New releases

Some stories of career change due to 80,000 Hours

Blog post by · Published February 4th, 2014

What kinds of career changes has 80,000 Hours caused? The following is a collection of 15 examples we prepared as part of a grant application in October 2013.

The examples were written by us, but each was sent to the relevant person by email, who was encouraged to point out inaccuracies or exaggerations of our influence. The exact wording for each example has been approved by the career changer. ? have been anonymised. In addition, we prepared 4 more similar examples, but don’t have permission to share those publicly.

We aimed to select the more impressive examples that we were most familiar with, so the selection is biased towards people we know personally and from the first two years of our existence (Feb 2011 – Feb 2013). We’re exploring the career changes we have caused among our readers and coachees more broadly through our impact survey and upcoming coaching evaluations. Nevertheless, we think this collection of examples is a good proof of concept. They show that talking to people about our ideas in the context of a community can lead to significant changes of career plan, more thoughtfulness and stronger intentions to make a difference.

They also help estimate a lower bound on our impact. Just considering those who switched to pursuing earning to give, we’ve already tracked donations of ~$150,000 to GiveWell recommended charities or effective altruist organisations.

The amount donated over the next couple of years seems clearly set to rise.
* The people already donating can expect substantial salary increases as they move into their second and third years in employment.
* Richard and Adam have only just entered employment.
* Sam Bankman-Fried has accepted a job at a proprietary trading firm, and is on track to donate as much as Tim.
* Matt’s startup is in an incubator, and he has legally bound himself to donate 33% of his exit value.

Given this, we’re confident that more than $1mn will be donated by this group in the next 3 years.

We think there is also substantial value among those not pursuing earning to give:

  • One is a Marshall scholar, and starting a promising academic career.
  • One went to work at GiveWell.
  • One has founded a network to promote effective altruism in healthcare.

In addition, we played a substantial role in the creation of Animal Charity Evaluators, which performs research into the most effective ways to promote animal welfare and now has an annual budget of $80,000. ACE developed out of Effective Animal Activism, which was founded by an intern at 80,000 Hours during their internship. 80,000 Hours contributed to the initial concept for the charity and provided it with technical support, as well as assistance fundraising and hiring full-time staff. Moreover, EAA was legally part of 80,000 Hours for 6 months, before being spun-off and independently registered.

The full stories are below.

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5 ways to make a big difference in any career

Blog post by · Published February 3rd, 2014

Soup_kitchen

At 80,000 Hours, we’re focused on finding the very best opportunities for you to do good with your career. We’re worried that sometimes this continuous focus can be demoralising. After all, it’s hard to find the best opportunities. Moreover, we’re worried that sometimes our members lose sight of the fact that you can make a big difference in any career.

We don’t mean spending your birthday volunteering at a soup kitchen, giving seniors the ‘gift’ of your art, or buying a charity wristband. We mean you can transform the lives of hundreds of other people, in any career.

So, we decided to write this note explaining how…

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80,000 Hours is hiring: careers analyst job available

Blog post by · Published January 31st, 2014

Oxfordimage

As we continue to expand our team in Oxford, we are looking for someone to join 80,000 Hours full time as a Careers Analyst. Details of all the positions we’re offering can as always be found on our recruitment page.

This is your chance to help us fulfill our mission of helping thousands of the most talented and dedicated people work on solving the world’s most pressing problems. That’s a big project, and we’re growing fast, so we’re looking for bright and ambitious people to join us. If this sounds like something you’d like to be part of, then apply to work for us!

You can read more about the position below. For more on why working at 80,000 Hours is an incredible opportunity, see Why work for 80,000 Hours?

Details of the role

As an 80,000 Hours Careers Analyst, you will play a key part in growing the organisation as we expand over the coming years. We are looking for someone to become part of our founding team, in order to:

  • Give one-on-one coaching to amazing people who want to change the world, as part of our case studies.

  • Do research into ?nding the most promising career opportunities in the world.

  • Promote our research in the international media, online and through other outreach.

  • Monitor our impact.

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Case study: can I earn more in software or finance?

Blog post by · Published January 30th, 2014

Software

Jessica is a software engineer at Google, who donates much of her income to GiveWell recommendations and 80,000 Hours. She plans to continue pursuing earning to give, and came to us wondering whether she might be able earn more using her skills; in particular by switching into finance or moving to Silicon Valley.

Summary of lessons learned

We found:

  • An engineer at Google can expect to earn about $150-$200 p.a. after 3 years of experience, which will then grow at 2-6% p.a. afterwards.
  • Google engineers are among the most highly paid engineers in big companies.
  • Google engineers do not appear to earn more in Silicon Valley compared to major East Coast cities, although software engineers on average earn more in the Valley.
  • She may be able to earn more by switching into finance, but we need to do more research.

