N.B. You may be interested to read our follow-up post: Many EA orgs say they place a lot of financial value on their previous hire. What does that mean, if anything? And why aren't they hiring faster?
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For the third year running we've surveyed leadership at EA organisations about a range of issues where their views might be relevant to EAs’ career decisions:
It complements the 2018 EA Survey which aims to collect information about everyone who says "they can, however loosely, be described as an effective altruist."
We asked leaders about:
- what skills and experience they most need;
- what skills and experience they think the community as a whole will need in the future;
- how many donations they'd be willing to forego for their latest hires;
- their view on the relative cost-effectiveness of the different EA Funds, and which new funds they'd like to see;
- how urgent their need for extra donations and staff is;
- and various other issues.
We also surveyed people who identify as members of the EA community and work directly on problems like animal welfare and poverty, to see how their views on some of these questions would compare.
Here are some of the findings:
- EA organisation leaders said experience with operations or management, and generalist researchers are what their organisations will need most of over the next five years.
- They said the community as a whole will most need more government and policy experts, operations experience, machine learning/AI technical expertise, and skilled managers.
- Most EA organisations continue to feel more 'talent constrained' than funding constrained, rating themselves as 2.8/4 talent constrained and 1.5/4 funding constrained.
- Leaders thought the key bottleneck for the community is to get More dedicated people (e.g. work at EA orgs, research in AI safety/biosecurity/economics, ETG over $1m) converted from moderate engagement. The second biggest is to increase impact of existing dedicated people through e.g. better research, coordination, decision-making.
- We asked leaders their views on the relative cost-effectiveness of donations to four funds operated by the community. The median view was that the Long-Term Future fund was twice as effective as the EA Community fund, which in turn was 10 times more cost-effective than the Animal Welfare fund, and twenty times as cost-effective as the Global Health and Development fund. Individual views on this question varied very widely, though 18/28 respondents thought the Long-Term Future fund was the most effective.
- In addition, we asked several community members working directly on animal welfare and global development for their views on the relative cost-effectiveness of donations to these funds. About half these staff thought the fund in their own cause area was best, and about half thought either the EA Community fund or Long-Term Future fund was best. The median respondent in that group thought that the Animal Welfare fund was about 33% more cost-effective than the Long-Term Future fund and the EA Community fund - which were rated equally cost-effective - while the Global Health and Development fund was 33% as cost effective as either of those two. However, there was also a wide range of views among this group.
- The organisations surveyed were usually willing to forego over a million dollars in additional donations to get the right person in a senior role 3 years earlier, or several hundred thousand dollars for a junior hire.
Continue reading for details of the method and results...
Most answers were similar to what we found in 2017, so next year we expect to either ask different questions or interview a smaller number of people in greater depth and see whether their responses change after further reflection.
Continuing on the EA talent paradox (“EA orgs need talent but many EAs can’t get hired at EA orgs”), I’m confused why 80,000 Hours is continuing to bemoan earning to give. I get that if someone could be an FHI superstar or earn to give at $50K/yr they should go join FHI and I get that there are many awesome career paths outside of EA orgs and outside ETG that should be explored. Maybe in the past ETG was too much of an easy auto-default and we want to pressure people to consider more of their options. But ETG is an easy auto-default for a reason and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that ETG is genuinely the highest impact option for >50% of the population of people who are EA enough to, e.g., fill out the EA Survey!
It seems pretty discouraging to EAs to make them feel bad about what is a genuinely a really great option. I think we may have overcorrected too strongly against ETG and it may be time to bring it back as a very valid option among the top career paths, rather than “only for people who can donate $1M/yr or more” or “the auto-default for everyone”.
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Edited to add that it looks like 80K seems to actually promote ETG in the way I recommend - see https://80000hours.org/articles/high-impact-careers/#5-otherwise-earn-to-give - but I don't think this is communicated very clearly outside that section of that article. In general, I get the sense that ETG has become depressing and low-status in EA when it was once high-status, and I'd like to see that trend reversed at least somewhat.
Hi Peter,
It sounds like you mostly agree with our take on earning to give in the high impact careers article. That article is fairly new but it will become one of the central pages on the site after a forthcoming re-organisation. Let us know if there are other articles on the site you think are inconsistent with that take - we can take a look and potentially bring them into line.
We agree with you that earning to give can be a genuinely great option and don’t intend to demoralize people who choose that path. As we write in that article, we believe that “an... (read more)