#75 – Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours

Since it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and offer more personalised advice. We try to help people get clear on the most plausible paths for them, the key uncertainties they face in choosing between them, and provide resources, pointers, and introductions to help them in those paths.

I (Michelle Hutchinson) joined the team a couple of years ago after working at Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute, and these days I’m 80,000 Hours’ Head of Advising. Since then, chatting to hundreds of people about their career plans has given me some idea of the kinds of things it’s useful for people to hear about when thinking through their careers.

We all thought it would be useful to discuss some of those on the show for others to hear. Among other topics we cover:

  • The difficulty of maintaining the ambition to increase your social impact, while also being proud of and motivated by what you’re already accomplishing.
  • Why traditional careers advice involves thinking through what types of roles you enjoy followed by which of those are impactful, while we recommend going the other way: ranking roles on impact, and then going down the list to find the one you think you’d most flourish in.
  • That if you’re pitching your job search at the right level of role, you’ll need to apply to a large number of different jobs. So it’s wise to broaden your options, by applying for both stretch and backup roles, and not over-emphasising a small number of organisations.
  • Our suggested process for writing a longer term career plan: 1. shortlist your best medium to long-term career options, then 2. figure out the key uncertainties in choosing between them, and 3. map out concrete next steps to resolve those uncertainties.
  • Why many listeners aren’t spending enough time finding out about what the day-to-day work is like in paths they’re considering, or reaching out to people for advice or opportunities.

I also thought it might be useful to give people a sense of what I do and don’t do in advising calls, to help them figure out if they should sign up for it.

If you’re wondering whether you’ll benefit from advising, bear in mind that it tends to be more useful to people:

  1. With similar views to 80,000 Hours on what the world’s most pressing problems are, because we’ve done most research on the problems we think it’s most important to address.
  2. Who don’t yet have close connections with people working at effective altruist organisations.
  3. Who aren’t strongly locationally constrained.

If you’re unsure, it doesn’t take long to apply and a lot of people say they find the application form itself helps them reflect on their plans. We’re particularly keen to hear from people from under-represented backgrounds.

Want to talk to one of our advisors?

We speak to hundreds of people each year and can offer introductions and answer specific questions you might have. You can join the waitlist here:

Request a career advising session

Also in this episode:

  • I describe mistakes I’ve made in advising, and career changes made by people I’ve spoken with.
  • Rob and I argue about what risks to take with your career, like when it’s sensible to take a study break, or start from the bottom in a new career path.
  • I try to forecast how I’ll change after I have a baby, Rob speculates wildly on what motherhood is like, and Arden and I mercilessly mock Rob.

It continues to be awe inspiring to me how many people I talk to are donating to save lives, making dietary changes to avoid intolerable suffering, and carefully planning their lives to improve the future trajectory of the world. I hope we can continue to support each other in doing those things, and appreciate how important all this work is.

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris.
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell.
Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.

Highlights

The difference in impact between different jobs

One thing I find myself talking about quite a bit is the difference in impact there might be between different jobs and also between different cause areas. I think maybe because the kinds of things that we do in everyday life are not that different from each other. I think that the instinct that people often bring to career choice and maybe other areas of life is finding a whole bunch of options which seem to do at least some good and then thinking through which of these seem the most appealing, without looking too much into how much better some are for the world than others. If the thing you’re working on is reducing the burden of AIDS, it’s hugely different whether you do that by working on late stage complications of AIDS like Kaposi’s sarcoma versus on giving out antiretrovirals or giving out condoms.

And then I think if you compare across causes, you can get, again, potentially a hundred times multiplier by looking at an area that’s hugely neglected. So at 80,000 Hours we tend to think that risks that could wipe out the whole of humanity tend to be radically under investigated and underfunded to how much they should be for a whole host of reasons, partly being very speculative, partly that people tend to have incentives to work on things that are nearer-term rather than things that will affect the world in a hundred years. But I think thinking through what you think the comparative impact of working in these different areas are is actually extremely important if you care about helping people as much as you can. I try to typically get people to flip their framing a bit of this to rather than think through, “What are a whole host of jobs that you think would do some good and then which seem most appealing”, to think through, “What things do you think are very most impactful and then rank them” and then at that point, start thinking through, “Okay, which of these do I think I might be personally well suited for”, because I think that difference in framing is going to really prime you for going for these jobs that are hundreds of times more impactful than others.

