New releases

Earning to give is systemic change

Blog post by · Published December 30th, 2014

One of the most common criticisms of earning to give (e.g. see this article released yesterday), and advocating for charitable donations generally, is that it just makes thing better at the margin, and doesn’t address the “systemic”, “structural” “root cause” issues that really matter.

One response to this we’ve given before is: yes that’s true, but donating is still a good thing to do.

Another response we’ve given before is that if systemic change is the most important cause, donate to organisations working on systemic change. This works so long as you’re not in a job that does a lot to prevent systemic change (e.g. conservative politician, professional strikebreaker) and you don’t think the act of philanthropy itself prevents systemic change (even if donating to systemic change organisations). If you think this all sounds completely implausible, consider the example of Engles who worked as a factory manager in order to fund Marx’s research.

A response we haven’t often given before, however, is just to argue that no, promoting earning to give is a form of important systemic change: imagine how different the world would be if almost everyone regularly donated 10% or more of their income to whichever causes they thought had the biggest impact.

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Why apply to Teach First?: An interview with the UK’s largest graduate recruiter

Blog post by · Published December 18th, 2014

Teach First

Teach First is a two year program that places talented graduates in schools in challenging circumstances as teachers after a rapidly accelerated six week training program. It aims to offer rapid personal development while also contributing to an important social cause. It’s similar to Teach for America in the US.

Founded in 2002, it’s now the UK’s largest graduate recruiter, hiring over 1,500 graduates in 2014, so we’re curious to learn more.

We were approached by the Teach First recruiter at Oxford, Tom Cole, and we offered to do an interview as a first step towards learning more. Teach First’s popularity is equally strong in Oxford as the rest of the country: secondary school teaching one of Oxford’s most common graduate destinations, with about 10% of the class becoming teachers, and a significant fraction of these graduates enter Teach First.

Overall, we don’t yet have firm views on the option; but my initial impression is that it’s a strong, if challenging, option for learning, building career capital and keeping your options open, which makes it an option worth considering early career if you have good personal fit, though it’s probably possible to have more immediate impact earning to give.

In the interview, we focus on the career capital benefits, which we’ve been told are often overlooked by people considering the programme.

The interview was conducted via email, but we met in person with Tom Cole to discuss the content.

The interview begins below:

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The camel doesn’t have two humps – update to software engineering profile

Blog post by · Published December 13th, 2014

In our current software engineering profile, we say:

Programming ability seems to roughly divide into two groups: those who find it relatively easy and those who don’t. If in the past you’ve done well at mathematics and science and can think abstractly, then it’s likely you can learn to program well enough to get an entry-level job within about six months.

In evidence of the first claim, one piece of evidence we cited was a paper called “The Camel Has Two Humps” by Dehnadi and Bornat.

However, we’ve just discovered that Bornat has publicly redacted this paper. He says:

It’s not enough to summarise the scientific result, because I wrote and web-circulated “The camel has two humps” in 2006. That document was very misleading and, in the way of web documents, it continues to mislead to this day. I need to make an explicit retraction of what it claimed. Dehnadi didn’t discover a programming aptitude test. He didn’t find a way of dividing programming sheep from non-programming goats. We hadn’t shown that nature trumps nurture. Just a phenomenon and a prediction.

Though it’s embarrassing, I feel it’s necessary to explain how and why I came to write “The camel has two humps” and its part-retraction in (Bornat et al., 2008). It’s in part a mental health story. In autumn 2005 I became clinically depressed. My physician put me on the then-standard treatment for depression, an SSRI. But she wasn’t aware that for some people an SSRI doesn’t gently treat depression, it puts them on the ceiling. I took the SSRI for three months, by which time I was grandiose, extremely self-righteous and very combative – myself turned up to one hundred and eleven. I did a number of very silly things whilst on the SSRI and some more in the immediate aftermath, amongst them writing “The camel has two humps”.

Based on this, we’ve removed the paper from the profile, and removed the claim about the distribution dividing into two clumps.

We intend to do a more thorough review of the predictors of success in this field when we release our full profile of software engineering in the new year.

Did we make a mistake in this case? The profile was only at the “considered” stage, so not the result of in-depth research. Even so, when most skills and abilities are normally or log-normally distributed, we should have been cautious about the existence of a bimodal distribution without relatively strong evidence.

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Stop worrying so much about long-term career plans

Article by · Published December 2014

The Thinker

Many people who ask us about their careers are clearly desperate to plan out the next decade of their career, or even their entire working life. As a result, they tended to feel anxious and even overwhelmed by the options available and the weight of the decisions in front of them.

Might this be you? Some giveaways are phrases like “how can I find the right career for me?” or “I’m trying to figure out what to do with my life”.

To people who feel this way, we have this advice: stop worrying so much about the long-term.

