New releases

Drawing on similarities between an individual planning their career and a startup business, we’ve realised the importance of learning and adapting to change early in your career. Rigid career plans don’t seem that useful, and could even be harmful – but you do still need some means of direction and motivation for the future.

One promising solution we’ve found is the idea of having a “career model”: identifying your aims and values, and making a best guess of how you might achieve them. What’s key is that this model is designed to be tested and adapted as you learn.

Hopefully you’ve seen by now that 80,000 Hours is hiring!

In addition to the positions advertised previously, we’re also looking for a Finance Manager and Director of Fundraising. Both would be full-time paid positions based in Oxford, and you’d be working across both 80,000 Hours and our sister organisation Giving What We Can.

The deadline for all positions is Friday 16th August at 5pm GMT.

How do you even begin going about trying to assess the impact of a career?

It might seem impossible. But if you don’t try to weigh up your options, you’ll end up doing far less for the world than you could otherwise.

It’s not an easy question, but it is a fascinating one that has a great deal of importance for the world. After talking one-on-one with around 100 people about their careers, asking people who have made a big impact, and thinking through what matters, we’ve developed an initial simple framework for assessing the value of different careers.

We want to change the world by revolutionising something incredibly important: the way people think about and spend their careers. Our mission is to help talented and dedicated people have the biggest possible positive impact with their careers. This is 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!

We’re changing how we do our career coaching. For at least the next couple of months, we’re only going to be coaching one or two people each week, but we’re going to spend up to a week of research on each one. We call these our case studies.

Why the change? Why are we going to turn away at least 80% of our coaching requests? This post explains how and why our new approach will be more in depth.

Effective Animal Activism (EAA) will now become entirely independent from 80,000 Hours, and has a separate board of trustees consisting of Brian Tomasik, Eitan Fischer and Rob Wiblin.

In the rest of this post, I let Jon explain the new mission and direction of the organisation.

Want to really add value and innovate in international development? AidGrade, a fantastic new organisation with precisely this aim, are currently hiring.

If making a huge difference using your quantitative skills sounds like something you’re interested in, read on for a full description from Eva of what AidGrade are looking for and offer.

The concept of Earning to Give was featured in the Washington Post last week. See the article here.

In combination with Peter Singer’s TED talk on effective altruism, which mentions 80,000 Hours, we’ve been receiving very heavy and sustained web traffic – over 10,000 visitors in just two weeks.

The Washington Post article generated a number of high profile responses, including an opinion piece in the New York Times, a piece in the National Review, and a mention on Daily Mail Online – the world’s most read online newspaper. (Unfortunately they call us 8,000 Hours!)

There was much praise for the idea of Earning to Give and Effective Altruism, as well as the dedication of the people mentioned. Many of the criticisms, including those reflected more generally in the comments, are criticisms or misunderstandings we have addressed many times in the past, for instance in our FAQ about Earning to Give, in this series of three blog posts, and in Will’s original paper.

Peter Singer gave a TED talk on “The Why and How of Effective Altruism,” which you can watch here, which mentions 80,000 Hours.

It’s been interesting to look at people’s reactions both on the TED website, and on YouTube…