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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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An attempt to create a new AMF

Blog post by · Published November 25th, 2013

There are several health interventions that have been found in academic papers to have a cost-effectiveness that’s similar or better than distributing insecticide treated bed-nets, but which lack a high quality charity to implement them. For someone with the right entrepreneurial skills, it could be extremely effective to create such a charity.

One example of a promising intervention is using mass media to promote positive health behaviours. Development Media International is attempting to become a highly effective, transparent, scalable charity that implements this intervention.

Clara Marquardt, a member of Giving What We Can, recently interviewed Will Snell, a member of 80,000 Hours and the Director of Public Engagement & Development at DMI.

Before scaling up, DMI decided to gather more evidence about the effectiveness of using mass media to promote health, since the existing evidence is patchy. In the interview, Will explains how DMI overcame numerous challenges to design, fund and carry out a $12mn randomised control trial into the effectiveness of their program. He also explains the story and mission of DMI, giving an insight into the advantages and challenges of running an impact-focused charity.

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Careers advice from top tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen

Blog post by · Published November 21st, 2013

We just came across a series of four careers advice posts by Marc Andreessen (hat tip, Satvik Beri).

We’re always on the look out for thoughtful careers advice from very successful individuals aimed at people looking to make a big impact – we think it’s one of the best sources of careers advice, and we think these posts qualify. Andressen co-authored Mosaic (the first web browser), founded Netscape, and then led a successful career in venture capital.

The advice is particularly orientated towards people who want to enter the technology industry, which we think is a particularly promising path to social impact.

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Interview with malaria vaccine researcher Katie Ewer

Blog post by · Published November 20th, 2013

Introduction

A recent case study candidate asked us whether he should enter vaccine research. As part of our research for that study, we contacted the Jenner Institute, an international centre based in Oxford that develops vaccines for infectious diseases . Our aim was to interview one of the scientists to better understand how careers in this sector tend to go, and to get their thoughts on a variety of important questions (especially those concerning vaccines) for our case study candidate to cross-check against other interviews we have done with medical researchers.

Katie Ewer, a cellular immunologist based at the Institute, agreed to talk to us. We sent her a list of questions by email (see the appendix), and discussed them on Skype. Below, we present a summary of her responses and key quotes from the Skype call.

Key updates for us

  • Katie was less keen on starting your career by studying medicine than our previous interview, because she didn’t think the benefits are worth the lost time, which made us less certain about this question.
  • We updated slightly in favor of the idea that most of the benefits of doing vaccine research on a specific disease are flow through effects i.e. advances in one vaccine have many benefits for other vaccines, reducing pandemic risk, and medical research more generally. This suggests that ability at research is relatively more important than the priority of the research question than we previously thought.
  • Katie suggested without prompting that research into neglected tropical diseases might be particularly neglected, which fits with previous research done by Giving What We Can into the Sabin Vaccine Institute.
  • Katie, as with everyone else we’ve spoken to, said that strong motivation by the subject is very important, because the work is tough and the pay is low.
  • Katie thought that the vast majority of people would be better off supporting research through earning to give than by becoming researchers, though talented people should do research, which fits with our view.
  • A useful way to test out a medical research career is to take a research assistant job over the summer.
  • We found that careers in medical research might be more flexible than we had first thought.

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Career Opportunities for Economics PhDs

Blog post by · Published November 18th, 2013

Introduction

This post presents some research notes we made while investigating the value of economics PhDs. We were motivated to do this research because we have some reasons to think that an economics PhD is a particularly good way to build career capital and keep one’s options open. We have coached several individuals who are considering applying to economics PhD programs. We lacked information about a) how useful an economics PhD is for high impact careers outside of academia and b) how important attending a top ranked program is for different career options. With more information, we can be more confident in determining whether an economics PhD or an alternative is the best option in individual cases.

Summary

Key findings from our research are:

  • A majority (about 60%) of economics PhDs place into academic positions immediately following graduate school. About one-in-six place into government, and a similar percentage place into the private sector. Very few place into nonprofits or think tanks.