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Interview with leading HIV vaccine researcher – Prof. Sir Andrew McMichael

Blog post by · Published January 28th, 2014

Introduction

Andrew McMichael

Continuing our investigation into medical research careers, we interviewed Prof. Andrew McMichael. Andrew is Director of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, and focuses especially on two areas of special interest to us: HIV and flu vaccines.

Key points made

  • Andrew would recommend starting in medicine for the increased security, better earnings, broader perspective and greater set of opportunities at the end. The main cost is that it takes about 5 years longer.
  • In the medicine career track, you qualify as a doctor in 5-6 years, then you work as a junior doctor for 3-5 years, while starting a PhD. During this time, you start to move towards a promising speciality, where you build your career.
  • In the biology career track, get a good undergraduate degree, then do a PhD. It’s very important to join a top lab and publish early in your career. Then you can start to move towards an interesting area.
  • After you finish your PhD is a good time to reassess. It’s a competitive career, and if you’re not headed towards the top, be prepared to do something else. Public health is a common backup option, which can make a significant contribution. If you’ve studied medicine, you can do that. People sometimes get stranded mid-career, and that can be tough.
  • An outstanding post-doc applicant has a great reference from their PhD supervisor, is good at statistics/maths/programming, and has published in a top journal.
  • If you qualify in medicine in the UK, you can earn as much as ordinary doctors while doing your research, though you’ll miss out on private practice. In the US, you’ll earn less.
  • Some exciting areas right now include stem cell research, neuroscience, psychiatry and the HIV vaccine.
  • To increase your impact, work on good quality basic science, but keep an eye out for applications.
  • Programming, mathematics and statistics are all valuable skills. Other skills shortages develop from the introduction of new technologies.
  • Good researchers can normally get funded, and Andrew would probably prefer a good researcher to a half million pound grant, though he wasn’t sure.
  • He doesn’t think that bad methodology or publication bias is a significant problem in basic science, though it might be in clinical trials.

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Has 80,000 Hours helped you?

Blog post by · Published January 27th, 2014

We want to find out.

We’re doing a survey to understand how we may have helped readers like yourself. This will help us measure our impact. We take this really seriously, because we want to know how effective we are, and how our service can be improved.

If you’ve found our content useful, please give us five minutes of your time in support.

If you haven’t found our content useful, we also really want to hear from you. This is your chance to tell us what we should do different.

Take our survey before midnight January 31st, and we’ll enter you in a draw to win $100 as an Amazon Gift Card or donation to a charity of your choice.

Take our survey

The full results will be published on the blog.

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80,000 Hours is hiring! Lead Developer and tech/design interns needed

Blog post by · Published January 24th, 2014

As we continue to expand our team in Oxford, we are seeking three new team members to join us some time between March and September this year:

  1. A Lead Developer to develop our website as a paid employee

  2. A tech intern to work on a range of web projects as a member of our Graduate Volunteer Scheme

  3. A design intern to illustrate our ideas as a member of our Graduate Volunteer Scheme

Wholeteam1

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Reasoning about influence in politics

Blog post by · Published January 23rd, 2014

Understanding a politician’s influence at first appears to be hopelessly tangled. A politicians’ influence is very tenuously related to the vote they can cast in parliament, and is mediated by a complicated process involving respect for precedent, social consensus, explicit and implicit negotiation, explicit and implicit appeals to popular opinion, and so on. Fortunately, on closer inspection many of these challenges can be ameliorated.

In the following research notes, we introduce an argument that the naive answer is about right: if there are 100 politicians with one vote each, then each politician has about 1% of the total impact of the politicians.

The result is highly useful in making estimates of the influence you might expect to have by becoming a politician, or indeed in any situation when a group of people negotiate over an outcome e.g a company board setting strategy, or a committee of grant makers allocating funding.

Note that the following are only preliminary research notes that were made while doing a case study, and not the results of in-depth analysis, so we’re cautious about the conclusion. Nevertheless, we’re keen to share the ideas and seek feedback.

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Which cause is most effective?

Blog post by · Published January 21st, 2014

In previous posts, we explained what causes are and presented a method for assessing them in terms of expected effectiveness.

In this post, we apply this method to identify a list of causes that we think represent some particularly promising opportunities for having a social impact in your career (though there are many others we don’t cover!).

