Happy to see this being discussed :) I may come back and write more later, but a couple quick points:

• I've been having lots of convos with different people in this vein, and am feeling optimistic there's growing momentum behind recognizing the importance of recruiting mid+ career professionals -- not as a matter of equity and diversification, but as one of bringing critical and missing talent into the movement. I think EA has, on the whole, significantly overvalued "potential" and significantly undervalued "skills" and "capacities" in the past.
• One of the advantages of the funding overhang is that it creates an opportunity to "remove the excuse" for people to not switch to direct work. It is a very big mistake IMO to be arbitrarily limiting salaries for talented professionals to well under market (for what purpose?). It seems like this is increasingly recognized and orgs are developing more context-sensitive approaches to compensation -- accordingly, I think it's something of a mistake to provide an anticipated salary range (generally below what I would expect mid-career professionals to be paid, I'd add) and describe it as a potential downside of moving to direct work. It's mentioned in the post but bears repeating: IF MONEY IS THE ONLY THING HOLDING YOU BACK FROM A CAREER IN DIRECT WORK, TALK TO PEOPLE IN THE COMMUNITY ABOUT THIS -- there is flexibility here.

Thank you so much for writing this up, Ben! There are many things that ring true to me, being in my 40s. I'd like to add other misconceptions I experienced:

• Misconception: EA is only for young people
  • Reality: Although joining a local group can make you feel as if you're sticking out age-wise this will change if you join EAG conferences, especially the mid- and late-career meetups there. Conferences are a great place to start meeting people in similar career positions. Also just sending emails to people you are interested in directly often leads to you being able to have a call. The 80k career call is also a good place to get introduced.
• Misconception: I will be viewed differently because of my age
  • Reality: After overcoming my own fear of being judged for my age I found out that EAs are generally welcoming and open. I now find myself joining EA meetings more often than ones with my former peers because of the shared interest and good discussion culture. I neither see myself as being penalized nor having special privileges for being older. For example, job applications seem very standardized and fair.
• Misconception:  Working for an EA org means moving if I'm not in an existing hub
  • Reality: While some organisations want to have staff on the ground, others are fully or partially remote. With more co-working spaces popping up it may even be possible to join EAs in your city while working remotely for an EA org in your specialist area.
• Misconception: EA orgs are small and mainly need specialists
  • Reality: While many EA orgs have 5 or fewer employees more and more are getting funding to scale up. This means there is more demand for knowledge around organisation building and scaling as well as additional support staff roles. At EAG London I heard about jobs that hadn't been published yet and was able to apply. Prior to the conference, I hadn't even considered these roles as operation roles seemed very limited in scope.
• Misconception: I can do more good by earning to give
  • Reality: This is really hard to evaluate but after talking to some experienced people at EAG I suspect there are still many people who undervalue their potential for direct work. With new organisations scaling up and the need for bigger projects ("megaprojects") wanted by funders not being met, I think we're seeing a skill gap, especially in entrepreneurship and management. Some people should forgo their current income in order to take jobs that funders are very willing to pay.

Some things that come to mind that might help mid-career people:

• Meetings/Calls with people that were in similar situations and are now working in EA-aligned jobs
• Possibilities to explore EA-work while taking a sabbatical, e.g. by doing research projects in an EA hub, joining an 80k career group for people of the same age, doing skilled volunteering
• Writeups of more success stories of mid-career people changing jobs
• Talks from mid-career people in EA-jobs at EA job place groups
• Retreats for mid-career people interested in switching with speakers that have done the transition
• More volunteering opportunities that enable getting to know organisations

I hope to be able to contribute to getting more mid-career people into direct EA work and have offered High Impact Professionals to support them in that area. Additionally, I'm also always happy to chat with people about this and to make introductions.

An important point here is that if you're considering this move, there's a decent/good chance you'll be able to find career transition funding so that you can have 3-12mo of runway during which you can full-time talk to people, read lots of stuff, apply to lots of things, etc. after you quit your job, so that you don't have to burn through much or any of your savings while trying to make the transition work.

I endorse this direction for my domain (software)

I'd like to emphasise something you said as a side note but seems really important to me: 

"if salary is blocking you..."

Or if anything else is blocking you - tell someone. The EA orgs are often unaware. At least one EA org explicitly asked me if I think salaries are preventing people from applying.

The EA orgs really need feedback on what is preventing people from applying, this is a blind spot for them and a pain point for the community, please be one of the people who share what is blocking you (even anonymously, or PM me, I'll ask some follow up questions like "what salary would get you to apply?" or so, and then I'll pass it on anonymously)

Nice post! I think that I agree with all of the specific points you made, that they seem in aggregate pretty useful+important to say, and that in future I'll probably send this post to at least 5 people when giving career advice.

But here are two criticisms:

• I think you don't state explicitly what you mean by "EA work"?
  • And I'm guessing at least 25% of readers will consciously or unconsciously interpret it as "work at explicitly EA orgs", but I'm also guessing you in fact mean it as something like "work that's motivated by impartial altruism and would be seen by many EAs as plausibly the highest impact choice for the person could take right now".
  • E.g., I'm guessing you'd include things like roles in the US government or running for political office in cases where those things either plausibly have very high net positive impact or are great for the person's career capital and the person aims to use that career capital impactfully later.
  • I think it's already the case that many people unfortunately conflate "impactful role" with "role at an EA org", and also that many people get annoyed at "EA insiders" for appearing to do so (e.g., I think 80k has sometimes been criticised based on perceptions of this).
  • So if I were you, I'd probably have defined "EA work" early on and explicitly flagged that it includes but is not limited to work at EA orgs.
  • (To be clear, I do think mid-career people - as with everyone else should also strongly consider switching to working at EA orgs specifically! They should just consider both that and impactful roles elsewhere.)
• I think much/most of the advice/info provided in this post is ~exactly as relevant to early-career people as to mid-career people. This is of course itself a good thing - just adds to its usefulness! - but it also makes me feel like maybe therefore this either should've been split into two posts or should've had a different title?
  • I expect most of the people I'll want to share this with in future will be early-career, since that's most of the people I come across in EA and give career advice to. I'll probably just clarify each time that most (though not all) of the contents are really just as relevant to early-career people and the title is just a bit misleading.