  • Program tier does not appear to affect what sector one places into, but placement types can vary widely between individual programs.

  • Within academia, professorships in top departments are largely held by graduates of top tier programs. For example, twenty-six percent of faculty at the top 15 departments earned their PhDs at Harvard or MIT.

  • One-in-three professors at LSE and Oxford, top ranked departments outside of the US, went to a 1st tier program in the US.

  • Prestigious awards within economics tend to go to individuals who graduated from top-ranked programs.

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Interview with a Cambridge Professor of Medical Genetics on research careers

Blog post by · Published November 14th, 2013

Introduction

I recently interviewed John Todd, a Professor of Medical Genetics at Cambridge, as part of a series of interviews we’re carrying out for a case study. The aim of the series is to find out what key people in the field think about:

  1. What opportunities are best in the medical research field?
  2. What’s the balance between talent constraints and funding constraints?
  3. Who’s a good fit for medical research?
  4. Would our case study candidate be a good fit?
  5. How to go about this kind of career

Summary

The main points made in this interview were:

  1. John would prefer a good person in his lab to an extra £0.5mn in annual funding. Generally, there are enough grants, so finding good people is a bigger constraint than money.
  2. People with both medical knowledge with statistical and programming skills are highly sought after.
  3. Within medical research, it’s not straightforward to try to “pick” an area to work on and it changes quickly, though there are some broad strategies to use (e.g. pick diseases neglected by pharma, take a longer term perspective, avoid bandwagons)
  4. If you want to fund medical research, it would be difficult to beat going with the Wellcome Trust or Gates Foundation. Likewise, if you want to find the best areas to work on, these foundations are a good start.
  5. Getting an MD, then doing a PhD as a registrar is a good way in. If you have programming and statistics, you don’t need the PhD.
  6. He prefers Academia to Pharma.

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Case study: Working in the financial sector to promote a flourishing long-term future

Blog post by · Published November 13th, 2013

Introduction

This post is a write up of an in-depth case study, exploring one person’s decision about where to work in the financial sector, from the perspective of helping the long-run future.

Key recommendations made

  • If you particularly care about long-run impacts, these are some of the interventions that have been pursued.
  • We rate cause prioritisation research and advocacy as high priority (to be explained in an upcoming post)
  • If you’re pursuing prioritisation research within finance and don’t want to pursue earning to give, then we recommend generally aiming to build career capital, building a community of people who support prioritisation, and promoting areas of social finance that seek to assess the social value of different projects. Though note that this is a judgement call.

What we learned

  • We prepared this list of ways that people are trying to improve the far future.
  • The direct impact of doing ‘impact investing’ (attempting to invest in socially beneficial companies) doesn’t seem high relative to donations to cost-effective charities, but the industry might be improvable, could produce useful research and could move more resources into altruistic causes (as we’ll explain in an upcoming report).
  • Impact investing seems like a reasonable area for someone looking to build career capital and promote prioritisation, though we don’t have much confidence in this.

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Live Q&A in Oxford with Dame Stephanie Shirley

Blog post by · Published November 11th, 2013

Introduction

We recently held a public Q&A with Dame “Steve” Shirley at our Oxford student group.

In the talk, Dame Stephanie filled us in on her fascinating life, which includes pioneering work in tech entrepreneurship (during which time she took on the name “Steve” in order to secure meetings in the male dominated industry, and built a company of 300 female programmers), followed by a philanthropic career in which she has founded 5 non-profits, became the first UK Ambassador of Philanthropy, and donated £67mn (primarily towards fighting Autism but also interdisciplinary research into the social consequences of the internet at the Oxford Internet Institute). She plans to donate 95% of her wealth.

We held the talk in order to hear about the career ideas of someone extremely successful in areas that are particularly interesting to us (tech entrepreneurship and philanthropy).

This blog post highlights three questions and responses that are of particular interest to our members.

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What should you do with a very large amount of money?

Blog post by · Published November 6th, 2013

A philanthropist who will remain anonymous recently asked Nick Beckstead, a trustee of 80,000 Hours, what he would do with a very large amount of money.