We’d like to emphasise that these are just informed guesses over which there’s disagreement. We don’t expect the results to be highly robust. However, you have to choose something to work on, so we think it’ll be useful to share our guesses to give you ideas and so we can get feedback on our reasoning – we’ve certainly had lots of requests to do so. In the future, we’d like more people to independently apply the methodology to a wider range of causes and do more research into the biggest uncertainties.

The following is intended to be a list of some of the most effective causes in general to work on, based on broad human values. Which cause is most effective for an individual to work on also depends on what resources they have (money, skills, experience), their comparative advantages and how motivated they are. This list is just intended as a starting point, which needs to be combined with individual considerations. An individual’s list may differ due also to differences in values. After we present the list, we go over some of the key assumptions we made and how these assumptions affect the rankings.

We intend to update the list significantly over time as more research is done into these issues. Fortunately, more and more cause prioritisation research is being done, so we’re optimistic our answers will become more solid over the next couple of years. This also means we think it’s highly important to stay flexible, build career capital, and keep your options open.

In the rest of this post we:
1. Provide a summary list of high priority causes
2. Explain what each cause is and overview our reasons for including it
3. Explain how key judgement calls alter the ranking
4. Overview how we came up with the list and how we’ll take it forward
5. Answer other common questions

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The Value of a Degree

Blog post by · Published January 15th, 2014

Introduction

Many of our readers are students, and some have come to us wondering whether they should start a university degree or complete one they have already started. One thing to consider in making this decision is what effect getting a degree will have on your lifetime earnings. So in this post we summarise our reading of some of the empirical literature on this question, mostly focused on the UK.

Summary

  • There appears to be a consensus in the empirical literature that getting a degree provides a large financial return on the costs in increased lifetime earnings (generally better than an investment with a 10% return and maybe closer to 15%).

  • The most common way of studying the question of economic returns is to use correlations in data containing information on education, earnings and other variables (performing “ordinary least square regression” on it).

  • The obvious worry with this method is that the same abilities that help earn a higher income might cause people to go to university rather than the other way around. This is called ability bias. The standard view in the literature, however, is that this issue only has as minor effect on estimates of the return to education.

  • The literature here supports the common sense position that an undergraduate degree is generally a good investment in your career.

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Neglectedness and impact

Blog post by · Published January 14th, 2014

Summary

Let’s suppose there’s a cause that you care about much more than society at large. In your eyes, that cause is neglected. All else equal, you should have more positive impact by working on a neglected cause, because other people won’t already be taking the best opportunities within it. But how much more positive impact can you expect?

The following is a set of research notes we made while performing a case study, which we’re making available for feedback on our thinking. It argues for a simple result: If you care about an output K times more than society at large, then (all else equal) you should expect investing in gaining that output to be K times more effective than making other investments.

For instance, most people don’t put a high weight on avoiding animal suffering. Let’s suppose you do. In fact, you estimate that you care about it roughly 10 times more than the average person (i.e. you would be satisfied investing 10 times the amount of resources to avoid the same amount of animal suffering compared to the average person). Then, you should expect that investing to end animal suffering is, all else equal, roughly 10 times more effective than making other investments.

This seems like it might be a highly relevant consideration in picking causes. If the argument is correct then, all else equal, we should expect more neglected causes to be more effective. Our current position is that the arguement below shows that we should weight neglectedness to some extent in picking causes, but we’re not yet sure how highly we should weight it because we’re not sure: (i) how important neglectedness, as modelled in this way, is compared to other considerations we could investigate (ii) how tractable it is to investigate.

The research note also explores how important this consideration is to members of 80,000 Hours, the effect of adding further considerations, and how the result might be applied in practice.

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Case study: choosing between working at effective altruist organisations, earning to give, and graduate school

Blog post by · Published January 9th, 2014

Introduction

Back in May 2013, I realized I would be graduating in a year and wondered a lot about what I should pick for my first career. The questions I had at the time were:

1.) Should I aim to work in an effective altruist organisation, go to graduate school, or should I earn to give?

2.) Where should I look for employment if I want to earn to give — law, market research, or programming?

I spent a little time considering other options (finance and consulting careers), but the bulk of my time was spent comparing EA org employment, grad school, and the three earning to give careers.

Lessons learned

  • Direct work in EA is promising, but there are limited employment opportunities and a generally strong base of talent to draw from that makes replaceability an issue.

  • Graduate school also seems promising, but programs with high direct impact seem limited in employment opportunities.

  • It’s important to consider factors about the career other than salary when doing earning to give. Law was my best earning to give opportunity at first glance, given that it had the highest salary of the options I was willing to consider. But when I looked more deeply at non-salary factors, it became my worst option.