Don’t get us wrong, of course your career decisions are important. 80,000 Hours is built around the idea that you can make an incredible difference through your career choices, if you choose carefully.

However, we don’t think that making a detailed career plan is a particularly good way to ensure that your career goes well in the long-term. A better idea, especially at the start of your career, is to make sure you get the next step right: focus on getting into a better position, and then worry about what comes next when more decisions arise.

This may sound counter-intuitive. So why do I recommend it? Four reasons:

1. You have limited knowledge

If you’re at the start of your career, then you probably don’t know much about the career options available,

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Stop worrying so much about the long-term

Blog post by · Published December 12th, 2014

The Thinker

thinker

Today I’ve been reviewing our most recent round of coaching, and something struck me about the applications. Many of them were written by people who were clearly desperate to plan out the next decade of their career, or even their entire working life. As a result, they tended to feel anxious and even overwhelmed by the options available and the weight of the decisions in front of them.

Might this be you? Some giveaways are phrases like “how can I find the right career for me?” or “I’m trying to figure out what to do with my life”.

To people who feel this way, I have this advice: stop worrying so much about the long-term.

Don’t get me wrong, of course your career decisions are important. 80,000 Hours is built around the idea that you can make an incredible difference through your career choices, if you choose carefully.

However, I don’t think that making a detailed career plan is a particularly good way to ensure that your career goes well in the long-term. A better idea, especially at the start of your career, is to make sure you get the next step right: focus on getting into a better position, and then worry about what comes next when more decisions arise.

This may sound counter-intuitive. So why do I recommend it? Four reasons:

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Learn to code in 16 weeks for free in the UK at Founders and Coders

Blog post by · Published December 10th, 2014

Introduction

Ben Clifford

Are you interested in doing something like App Academy to learn to program, but in the UK? Makers Academy is often thought to be the best option, and we’ve had good reports from one of our members. But it costs £8,000. What about doing something similar for free?

In this interview, Ben Clifford – another member who changed his career due to 80,000 Hours – tells us about a free alternative called Founders and Coders. Ben recently went through the course, and is currently working at a startup in London.

If interested, you can apply here. the deadline for the next round is on Friday.

Summary of main points:

  • Founders and Coders is a free coding program based in London.
  • The course aims to make people full stack javascript developers in 16 weeks.
  • The biggest benefits of doing a coding course are providing structure and tackling motivation problems.
  • The weakest point of Founders and Coders is links to employers but Ben thinks this would not stop determined students can get jobs.
  • The most important thing for getting a place is commitment to becoming a software developer. Being motivated to do good in your career also improves your chances.
  • Applications for January close on Friday 12th December. You can attend taster days by supporting their Indiegogo campaign.

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Giving What We Can is seeking a Director of Research

Blog post by · Published December 4th, 2014

Giving What We Can is our sister organisation, and we are cross posting this job opportunity from their blog:

In just five years, Giving What We Can has grown to over 660 members in 25 countries worldwide. The community has pledged over $330m towards ending poverty. We are looking for additional hires to build on this success.

Apply to be our Director of Research

Note: applications have now closed.

The deadline for submitting applications is now Midnight GMT on Friday 12th December 2014.

As Director of Research, you would lead our efforts to find the charities most effective at alleviating extreme poverty and advise the Giving What We Can community in their donation decisions.

Specifically, you would be responsible for:

  • Determining which charities we should recommend – based both the effectiveness of the interventions the charities carry out, and how well those organisations implement them.
  • Understanding the broader landscape of top charitable interventions and organisations, in order to advise our members when deciding where to donate
  • Presenting the research in compelling ways in order to encourage people to donate to the most effective charities, both via our website and presentations.

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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Interested in working in international development? Consider 2Seeds.

Blog post by · Published December 4th, 2014

Many people have told us that if you want to work in international development, it’s very useful to spend time working in a developing country (e.g. see our interview with Owen Barder), and living abroad is probably useful for exploration value too. It’s also very useful to get project management experience early on in this space, because it opens up jobs in non-profits and foundations. But management positions in the developing world are rare early in your career.

This made me interested to hear about 2Seeds, which gives graduates the opportunity to volunteer as a project manager in rural Tanazania for a year.

I met the co-founder of 2Seeds, Sam Bonsey, at a conference, and then followed up by doing the following interview with their Outreach Manager, Abby Love. Based on what I’ve seen, it looks well worth considering as an early career step, especially if you’re interested in working within international development.

Read on to see the full interview, which was conducted by email.

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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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Best existing resources

Article by · Published July 2015

This page is no longer kept up to date and we may no longer agree with all of the recommendations.

On this page, we list some of the best sources of careers advice and information we’ve found elsewhere.

Basic information on specific career paths
Occupational Outlook Handbook from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics

The online BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook has profiles on many broad categories of occupation provided by the US government. It’s a good place to look to find lists of different occupations when you’re just starting to think about your options. It also has job descriptions, skills required, pay, work environment information, and demand growth projections.

