I am too young and stupid to be giving career advice, but in the spirit of career conversations week, I figured I'd pass on advice I've received which I ignored at the time, and now think was good advice: you might be underrating the value of good management! I think lots of young EAish people underrate the importance of good management/learning opportunities, and overrate direct impact. In fact, I claim that if you're looking for your first/second job, you should consider optimising for having a great manager, rather than for direct impact. Why? * Having a great manager dramatically increases your rate of learning, assuming you're in a job with scope for taking on new responsibilities or picking up new skills (which covers most jobs). * It also makes working much more fun! * Mostly, you just don't know what you don't know. It's been very revealing to me how much I've learnt in the last year, I think it's increased my expected impact, and I wouldn't have predicted this beforehand. * In particular, if you're just leaving university, you probably haven't really had a manager-type person before, and you've only experienced a narrow slice of all possible work tasks. So you're probably underrating both how useful a very good manager can be, and how much you could learn. How can you tell if someone will be a great manager? * This part seems harder. I've thought about it a bit, but hopefully other people have better ideas. * Ask the org who would manage you and request a conversation with them. Ask about their management style: how do they approach management? How often will you meet, and for how long? Do they plan to give minimal oversight and just check you're on track, or will they be more actively involved? (For new grads, active management is usually better.) You might also want to ask for examples of people they've managed and how those people grew. * Once you're partway through the application process or have an offer, reach out to current employees fo

An excerpt about the creation of PEPFAR, from "Days of Fire" by Peter Baker. I found this moving.

This passage from David Roodman's essay Appeal to Me: First Trial of a “Replication Opinion” resonated: I had a similar realisation towards the end of my studies which was a key factor in persuading me to not pursue academia. Also I've mentioned this before, but it surprised me how much more these kinds of details mattered in my experience in industry. Skipping over to his recap of the specific case he looked into:

GiveWell did their first "lookbacks" (reviews of past grants) to see if they've met initial expectations and what they could learn from them: (While I'm very glad they did so with their usual high quality and rigor, I'm also confused why they hadn't started doing this earlier, given that "okay, but did we really help as much as we think we would've? Let's check?" feels like such a basic M&E / ops-y question. I'm obviously missing something trivial here, but also I find it hard to buy "limited org capacity"-type explanations for GW in particular given total funding moved, how long they've worked, their leading role in the grantmaking ecosystem etc) Their lookbacks led to substantial changes vs original estimates, in New Incentives' case driven by large drops in cost per child enrolled ("we think this is due to economies of scale, efficiency efforts by New Incentives, and the devaluation of the Nigerian naira, but we haven’t prioritized a deep assessment of drivers of cost changes") and in HKI's case driven by vitamin A deficiency rates in Nigeria being lower and counterfactual coverage rates higher than originally estimated:

I notice a pattern in my conversations where someone is making a career decision: the most helpful parts are often prompted by "what are your strengths and weaknesses?" and "what kinds of work have you historically enjoyed or not enjoyed?" I can think of a couple cases (one where I was the recipient of career decision advice, another where I was the advice-giver) where we were kinda spinning our wheels, going over the same considerations, and then we brought up those topics >20 minutes into the conversation and immediately made more progress than the rest of the call to that point. Maybe this is because in EA circles people have already put a ton of thought into considerations like "which of these jobs would be more impactful conditional on me doing a 8/10 job or better in them" and "which of these is generally better for career capital (including skill development, networks, and prestige)," so it's the conversational direction with the most low-hanging fruit. Another frame is that this is another case of people underrating personal fit relative to the more abstract/generally applicable characteristics of a job.