or more postdoctoral researchers to work on additional projects relevant to CSER’s broad aims, which include impacts and safety in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, biosecurity, extreme tail climate change, geoengineering, and catastrophic biodiversity loss. We welcome proposals from a range of fields. The study of technological x-risk is a young interdisciplinary subfield, still taking shape. We’re looking for brilliant and committed people, to help us design it. Deadline: April 24th. Details here, with more information on our website.

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How to network

Blog post by · Published March 5th, 2015

Networking

It’s no secret that networking can be one of the keys to career success. It’s useful in helping you to find out about jobs and to land them. But what’s the best way to go about building a successful network?

The best advice we’ve come across so far on how to network is Keith Farrazzi’s Never Eat Alone.1 It’s not as evidence-based and rigorous as we’d like (and his style can be annoying!), but the core of his recommendations makes sense.

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Researcher position available at Animal Charity Evaluators

Blog post by · Published February 26th, 2015

Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) uses research, evidence, and reason to find the most effective opportunities to improve the live of animals. ACE was founded by 80,000 Hours staff working in Oxford, and has since become an independent organization based in California. In 2014 alone, ACE influenced over $141,000 in giving to their recommended charities.

What is the position?

From the position description:

[The position] will involve developing and managing research department strategies and activities, including designing, managing and executing research projects, data analysis, and program evaluation.

A sample project:

Intervention evaluations. You will research the effectiveness of a common tactic in animal advocacy, including by conducting interviews with advocates who regularly use the tactic. You will then write up your findings for use within ACE and for publication on our website. Example evaluation: corporate outreach.

More info

Full job description and application.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education on who gets ‘elite’ jobs

Blog post by · Published February 24th, 2015

I just came across a study of what top-tier investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms look for when recruiting. The author of the study interviewed over 100 recruiters at these firms to find out what criteria they used.1

The Chronicle of Higher Education summed up the results:

If you want to get a job at the very best law firm, investment bank, or consultancy:2

1. Go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or (maybe) Stanford. If you’re a business student, attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will work, too, but don’t show up with a diploma from Dartmouth or MIT. No one cares about those places.
2. Don’t work your rear off for a 4.0. Better to graduate with 3.7 and a bunch of really awesome extracurriculars. And by “really awesome” I mean literally climbing Everest or winning an Olympic medal. Playing intramurals doesn’t cut it.

Here’s a chart showing the key signals that recruiters used to screen candidates.

How to get elite jobs
Graphic re-created from original figure in Rivera (2011)

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Should I help now or later?

Blog post by · Published February 18th, 2015

If you’re committed to making the biggest difference possible with your career, you may well find that there is a tension between doing good now and laying the groundwork for doing good later.

For example:

  • Next year, you have two choices. You could work for an effective charity, making an immediate difference to its beneficiaries. Or you could go to graduate school and build up your career capital, (hopefully) allowing you to have a larger impact later.

Alternatively:

  • You have a substantial sum of money. You could give it today, or you could invest it, allow it to grow, and then give the larger amount later.

How can you go about deciding between these options? Here we present a summary of our findings – the full research has been published on the Global Priorities Project page.

The main factors

Which option is highest-impact varies from case to case. In general, the earlier you are in your career, the less stable your view of the best cause and the more well-established the cause, the more the balance shifts from doing good now towards doing good later.

Here’s a summary:

Now vs Later flowchart

We’ll further explain each factor below.

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We change more than we expect

Blog post by · Published February 12th, 2015

How much will your personality, values and preferences change over the next decade? Probably more than you think, at least according to a recent paper, “The End of History Illusion” by a team of psychologists at Harvard and the University of Virginia.

In a number of separate experiments, the authors asked a total of over 19,000 people between 18 and 68 to measure their current personality, values and preferences. Half of them were also asked to complete the assessment as they believed they would have done ten years earlier, while the other half were asked to predict what they would say in ten years’ time.

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How to start a career in technology (even if you studied art)

Blog post by · Published February 6th, 2015

Technology and Liberal Arts

80,000 Hours: Oxford recently hosted a panel on tech careers, co-hosted with Codelaborate, featuring four people who did arts degrees but ended up working in tech and loving their jobs.

The panel included:

  • Matt Clifford – studied Ancient History at Cambridge before doing a degree at MIT, worked in strategy consulting but quit to start Entrepreneur First
  • Jackson Gabbard – studied English at a small college in the US but was one of the first engineers at Facebook London
  • Nabeel Qureshi – studied PPE at Oxford, worked in consultancy but now works at startup GoCardless
  • Steven Shingler – studied double bass at the Royal College of Music in London, but now works at Google as an engineer.

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