ONET

ONET is a US Department of Labour website that contains detailed profiles on different occupations. It is the most systematic and evidence-based source we’ve found that covers what jobs involve and what skills are required (collected via self-report1). For each job it has a summary report and you can see all their data on each job by clicking on the details tab in one of the job profiles.

Prospects

The UK equivalent to ONET, specializing in graduate careers, is Prospects. It also has career profiles broken down by sector, containing basic information such as what the role involves and salary at different levels.

In-depth career profiles
Wetfeet

Two sites:

You can register on wetfeet.com and get access to articles and Q&As with hiring managers at major companies.

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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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Some causes are better than others

Article by · Published December 2014

We tend to imagine that organised attempts to make the world a better place are almost always successful, at least to some extent. However, this is simply not the case.

GiveWell surveyed the literature on the effects of social interventions, concluding:

We think that charities can easily fail to have impact, even when they’re doing exactly what they say they are. In fact, our review of academic research has led us to believe that many of the problems charities aim to address are extremely difficult problems that foundations, governments and experts have struggled with for decades. Many well-funded, well-executed, logical programs simply haven’t had the desired results.

David Anderson, assistant director of the Coalition for Evidence Based Policy estimates:

(1) The vast majority of social programs and services have not yet been rigorously evaluated, and (2) of those that have been rigorously evaluated, most (perhaps 75% or more), including those backed by expert opinion and less-rigorous studies, turn out to produce small or no effects, and, in some cases negative effects.

Even within areas where interventions do work, the differences in effectiveness are often significant. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab is a network of over 100 academics who carry out rigorous impact evaluations of interventions within international development. Within a program area, they often find that the best interventions are more than ten times as effective as others with the same aim,

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The difference between true and tangible impact

Article by · Last updated November 2014 · First published November 2014

When people think about the impact of their actions, they tend to think only of the immediate results – what we call their tangible impact.

But that is only part of the story. To get the full picture, you need to compare the world you bring about with the world as it would have been without your involvement. We call this your true impact.

Here’s an example to illustrate the difference. Imagine you’re at the scene of an accident and you see an injured person. In your enthusiasm to help, you push the paramedics out of the way and perform CPR on the injured person yourself. You’re successful and bring them back to consciousness, but because you’re less well-trained than the paramedics, you cause permanent damage to the person’s spine. If you had let the paramedics perform CPR instead, the injured person would have made a full recovery. In this case, your tangible impact was to save their life, but your true impact was to cause the person spinal damage.

This example also illustrates that your true impact is what really matters. Even though the tangible impact of performing CPR was good – you saved a life – it wasn’t in fact the right thing to do. It would have been even better if you hadn’t acted, since the injured person would still have survived and would not have suffered spinal damage.

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Why and how to keep your options open

Article by · Last updated October 2014 · First published October 2014

Some of the steps you could take in your career open up a greater range of career options than others. The more paths a steps opens up, and the better these paths are in terms of impact, the more it “keeps your options open”.

For example, an undergraduate degree opens up a wide range of jobs: it is essential for around 25% of jobs, and an advantage in a huge number of others. By contrast, many vocational qualifications only prepare you for a single career and are of little use elsewhere. As a result, undertaking an undergraduate degree does far more to keep your options open than such vocational qualifications

Our advice is to keep in mind the value of keeping your options open. This is especially true at the beginning of your career but remains relevant throughout. This page explores why it is so important, and what you can do about it.

Why should I keep my options open?

The reason to value career flexibility so highly is that which career options are the most effective changes over time. You won’t always be able to predict these changes in advance, but if you keep your options open, you’ll be able to keep switching into better paths as they come up.

Try to avoid making the mistake of one person we know, who undertook a highly specialised hospitality degree only to discover several years later that he hated working in hotels…

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Reasoning behind our framework

Article by · Published October 2014

On this page, we outline the reasoning behind our framework. In particular, we explain (i) why we use a framework at all (ii) how we selected the factors (iii) our views about which factors are most important.

Why use a framework at all?

We want to compare career options in terms of how much impact they’ll let you have in the long-run. Ideally, we could precisely measure the impact of each option (perhaps in terms of how many lives you improve), and choose the best one. In practice, we’ll never be able to get a precise measurement – the impact of a career option is just far too complicated.

However, that doesn’t mean that all options are equally good – it’s obvious that some options are better than others. Rather, it means we need to prioritise what we investigate, and identify the most important dimensions to compare your options on in the limited time available. The goal of a good framework is to identify the factors that are most high-priority to investigate (essentially those which have the highest value of information).

How did we choose these factors?
What makes one factor better than another?

The importance of a factor within the framework depends on:

  • Relevance: To what extent do differences in this factor correlate with long-run impact?
  • Scale: How much do careers differ based on this factor?

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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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