New releases

Interview with a project manager at the Copenhagen Consensus

Blog post by · Published December 3rd, 2014

Ben recently interviewed Brad Wong about his career and current job at the Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC), a leading global think tank which draws together over 100 top economists to work on prioritizing the solutions to the most pressing global issues.

We spoke to Brad to learn more about whether working at the CCC could be a good opportunity for our members, following up on our previous research.

The CCC is hiring two more project managers to work on a Copenhagen Consensus project for development in Bangladesh, in a role similar to Brad’s. These jobs can either be based in Dhaka, Bangladesh or Budapest, Hungary or in the Centre for Effective Altruism’s office’s in Oxford (shared with us!).

The interview was conducted via phone call. Below we summarise the key messages of the conversation, followed by some excerpts, which have been edited and reorganised for clarity.

In summary, Brad told us:

  • Brad manages a project to provide cost-benefit analysis of the UN’s next development goals.
  • Before this job, Brad completed a PhD, worked as a consultant at Booz & Company, and did strategic consulting at an Indian nonprofit, Technoserve. All three were good preparation for his current role, which requires an understanding of academic research and development, combined with the ability to manage a project and get things done.
  • Brad really enjoys his work at the CCC. Day-to-day, the work ranges from very exciting (networking with UN ambassadors) to quotidian (writing contracts, organising meetings, proofreading).
  • He’s excited about the project’s potential impact – their analysis is being used at the highest levels within the UN and there are already more than 100 media articles about the project from major outlets, such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
  • Brad would like to continue working at the CCC, though long-term would like to work at a major foundation or consult for foundations.
  • 80,000 Hours did not directly affect his decision to work for CCC, but exposure to Givewell and 80,000 Hours significantly changed his attitude towards impact in his career.

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80,000 Hours is seeking a Head of Research

Blog post by · Published November 27th, 2014

As Head of Research, you will become part of our founding team to lead our research efforts into how to select the most high-impact careers. Our research is what drives the advice we provide via our website and career coaching.

Specifically, you become responsible for:

  • Deciding what questions to investigate and personally coming up with answers to these questions, or overseeing the delegation of this research to others.
  • Helping to translate these findings into practical products that help people make better decisions – books, web applications, workshops and others.
  • Fitting the research into the overall strategy for the organisation.

We are a small team, so you’ll also have the opportunity to be involved in recruitment, fundraising, publishing our findings in the media and whatever else most interests you.

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The Centre for Effective Altruism is seeking a Chief Operating Officer

Blog post by · Published November 26th, 2014

We are recruiting a Chief Operating Officer to lead our central division, managing a team that supports the recruitment, finance, logistics, HR and fundraising of all our projects. This role is a unique opportunity to shape a rapidly-growing charity into an incubator that can quickly scale up the best ideas emerging from the nascent effective altruism movement. We see this as one of the most challenging roles in the organisation, requiring a high level of competency across most skill areas. The role is located in Oxford, and you would work in our offices which are housed within the University.

The Centre for Effective Altruism is an incubator of projects we believe have potential to create significant positive change in the world at low cost. Our organisation includes two established projects, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, as well as two newer projects we are incubating, the Global Priorities Project and Effective Altruism Outreach. We have also spun two projects out of the Centre for Effective Altruism – Animal Charity Evaluators and The Life You Can Save – which are both now run independently in the US.

In this role you would be involved in the operational aspects of all of CEA’s projects. You will meet and provide invaluable help to a large share of the people and projects in the effective altruist movement today. You will learn about all aspects of CEA’s work, including our expansion into other countries. As a result, it will provide you with the skills and contacts you would need to lead on future projects.

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Serial social entrepreneur, Michael Norton OBE, speaks in Oxford

Blog post by · Published November 20th, 2014

The serial social entrepreneur, Michael Norton, recently spoke at 80,000 Hours: Oxford.

Michael started his career as a scientist, merchant banker and publisher before becoming a social activist. Since then, he has helped to found over 40 charities and social enterprises, including UnLtd, which has raised an endowment of over £100 million to support thousands of social enterprises. He spoke to us about his career and what he’s learned about making a difference.