We're not just excited about our priority paths

I think people often assume that we’re only really excited about our priority paths which are listed explicitly on the website which is definitely not the case. One of the things that’s going on there is that it’s pretty difficult to figure out where people can have most impact. And so we’ve tried pretty hard to find some examples where we think some particular type of role could absorb quite a lot of people and still be amongst the most important things. But I think actually, it’s the case that most of the most important roles are plausibly going to be ones where there’s only a few people who could easily go into them. Or only a few people are needed. Or they’re just the type of roles or careers that we haven’t yet found or haven’t yet worked out are particularly impactful. And those are obviously very difficult to describe.

The value of encouragement

One thing that people are surprised that we talk about quite a bit in advising calls and that ends up being a useful function of them is providing people with encouragement. I think a lot of people feel wary of applying to particularly competitive options, particularly given that they might know statistical evidence of people, in general, being overconfident. But that means that I actually get quite a few advisees who feel that they obviously wouldn’t be able to get some competitive option and so they’re not even going to apply for it. And so talking to them and saying, “Well, it’s worth at least trying out, even if it’s pretty unlikely”. And then providing encouragement also for trying different kinds of options and for feeling better about the types of options that you go for can be pretty important.

I think the types of people who are trying hard to have as much impact as they can in the world are just very prone to compare themselves to the absolute most impressive person they can find. I absolutely feel the pull of this. While I worked at the Global Priorities Institute, my manager was Hilary Greaves who was the academic director and it was incredibly hard not to be wishing all the time that I was Hilary Greaves. Whereas that’s actually not that useful compared to thinking through what’s the best thing that I could be doing. And also people tend to see the ways in which they’re falling short compared to other people rather than the ways they’re doing well compared to other people. So I find it pretty important to encourage people to be feeling better about the types of roles that they’re going into. And also just to generally remember that the kinds of people that we’re talking about who are trying to help the world as much as possible are just typically doing hugely important things. Many of them, for example, are giving away large amounts of money that can buy bed nets to save multiple lives per year. It’s absolutely incredible that we’re in a position to do that and that people are willing to do that when they could be keeping the money for themselves. I think it’s really important that people realize how important that is and don’t just feel bad for the fact that they could be doing something else even better or different.

Interpersonal comparisons

A big thing that feels worrying to me is not being able to quite separate the things that you could do in theory if you tried harder from the things that you could do if you were simply a different person. And particularly for the people who are around you and doing similar kinds of jobs, it’s actually quite useful to have some sense of, “Oh my colleague’s doing really well at this particular thing because they did a statistics MOOC in their spare time. Maybe I should do that and generally learning from them”, versus, “Oh, actually they’re just a different kind of person”. Partly because that could be in ways that we usually think of as malleable. So it could be that some of my colleagues work several hours a day longer than me but that actually be a total mistake for me to try and work longer hours because I would get more burnt out or whatever. So I think part of this is coming from a kind of sensible intuition misfiring.

Common mistakes

One thing that I somewhat frequently see is people who think that some particular area is probably the highest impact one for them to go into but don’t feel terribly passionate about it and therefore relatively quickly rule it out. I think that seems more problematic because I think there’s this really big difference in terms of how impactful different kinds of things are. But then I also think it comes back to this thing about people having some trouble introspecting before having tried something out as to how much they’ll like it. So I really try hard to push people if they’re in that kind of position. To think through specifically what kinds of things drive their motivation and whether there would be ways of being happy working in this area that they think is highest impact that would still motivate them. Because I think people are very different in terms of what kinds of things motivate them. So some people need to be seeing the beneficiaries in front of them all the time and that’s going to make it very difficult for you, for example, to work on a long-term horizon. Whereas other people, so I tend to be the kind of person who’s very motivated by not letting my team down, which means that I can work in quite a lot of different areas. And then also by generally feeling like I’m helping people.

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About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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