  • Market research and computer programming are my most promising paths and I should consider both further. They allow good salary potential while offering many other benefits.

  • Publishing my ongoing thought process was valuable in ways I couldn’t even imagine at the time, creating the opportunity to meet people I couldn’t have met otherwise.

  • Spending time directly in Oxford was also incredibly valuable in meeting with people that could help me think through my decision process.

  • An analytically-minded person can train in programming quickly enough to seriously consider programming as a career path. While I started with intermediate computer programming knowledge in irrelevant computer languages, it took me about 150 hours of training over 20 weeks to know enough to interview competently. I don’t know if this is a unique case, though.

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Research into the earnings of software engineers

Blog post by · Published January 6th, 2014

Software

Introduction

We recently did a case study for an individual who has worked at Google for several years in an East Coast city, earning between US$140k and US$180k, and donating a large fraction to GiveWell recommended charities and 80,000 Hours. They asked us the following questions about their expected earnings in software engineering:

  1. What are my prospective earnings if I continue as an engineer at Google?
  2. Could I earn more by moving to Google HQ in California?
  3. Could I earn more by joining a start-up in Silicon Valley?
  4. Could I earn more by becoming a programmer in finance?

We interviewed five people about these questions (see full details at the end of this post) and did a simple analysis on Glassdoor. In this post we present notes on our findings.

Summary of findings

In summary, we found:

  1. They can expect their salary to increase 2-6% per year if they stay at Google.
  2. They probably can’t earn more by moving to Google HQ in the Bay Area, though we encouraged them to ask more people about this.
  3. They can probably expect to earn more by joining a start-up. But we’re still investigating this issue so aren’t confident.
  4. We’re unsure whether they can earn more by entering finance, though there is potential for significant salary increases so we recommended they speak to a head-hunter, and eventually apply to several companies.

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A framework for strategically selecting a cause

Blog post by · Published December 19th, 2013

Introduction and summary

We could have all the influence in the world, but if we focus on the wrong opportunity, we’re not going to have much impact.

How can we make sure we work on good opportunities in our careers? At 80,000 Hours, we think it’s really useful for most people to work on picking a cause to support in their career. By cause, we mean a set of opportunities for making a difference such that the people working on them tend to share common knowledge, skills and core values.

But how can we compare causes in terms of potential for impact? In this post, we present our answer, which we think differs considerably from how people normally go about choosing a cause, which focuses mainly on personal passion. Your degree of passion is important, but it’s just one factor among several others, which we’ll describe in this post.

Our answer to how you can compare causes in terms of the impact you can have with your human or financial capital, is in the form of a framework you can apply. Note that what follows is just our current best answer – it’s likely to change, and involves many judgement calls that some people may not agree with.

In a later post, we’ll apply this framework to a selection of causes we think are particularly promising.

In summary, we think you should look for the best overall combination of the following three factors, the names of which we took from GiveWell Labs:

  1. Important: If we make more progress on this cause, the world will be made a better place. By ‘world made a better place’ we mean that lots of people will be made better off in important ways. Causes can also be important indirectly, because progress on them lets us make progress on other important causes or provides valuable information about which causes are best.

  2. Tractable: There are definite interventions to make progress within this cause, with strong evidence behind them For instance, there are definite opportunities for progress, backed by widely accepted theory, randomised control trials or a track record of success.

  3. Uncrowded: If we add more resources to the cause, we can expect more promising interventions to be carried out. Uncrowded causes are often undervalued or neglected by society. There may be a shortage of important actors within the cause.

We think you can assess causes by:
* Assessing these factors and their subfactors by asking experts and gathering other relevant data (e.g. data about how many people are affected by a problem, how many people are working on the cause).
* Drawing on cost-effectiveness and benefit-cost analyses prepared by the Copenhagen Consensus, JPAL and other academic research.
* Using the results of GiveWell Labs, which aims to assess causes from the perspective of a donor (with the caveat that the best areas to lead your career within are likely to be different from the best areas to donate to).

In the rest of this post:
* We explain why we picked these factors and further explain what we mean by them
* We give a summary checklist of criteria you can use to compare causes
* We suggest how it might be practically applied
* We sketch how we came up with it

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An interview on which skills most boost your employability

Blog post by · Published December 17th, 2013

Satvik8

We recommend reading the following interview by Peter Hurford (an 80,000 Hours coachee, and volunteer at CEA) with Satvik Beri. Peter performed the interview as part of research into his career decision. We post it here because Satvik has invested a lot of thought into how to maximise his earnings in order to do earning to give, and we think he adds some new considerations to the discussion.