Nick, with support from Carl Shulman (a research advisor to 80,000 Hours), wrote a detailed answer: A long-run perspective on strategic cause selection and philanthropy.

If you’re looking to spend or influence large budgets with the aim of improving the world (or happen to be extremely wealthy!) we recommend taking a look. It also contains brief arguments in favor of five causes.

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Thoughts on my experience working at GiveWell

Blog post by · Published November 4th, 2013

Introduction

In this post, I offer some thoughts on my experience working at GiveWell. I’ve had a number of different people ask me about this, and I think many people interested in effective altruism are curious about working there. So I thought I would explain my views in detail so that others who are thinking about working there have more information.

Summary

In summary:

  1. I worked at GiveWell for two months in 2012, during which time I mainly did literature reviews and constructed cost-effectiveness models for a few different interventions (breast-feeding promotion, vaccination for neonatal tetanus, vaccination for meningitis, and vaccination for measles).

  2. While there, I primarily learned about how to do a literature search, how to evaluate research (especially causal attribution in economics), and how to construct cost-effectiveness models. I also learned a lot about how to run an effective organization in general, which may have been the most valuable part of the experience.

  3. For people who may be a good fit and have the opportunity to work at GiveWell, I recommend trying it without hesitation. I believe that working at GiveWell is an outstanding opportunity for personal development and having an impact. I also found it a very enjoyable place to work.

  4. I didn’t end up working at GiveWell because the work they wanted me to do didn’t line up well with the work that I wanted to do, working there offered me less autonomy than my best alternative (working at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford), and I believed that working at the Future of Humanity Institute would offer me more job security and options in the future.

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Why consider becoming a trader?

Blog post by · Published October 30th, 2013

Introduction

The following is an article by 80,000 Hours member, Joe Mela, about (i) why he thinks trading can be better than other finance jobs (ii) what the work’s like (iii) who might especially suit it. Joe has over 5 years experience in trading, and was keen to share his perspective with other 80,000 Hours members on why this might be an especially promising career path.

Summary

In summary, Joe thinks:

If you have excellent quantitative skills, have yet to start your career, and are thinking of earning to give, you should consider going into a hedge fund or proprietary trading firm to trade stocks or other assets. You can reach a seven figure bonus within five years by working on interesting problems. You’ll work with really smart, focused people and have transferable skills if you choose to leave.

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Linearity – a useful assumption in evaluating careers and causes

Blog post by · Published October 28th, 2013

Introduction

When analysing the good done by different paths, we’ve often found it useful to assume that the value of your resources are linear – i.e. donating $2mn is roughly twice as good as $1mn, persuading two people to support a cause is roughly twice as good as persuading one person, and so on. For more in-depth examples, see our upcoming analysis of the value of becoming a politician or this analysis of the ethics of consumption.

This assumption, however, faces a number of objections. In this post, Paul Christiano, a Research Associate at 80,000 Hours, responds to these objections to linearity, arguing that it’s normally a reasonable approximation to make.

What do I mean by “linearity”?

More precisely, the assumption is:

The value of a resource is very likely to be linear when considering changes that are a small fraction of the current supply of that resource; is very likely to be diminishing through most of the range; and is likely to be increasing only as you come to control the majority of that resource, and even then only in some cases.

In the abstract it’s not a very objectionable sounding claim, but below I go over a few common objections in particular cases.

Note that “current supply” means resources that would be used in the pursuit of similar goals. When it seems like the current supply is negligibly small, I think we are probably drawing the boundaries wrong: don’t consider money being spent on a very narrow cause, consider money being sensibly spent on improving the world, etc. In the most extreme case, where the relevant supply of resources really is tiny, then this number will still be driven up by incidentally relevant behavior by people with completely different goals.

Of course I don’t think this is an ironclad law, but in practice I rarely believe objections people make against local linearity. That said, there is lots of room for me to revise my views here.

First, I should say that linearity seems to be the right prior presumption. If we do something twice, a priori we should suppose that the second time we do it will have the same (expected) effect as the first time we do it. So I see my role here (at least with respect to linearity) as defending the prior presumption from various objections that might be raised.

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