Survey of EA org leaders about what skills and experience they most need, their staff/donations trade-offs, problem prioritisation, and more.

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.

I’d really like to hear more about other EA orgs experience with hiring staff. I’ve certainly had no problem finding junior staff for Rethink Priorities, Rethink Charity, or Charity Science (Note: Rethink Priorities is part of Rethink Charity but both are entirely separate from Charity Science)… and so far we’ve been lucky enough to have enough strong senior staff applications that we’re still finding ourselves turning down really strong applicants we would otherwise really love to hire.

I personally feel much more funding constrained / management capacity constrained / team culture “don’t grow too quickly” constrained than I feel “I need more talented applicants” constrained. I definitely don’t feel a need to trade away hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in donations to get a good hire and I’m surprised that 80K/CEA has been flagging this issue for years now. …And experiences like this one suggest to me that I might not be alone in this regard.

So…

1.) Am I just less picky? (possible)

2.) Am I better at attracting the stronger applicants? (doubtful)

3.) Am I mistaken about the quality of our applicants such that they’re actually lower than they appear? (possible but doubtful)

Maybe my differences in cause prioritization (not overwhelmingly prioritizing the long-term future but still giving it a lot of credence) contributes toward getting a different and stronger applicant pool? …But how precise of a cause alignment do you need from hires, especially in ops, as long as people are broadly onboard?

I’m confused.

Echoing David, I'm somewhat sceptical of the responses to "what skills and experience they think the community as a whole will need in the future". Does the answer refer to high impact opportunities in general in the world or only the ones who are mostly located at EA organisations?

I'm also not sure about the relevance to individual EA's career decisions. I think implying it might be relevant might be outright dangerous if this answer is built on the needs of jobs that are mostly located at EA organisations. From what I understand, EA organisations have had a sharp increase in not only the number, but also the quality of applications in recent times. That's great! But pretty unfortunate for people who took the arguments about 'talent constraints' seriously and focused their efforts on finding a job in the EA Community. They are now finding out that they may have little prospects, even if they are very talented and competent.

There's no shortage of high impact opportunities outside EA organisations. But the EA Community lacks the knowledge to identify them and resources to direct its talent there.

There are only a few dozen roles at EA orgs each year, nevermind roles that are a good fit for individual EA's skillset. Even if we only look at the most talented people, there are more capable people the EA Community isn't able to allocate among its own organizations. And this will only get worse - the EA Community is growing faster than jobs at EA orgs.

If we don't have the knowledge and connections to allocate all our talent right now, that's unfortunate, but not necessarily a big problem if this is something that is communicated. What is a big problem is to accidentally mislead people into thinking it's best to focus their career efforts mostly on EA orgs, instead of viewing them as a small sliver in a vast option space.

I've volunteered to submit a comment to the EA Forum from a couple anonymous observes which I believe deserves to be engaged.

The model this survey is based on implicitly creates something of an 'ideal EA,' which is somebody young, quantitative, elite, who has the means and opportunities to go to an elite university, and has the personality to hack very high-pressure jobs. In other words, it paints a picture of EA that is quite exclusive.

The median view was that the Long-Term Future fund was twice as effective as the EA Community fund

This strikes me as an odd statement to make, given that - so far - the two funds have essentially operated as the same fund and have given donations to the exact same organizations with the exact same stated purposes. That being said, I agree it’s reasonable to expect the grantmaking of the funds to diverge under the forthcoming new management and maybe this expectation is what is being priced in here.

Looking at this part -

"We did include more people from organisations focused on long-termism. It’s not clear what the right method is here, as organisations that are bigger and/or have more influence over the community ought to have more representation, but we think there’s room for disagreement with this decision."

I think one potential reason there are more people interested in EA working at LTF organisations is that EA and LTF are both relatively new ideas. Not many people are considering careers in these areas, so it is much easier for a community to found and staff the majority of organisations.

If global development had been ignored until 5 years ago, it's very likely most of the organisations in this area would be founded by people interested in EA, and they might be over represented in surveys like this.

There may be talent gaps in other cause areas (beyond development and animals) that are missed out as they don't have leaders with EA backgrounds but that doesn't mean that those gaps should be under weighted.

It may be worth having a separate survey trying to get opinions considering talent gaps in priority areas whether they are led by people involved in EA or not.

I find the term 'operations' to be chunky and plausibly misleading in a survey such as this where it might take on quite different meanings for different people and organizations depending on the specific needs it refers to, for example, in this article: https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/

Insofar as it is feasible, I would love to see it broken up into different parts, as it seems to me that it can refer to a lot:

-People in operations roles act as multipliers, aiming to enable those in the organisation to maximise their productivity. They oversee the functions crucial to every top performing organisation, such as management, overseeing budgets, helping to hire and train new staff, and so on.
-Great operations people are “systems builders” — they create and manage repeatable processes that keep the organisation functioning at a high level. This means they require significant creativity, self-direction and social skills, as well as conscientiousness.

&

...Creating a financial system.

Project management.

Creating a productive office.

Executive assistants.

Events.

HR & Hiring.

Interesting that the Long Term Future Fund is thought of as the most cost effective fund, even though the cause area is considered one of the least funding constrained. Sounds like there are still some pretty amazing opportunities for donations in that area!

I am curious about the finding of "government and policy experts" being perceived as a priority for the EA community as a whole, but not for individual organizations. The speculation in the report offers some scenarios as to what is meant by the respondents rating this highly, but I haven't seen comments here that address this open ended question.

I comment as someone with government and policy background exploring the EA community over the last year or so with curiosity. I think I'm mid-career and looking at effective giving strategies, but trying to read more on policy roles within EA.

We surveyed managers at organisations in the community to find out their views. These results help to inform our recommendations about the highest impact career paths available.

How much weight does 80,000 Hours give to these survey results relative for other factors which together form 80k's career recommendations?

I ask because I'm not sure managers at EA organizations know what in the near future their focus area as a whole will need, and I think 80k might be able to exercise better independent judgement than the aggregate opinion of EA organization leaders. For example, there was an ops bottleneck in EA that is a lot better now. It seemed like orgs like 80k and CEA spotted this problem, and drove operations talent to a variety of EA orgs. But independent of one another I don't recall other EA orgs which benefited from this push helping to solve this coordination problem in the first place.

In general, I'm impressed with 80k's more formal research. I imagine there might be pressure for 80k to give more weight to softer impressions like what different EA org managers think the EA movement needs. But I think 80k's career recommendations will remain better if they're built off a harder research methodology.