What follows are some notes I made based on his presentation. All are paraphrased, and I can’t guarantee they accurately reflect Michael’s views.

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Why and how to keep your options open

Blog post by · Published November 11th, 2014

Keeping options open is important for everyone, it’s especially important if you want to make a difference, because the most effective career opportunities are likely to change in the future. Indeed, we think it’s usually more important to keep your options open to make an immediate impact.

Many people think that ‘keeping your options open’ means being non-committal and avoiding tough decisions. We disagree. The best to keep your options open is to commit to building flexible abilities and resources, such as transferable skills, money and a public platform.

For more, see our new page on the topic.

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Mid-year review September 2014

Blog post by · Published November 11th, 2014

This document is an update on the priorities we set in our May 2014 team plan, as part of our annual 2013 review, for the period June 2014 – September 2014.

Summary

  • We’ve made good progress on the priorities we set in our review. In general, we’ve exceeded our goals and are on-track to make the rest by the end of the year.

  • Some of our key achievements include: (i) published our expanded research pages, including 30,000 words of new static pages, (ii) completed our fundraising targets, and (iii) hired Peter Hartree as our part-time web developer, allowing us to exceed our targets on web development.

  • The main problem we face is that we’ve failed to hire someone to lead on research, which has contributed to a shortage of staff capacity in this area.

  • Over the rest of the year, we intend to focus on improving our online content and the research behind it, by (i) doing another round of work on the key web pages (ii) doing a round of coaching (iii) publishing a round of articles from our research backlog.

  • After February 2015, we’ll do our annual review, a hiring round, and our next round of fundraising.

In the rest of this document, we review in more depth (i) our big picture strategy and priorities (ii) how we’ve performed relative to the priorities we set in our last team plan (iii) the challenges we’re facing and (iv) our priorities for the next six months.

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Should you wait to make a difference?

Blog post by · Published October 26th, 2014

The issue

One big picture consideration in career choice is the question of how important it is to make a difference now versus later. Here’s the issue: suppose you could either work at a charity next year or go to graduate school. If you work at the charity, you’ll be making a difference right away, speeding up progress. If you go to graduate school, you’ll be investing in yourself and able to have a larger impact later. Which is better?

If you think it’s better to make a difference as soon as possible, the more you’ll value your immediate opportunities for impact. In our framework, you’ll put more emphasis on path impact potential. If you think it’s better to invest and give later, the more you’ll value activities that build your skills, connections and credentials (career capital), and the more you’ll value learning about the world so you can make better decisions in the future (exploration value).

There’s a similar issue with charitable giving. If you have some money, you can either give today, or you can invest your money, which will grow over time, and give a larger amount later. Under what circumstances should you invest rather than give now?

Summary

Overall, we favour investing in your human capital and wealth early, so that you make a greater difference later in your career. Why?

  1. You’ll be able to find better opportunities to make a difference in the future, because you’ll get wiser and be able to use better research in which causes and careers are most effective.
  2. Early-to-mid career, most people can make investments that significantly increase their career capital, such as learning new skills, doing a graduate degree and building a professional network. The returns from these investments more than justify the cost of waiting.

Nevertheless, there are a few other reasons to start making a difference now: it will teach you about the world; it will help you find collaborators; it’s motivating; and it will help you build altruistic habits.

So, overall, we suggest that early in your career you mainly focus on building career capital and learning more, though still put some weight on your immediate impact. If choosing between two jobs, this could mean choosing the one that best builds your career capital, using immediate impact as a tiebreaker. As you get older, put more and more weight on your immediate impact.

Read on to see a full discussion of the considerations and our reasoning.

