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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

10155004_619539941461081_1904617897_n

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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,

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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…

Continue reading →

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?

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

Research reports

Article by · Published October 2014

On this page, we list some of our most in-depth career research reports that have not been featured on the other pages.

In-depth career research

  • How many lives does a doctor save? A three part series, here, here, and here
  • What’s the expected influence of becoming a politician? Read here.
  • How hard is it to become Prime Minister of the UK? Read here.

  • Entrepreneurship: A game of poker, not roulette. Read here.

Biases

  • Biases and how they affect your career decisions. The results of our survey of the literature on decision making biases. Read here.

Personal fit and replaceability

  • What does economics tell us about replaceability? Read here

  • Intelligence matters more than you think for career success. Read here.

  • Does the harm caused by banking outweigh the good done earning to give? Read here

  • What’s your true impact? Read here

Background

  • Can you measure the good you’ll do? Read here.

  • How altruists can benefit from risky careers. Read here.

Continue reading →