(Disclaimer-ish thing: I work with Ben at Rethink Priorities.)

This topic looks really interesting to me as a mid-career person who would prefer to work on something that improves the world rather than something that is in the end driven by profit. The post gives me the impression that there are lots of interesting research-y jobs out there that actually try to improve the world without requiring a big financial sacrifice and for which people without the exact skills needed for the job might still have a chance.

This raises a big "too good to be true" red flag for me. There are lots of people who would prefer to do research rather than some random commercial job, especially if it was on a topic relevant to improving the world. That is witnessed by the armies of people who would want to do a research job in academia despite the high pressure and mediocre pay. If these jobs are really as good as this post describes I would expect there to be lots of people trying to get in and thus it not being worth the effort for me to try to apply without exactly the right skills.

So, what's the catch? Or what am I missing here?

So here's a question I've been thinking about. Suppose I pivot to full-time EA work at one of the funded EA organizations described here. I have a good time and make the world a better place by delivering safe AI to a few customers. However, my organization of choice ends up being too longtermist to turn a profit, the funding from the Future Fund runs out, or whatever, and I need to find something more stable to support myself and my (future--hopefully!) family.  How do I sell the experience I gained at an EA company to mainstream stable employers (like at a bank or a top tech company)?

I really appreciate you writing this post, especially since you note "I focus on mid-career people here partly because I think EA career advice for mid-career people is undersupplied at the moment."

I agree with the implication that more resources should be dedicated to outreach to mid-career people, especially since senior management/mentorship seems to be a bottleneck for causes like AI safety. To that end, efforts like these seem valuable!

With this post almost a year old now, I was curious if any of the commenters who were interested in switching to EA-related work have pursued this route. If so:

• Have you been hired?
• What was the job seeking process like for you?
• Any recommendations to other mid-career professionals looking to pursue this path?

Question to the author (or someone else who made a similar transition): how much more/less motivated are you for your "EA work" versus your old "non-EA work" on a day to day basis?

Super glad you wrote this up! The over-representation of young people in EA might in some ways be due to more university outreach and early career resources. Overall, reaching out to mid-career professionals would require different methods - more articles like what you've written here.

Thank you! This post is hyper relevant to me right now - I'm mid career in finance, earning to give, it's OK but don't necessarily love it, thinking of alternatives, part of what's holding me back is the sense that I would do much less good elsewhere (and also a general risk aversion born of earlier-in-life relative poverty, admittedly). This has provided some helpful food for thought. 

As a fellow mid-career person looking at moving into EA, and agreeing that ‘EA career advice for mid-career people is undersupplied at the moment’, I found this post and the comments below really valuable - thanks for taking the time to write it up!

I wanted to pick up on Patrick’s point around specialist vs generalist, as to me this seems a key part of the issue. Much as it is the case that EA tends younger, but seems inclusive of older people, it does also seem to skew specialist. This is understandable, given there are a lot of practitioner roles that will require large amounts of specialist knowledge. It’s interesting that this comment talks about more generalist roles being mentioned at EAG that haven’t been publicised. I wonder if it is more likely that specialist roles get ‘officially’ publicised, while the more generalist ones are likelier to not be, maybe to the extent of only living in someone’s head in the style, ‘we could really do with someone to help us out on operations…’

What I would find really useful as more of a generalist is advice around ‘here’s how to use your skill stack to get a job in EA’. This exists to a certain extent in career profiles like on 80k, but not always with the context of ‘this is essential from day 1, this is essential but you can learn it on the job, this will make your life easier, this is something you would only use once a month in practice…’ And it does feel like particular types of roles that could appear in any sector of work (e.g. operations roles) get less coverage than those that specialise in a particular sector (e.g. AI researcher) If I get an EA job, I promise to write something around this! I’ll drop a couple of you a line about this later.

On the ‘quit your job and try things out’ approach - I’ve seen a couple of posts around interim funding. This could be really useful, but from my own situation, the issue isn’t so much runway but whether I would give up a reasonably effective job for the chance of something that may be much better. How do you really distinguish between the genuine difference in impact you might have against loss aversion? How many jobs are there that would be better and how many people are chasing them? For mid-career people, it feels like runway may be less of an impact relative to the knowledge you may be giving up something with a guaranteed impact, even if it may not be optimal, on the basis of uncertain factors. 

Thanks again for spending a few hours writing this one.

Hey, this is interesting. Have you thought about writing a piece for mid-level impact driven, EA inspired people that are at a cross-road and want to up their impact / leverage / effectiveness? A lot of EA 'recruitmemt' focuses on students and early career starters but we see a lot of people dropping out of the funnel of impacteers. How can we keep them motivated so that they continue with their ambition and drive? And empower them to take the next step on their EA journey? I would love to hear your thoughts.