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Update: 7 career strategies for making a difference

Blog post by · Published October 22nd, 2014

We recently released a page on “top career strategies”, featuring two strategies for building your long-run potential, and five for immediate impact:

  1. The experimenter: Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills.
  2. The self-developer: When you’ve narrowed down which area you want to enter, focus on investing in yourself to build your career capital.
  3. The effective worker: There are many non-profit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you’re a good fit for a high-impact organization, it’s an option worth considering. By high-impact organisations we mean those that are well-run and work on an effective cause.
  4. The entrepreneur: If you’ve got potential as an entrepreneur, attempt to found new effective non-profit organisations or innovative for-profits that benefit their customers and create positive spill-over effects.
  5. The philanthropist: Some people have skills that are better suited to earning money than the other strategies. These people can take a higher-earning career and donate the money to effective organisations. We call this strategy ‘earning to give’.
  6. The researcher: Some people are especially good at and interested in research – attempting to create new knowledge. If this is you, and have you have the opportunity to work in a field that seems particularly important, tractable and neglected, then this could be a way to have a large impact.
  7. The advocate: If you can take a job that gives you a public platform, good network and credibility, you can use it to promote and unite people behind important ideas.

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Want to do something about the risks of artificial intelligence?

Blog post by · Published October 17th, 2014

Nick Bostrom’s recent book, “Superintelligence”, has been a great success, gaining favorable reviews in the Financial Times and the Economist, as well as support from Elon Musk, the founder of Telsa and SpaceX.

The field of research into the risks of artificial intelligence is also taking off, with the recent founding of Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute (supported by Morgan Freeman!); continued strong growth at MIRI; and GiveWell’s recently declared interest in the area.

If you’ve read the book, and are interested in how you can contribute to this cause, we’d like to hear from you. There’s pressing needs developing in the field for researchers, project managers, and funding. We can help you work out where you can best contribute, and introduce you to the right people.

If you’re interested, please email ben at 80000hours.org, or apply for our coaching.

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What I learned quitting my job to found a tech startup

Blog post by · Published October 16th, 2014

Ben West

I’ve been earning to give as a software developer for the past several years, and it started to become clear that I could make more money in a different job. But I was torn between a finance career which put my math skills to use and founding a company where I might achieve the vocational equivalent of winning the lottery.

I eventually decided to pursue entrepreneurship because I thought it would better build career capital, i.e. it would prepare me for a wider variety of future careers. After four months of running a company that idea still doesn’t seem completely idiotic, but it doesn’t seem completely true either.

I’ve encountered several people who are in similar positions, so I’d like to give an overview of my motivations (particularly the ones which haven’t been discussed here before), how I went about my career change, and of course how I should’ve gone about my career change. Optimizing for one narrow career path is a bad idea, so I hope this post is useful to everyone, not just potential entrepreneurs.

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Update on Peter’s career story

Blog post by · Published October 14th, 2014

Peter Hurford

Peter wrote about his career choice story on the blog back in January. After graduating, he started his software engineer internship at a startup in July. He recently wrote this update on how he’s doing.

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Tips on careers in journalism from NPR correspondent David Folkenflik

Blog post by · Published October 8th, 2014

David Folkenflik

David has been NPR’s media correspondent since 2004, and before that spent over a decade at the Baltimore Sun. He has won numerous awards for journalism, and is the author of Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires.

I had the chance to meet him at the 4th annual Nexus Global Youth Summit, where we chatted about careers in journalism for people who want to make a difference. Here’s the notes I made on the key takeaways, which I ran past David before publishing for edits (and are entirely his own views).

  • If you want to get a job in journalism, apply to any news organization that interests you, including all the major media organisations. Set some priorities – pay, location, size of organization, type of work, etc and select among them based on your top several priorities once you’ve got offers. “I applied to over 70 organisations. I got two offers, only one of which paid more than $10,000, so I went with that!”
  • Previously the route into the industry was to get a job at a local news station or paper. But the local news industry has shrunk significantly in recent years, so it’s a lot harder to advance from these positions today.
  • Build a personal library of content on Tumblr or some platform where it’s relatively easy to build a site. “There needs to be something out there you can link to.”
  • If you’re still in college, what should you do next? Start writing and reporting on the side to test yourself out, and to start building your portfolio.
  • How competitive is journalism? “You need to really want it; that’s the major filter.” It’s not a career you should drift into, but if you’re motivated, you’ve got a decent chance.
  • Although the industry is changing rapidly, it’s not high risk if you’re young and don’t have a mortgage or other family obligations. And if you do, it can still be rewarding.
  • Journalism is a good path if you want to effect social change, but that change may be defined quite differently than it would be at a philanthropy or advocacy organization. Providing good information and analysis is a public good in itself. You’ve also got a public platform to promote neglected concerns. And there’s been a renaissance of new news outlets that openly embrace advocacy and point of view journalism.