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A comparison of medical research and earning to give

Blog post by · Published December 13th, 2013

Introduction and Summary

We recently did a case study with Ramit (see the full case study write up here). He was wondering whether to start a medicine degree, with the aim of going into research, or to continue in finance doing earning to give, where he already has a job as a quant researcher earning in the range of $150,000 per year.

We did an in-depth comparison of the expected impact of the two paths to help him decide. The rest of this post contains our case study research notes on the comparison.

If forced to guess now, we lean in favor of earning to give, though we think it’s very high priority to gain more information. Ramit is going to try to better assess his degree of fit with medical research, perhaps by working as a researcher during the summer, and learn more about his earnings prospects in finance by making applications and speaking to a headhunter. We’ll review our decision when we find out more.

In the rest of the post, we explain our reasoning:

  1. We outline our general approach
  2. We define a number of factors to compare the two options
  3. We evaluate the two paths based on the factors
  4. We make our overall conclusions

Note that there were several potentially important issues we didn’t address, including job satisfaction and which path is best for career capital in careers besides finance and research.

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Why pick a cause?

Blog post by · Published December 10th, 2013

Introduction

We normally find our coachees benefit from picking a cause as part of their career planning, like global health or mitigating climate change, which they can use to compare their career options. Why?

In this post, we outline four reasons to pick a cause. In our one-on-one coaching, the idea of picking a cause has been something that many people hadn’t heard of, or thought about, and hearing about it has led to some significant career changes.

Note that when we say “pick a cause” we mean make an educated best guess (or perhaps pick 2 or 3 causes you find it difficult to choose between). We don’t mean pick a cause and stick to it for ever. Nothing in career choice is certain, so don’t get hung up on uncertainty. Make a best guess and be prepared to revise it.

In the rest of the post, we overview our reasons for picking a cause:

  1. Picking a cause is one of the best things you can do to increase your impact.
  2. We think picking a cause provides you with a useful level of direction in planning your next steps, which is neither too narrow nor too broad.
  3. Picking a cause seems to be a useful way to narrow down careers based on personal factors and deeply held value judgements.
  4. Having a cause can be motivating.

We’ll also give a couple of other lines of evidence.

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More evidence on the competitiveness of charity jobs

Blog post by · Published December 4th, 2013

Introduction

Here’s a short report, “Charities: Passion and skills in aid of a good cause,” on changes in the nonprofit sector’s employment landscape. The report provides evidence of increased competition over jobs, which is attributed to strong interest among recent graduates, greater professionalization across the sector, higher salaries, and an increase in the number of business people switching into nonprofit positions.

The report was published in 2008 by the Financial Times, but our sense is that the trends described have likely continued. The report features excerpts from an interview with a recruiter specialising in nonprofit careers.

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Economics PhD the only one worth getting?

Blog post by · Published December 2nd, 2013

Introduction

Here’s a case for doing an Economics PhD by Noah Smith, professor of finance at Stony Brook University. We think it’s an interesting argument, though there’s much more we need to investigate to work out whether this is an especially promising path for 80,000 Hours members. Regardless, we think that many of our readers will find this article and several of the embedded links useful.

If you’re persuaded, Smith also coauthored a guide on how to get into an Economics PhD program.

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Summary of our thoughts on how to pick a degree

Blog post by · Published November 27th, 2013

Introduction

I recently came across this post, which prompted me to summarise our current thoughts on how to pick an undergraduate degree.

I’d like to caveat that most of the following is just a judgement call, based on listening to what thoughtful, successful people have said about the topic (e.g. see here, here), my experiences of coaching, and thinking through the issues. Where there is further research on the claims, I’ve linked to it. Otherwise, assume it’s just my judgement call. Note that I don’t think I’m going to say anything that’s particularly controversial or against common sense.

In summary – what’s best?

It’s highly important to go to a prestigious university, do something you’re good at (which probably means picking something enjoyable and motivating) and use free time to meet people and learn useful skills.

With this constraint in mind, and if you broadly want to keep your options open, try to do the most impressive subject you can, ideally one which gives you skills in applied maths, statistics or programming. Top subjects would be things like: Maths (especially if combined with applied courses), Physics, CompSci, Engineering, Economics and Pre-Med. If you’ll hate these subjects or find them really hard, however, it’s probably best not to do them!

Note that there’s a tension between academic success and gaining connections, work experience and other skills. If you’re interested in a research career, then go for academic success. Otherwise, concentrate on getting ‘good enough’ grades (a 2.1 in the UK or a GPA around 3.4 in the US), and use the rest of your time to meet interesting people, get useful skills and do something impressive. That’s because our impression is that most employers value these traits more than good grades.

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