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Career story: Ben Kuhn: My job hunt after graduating

Blog post by · Published October 6th, 2014

In this guest post, 80,000 Hour’s member Ben Kuhn describes how he looked for a job after graduating from Harvard with a maths major. Ben’s especially reflective, so it’s fascinating to hear how he went about choosing between options in software, startups, finance and research with the aim of making the biggest difference.

Ben Kuhn

Background

For my first few years of college I prioritized getting experience in a bunch of different potential fields–I tried working at Fog Creek, Jane Street, and GiveWell, and cofounding a startup. By the end of that I came to a couple conclusions about what I wanted to do.

In terms of altruistic career choice considerations, I decided I should probably focus on doing the things I could be most awesome at, rather than trying to naively maximize earnings or maximize direct good done–basically, because I’m fairly uncertain about whether having lots of money will be helpful, and I’m fairly uncertain about what does the most direct good, but being awesome at things is a robustly good outcome that can be parlayed into many different advantages later.

Historically, technology- and software-related things seemed to have some of the greatest potential for me to be awesome at them, and also the widest breadth of opportunities to improve the world with those abilities later, so they seemed like the most promising options to pursue further. But I had already done one software internship, and while it was a fun experience, I didn’t want to do anything very similar–I guessed that I’d hit diminishing returns for standard software-engineering internships.

I was concurrently in the process of realizing that studying at Harvard for a fourth year didn’t seem especially high-value, and that I could graduate in three years if I wanted to thanks to my Advanced Placement credits. So I realized that I needed to put a lot of effort into my summer job search to make sure I found something that wasn’t a repeat of my previous internship, and that I would be happy turning into a full-time job if I decided I didn’t want to go back to Harvard.

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Have you checked out the Effective Altruism Forum yet?

Blog post by · Published October 5th, 2014

A few weeks ago, a new online forum to discuss effective altruism was released.

So far, the quality of the discussion has been great. If you’re interested in what we discuss on 80,000 Hours, you should definitely check it out. It may also be a good place to field career-related questions – we’re on there often.

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Interview: Holden Karnofsky on cause selection

Blog post by · Published October 3rd, 2014

Holden Karnofsky

In August 2014, we interviewed Holden Karnofsky, the co-founder of GiveWell, to discuss how the results of Open Philanthropy (formerly GiveWell Labs) might extend to career choice. In particular, we regard Open Philanthropy as the best available single source of information about which causes are most high priority (for more, see our cause page, and we want to explore how much the results transfer from philanthropists to people picking careers. See our previous interview with Holden.

The interview was carried out in person in GiveWell’s offices and recorded. Below, we list some of the key points and excerpts from the interview edited for clarity, which were reviewed by Holden before publishing.

Key points made by Holden

  • If a cause is on Open Philanthropy’s list, that’s an extra reason to seek a job in that area.
  • However, if a cause isn’t on the list, it may still be promising, especially if you have good personal fit with the area. Personal fit may often overwhelm considerations about the general effectiveness of a cause.
  • There can be other differences between the causes that are most promising for philanthropists and those that are most promising for job seekers. For instance, since OPP’s causes are often constrained by a lack of money, it may be difficult to get a job within them.
  • Some ideas for causes OPP isn’t investigating, but at first glance still look promising for job seekers include: environment and climate change, scientific research, for-profit work (especially in innovative areas), and foreign relations.
  • OPP aren’t highly likely to drastically change their list of causes (especially within global catastrophic risks and political advocacy) for at least two to three years.
  • If you want to make a difference in the for-profit world, avoid activities that make money through (i) zero-sum games (ii) addiction (iii) a marketing-first approach. If you’ve cleared those filters, then ask (i) is this scalable? (ii) does it make people’s lives better in a significant way? (iii) are you good at this activity?

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Interview: Holden Karnofsky on the importance of personal fit

Blog post by · Published October 1st, 2014

In January 2014, I interviewed Holden Karnofsky, the co-founder of GiveWell, to further discuss his views on the importance of personal fit in career choice, and how they might differ from our own. See our previous interview with Holden.

The interview was carried out on Skype and recorded. Below, we list some of the key points and excerpts from the interview. These have been edited for clarity, and were reviewed by Holden before publishing.

Summary of Holden’s key points

  • Your degree of “fit” with a role depends on your chances of ultimately excelling in the role if you work at hard at it, arising from the match between yourself and the requirements of the role.
  • Holden believes that if you want to make a difference, seeking out roles with which you have a high degree of fit should be a top priority, especially early in your career. This is because:
  • Fit is easier to judge than many other factors, such as how much immediate impact you have, which means it’s easier to improve your degree of fit over time.
  • It’s harder to change your career ‘role’ than your cause later in your career. For instance, if you become a great salesperson, it’s relatively easy to transition into an organisation that works on a different cause, but much harder to become great at some other skill. This means that early in your career it’s more important to figure out what types of roles suit you than what cause support early in your career.
  • There’s huge, robust benefits from being good at your job including (i) better career capital – “it gives you a better learning experience, better personal development, better overall status, better overall opportunities” – (ii) higher impact within your field.
  • Excelling at what you do is one of the most important rules of thumb for having more impact, partly because a lot of the world’s impact comes from extreme cases, so your chances of being an extreme case may dominate your expected impact. In particular, extreme impact often arises from innovation – spotting ideas others haven’t – and this is more likely when you’re at the top of your field.
  • Some other criteria that are important early in your career are: (i) the general status of the option (ii) the pay (iii) how much you’ll learn about yourself and your other options from taking this option.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Holden’s views on career choice for people interested in effective altruism, we recommend seeing the transcript of his conference call on career choice.

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We would like to interview you

Blog post by · Published October 1st, 2014

If you’ve got experience with a career of interest to our readers, we’d like to feature an interview with your on our blog. Similarly, if you’re interviewing someone as part of your career research, we’d like to feature your notes. For instance, see this interview with Buck from App Academy – one of our most popular ever pieces of content – and see many more here.

Why are we looking for interviews?

We think our readers have lots of useful knowledge to share about their careers, and we’ve found interviews to be one of the quickest, most transparent ways to do it.

How would we like to do the interview?

If you’re interested, choose 5-10 questions, draft answers to them, and send them to [email protected]. I’ll ask some follow up questions, then we’ll publish the final result on the blog.

If you’re interviewing someone else, make sure to get their permission to post the notes.

Example questions

Some good general purpose questions are:

  • What did you do before this job?
  • Why did you take this job?
  • What does the job involve?
  • What are the main pros and cons of this job for someone looking to make a difference?
  • What are the best sources of further information on this area?

You can see a full list of ideas for questions we often use here.

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Should you move to Thailand?

Blog post by · Published September 26th, 2014

Chiang Mai Coffee Shop
Chiang Mai Coffee Shop. Credit: Spartantraveler.com

By moving to Thailand, you can cut your cost of living by two to six times, and probably have a higher standard of living than you would have in a big city in the US or UK. NomadList currently estimates that you can live in Chiang Mai for only £400 per month, and flights from London can be had for £500 return. There’s several other cities in Thailand, Vietnam and Eastern Europe, which offer a cost of living under £900 per month.

In the case of Chiang Mai, this includes:

  • A nice, serviced apartment on short-let.
  • Fast internet.
  • Plenty of good cafes and co-working spaces.
  • Warm weather all year.
  • No commute.
  • Big community of international remote workers.
  • Eating out every meal.
  • No visa required for 3 months.
  • Set up within a day.

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