Summary

After over 2 years of operations, High Impact Engineers (HI-Eng) is reverting to a volunteer-led organisational model due to a middling impact outcome and a lack of funding. We wanted to thank all our subscribers, supporters, and contributors for being the driving force behind HI-Eng’s achievements, which you can read about in our Impact Report.

What is High Impact Engineers?

High Impact Engineers (HI-Eng for short, pronounced high-enj) is an organisation dedicated to helping (physical - i.e. non-software) engineers increase their ability to have an outsized positive impact through their work.

Why Is HI-Eng Winding Down?

In December 2023, we sent out a community survey and solicited case studies and testimonials to evaluate our impact, which we wrote up in our Impact Report. As shown in the report, there is some evidence of behavioural and attitudinal changes in our members towards more impactful career outcomes due to interactions with our programmes, as well as some ongoing career transitions that we supported to some extent, but even after consultations with grantmakers and other community builders, we found it difficult to determine if this amount of impact would meet the bar for ongoing funding.

As a result, we decided to (re-)apply for funding from the major EA funds (i.e. EAIF and Open Philanthropy), and they ended up deciding to not fund High Impact Engineers. Since our runway from the previous funding round was so short, we decided against trying to hire someone else to take over running HI-Eng, and the team is moving on to new opportunities.

However, we still believe that engineers in EA are a valuable and persistently underserved demographic, and that this latent potential can be realised by providing a hub for engineers in EA to meet other like-minded engineers and find relevant resources. Therefore, we decided to maintain the most valuable and impactful programmes through the help of volunteers.

Lessons Learnt

There are already many resources available for new community builders (e.g. the EA Groups Resource Centre, this, this, this, and this EA Forum post, this Google doc of links, and especially this post by Sofia Balderson), so we don’t believe that there is much we can add that hasn’t already been said. However, here are some lessons we think are robustly good:

1. Having a funding cycle of 6 months is too short.
2. If you’re looking to get set up and running quickly, getting a fiscal sponsor is great. We went with the Players Philanthropy Fund, but there are other options (including Rethink Priorities and maybe your national EA group).
3. Speak to other community builders, and ask for their resources! They’re often more than happy to give you a copy of their systems, processes and documentation (minus personal data).
4. Pay for monthly subscriptions to software when setting up, even if it’s cheaper to get an annual subscription. You might end up switching to a different software further down the line, and it’s easier (and cheaper) to cancel a monthly subscription.
5. Email each of your subscriptions’ customer service to ask for a non-profit discount (if you have non-profit status). They can save you up to 50% of the ticket price.

(Jessica will write up her own speculative lessons learnt in a future forum post).

What Will HI-Eng Look Like Going Forward?

Jessica will continue managing HI-Eng as a volunteer, and is currently implementing the following changes in our programmes:

• Email newsletter: the final HI-Eng newsletter was sent in May. Future impactful engineering opportunities can be found on the 80,000 Hours job board or the EA Opportunities board. Any other impactful engineering jobs can be submitted to these boards (submissions for 80k; submissions for EA Opportunities board)
• Slack: the High Impact Engineers Slack will be integrated into the #role-physical-engineers channel on EA Anywhere. All the resources from the HI-Eng Slack will be cross-posted.
• Podcast: the HI-Eng podcast Engineered for Impact will remain available on YouTube, but will no longer be available on podcasting platforms from June 2024.
• Website and resources: the website and resources will remain available. Volunteers will be able to contribute to researching and writing up more detailed pages on how engineers can contribute to different cause areas, although these will be updated much more sporadically.
• Career conversations: volunteers have been onboarded and trained to help advise career conversations.
• Meetups at EA conferences: volunteers will be found to help run meetups for engineers at future EA conferences.

Past Achievements

We met with around 350 individual engineers online and at EA conferences over the course of two years, which we found were the main driving force facilitating career changes in our members (see the survey analysis in our Impact Report). Our newsletter and Slack grew to at least 270 members each. We held meetups at 15 EA conferences totalling 225 attendees (with some overlap due to attendees attending multiple EA conferences) and released 16 podcast episodes interviewing engineers doing high-impact work with over 1000 downloads across podcasting platforms. We produced 15 resource portal pages across 9 cause areas exploring where engineers can have an outsized impact in different cause areas and contributed to resources for engineers on the 80,000 Hours and Effective Thesis websites.

However, the value and impact of HI-Eng originates from our amazing network. HI-Eng members have achieved many incredible accomplishments, including:

• Being accepted onto AIM’s Charity Entrepreneurship incubator, Founding to Give incubator, and Research Training programme
• Being accepted onto BlueDot Impact’s various courses and the EU Tech Policy Fellowship
• Starting local High Impact Engineers / Engineers for Impact groups in Kenya, Denmark, and the UK
• Conducting volunteer research projects for GovAI and ALLFED
• Being accepted onto the Princeton School for Science and Global Security
• Landing roles in cause areas ranging from alternative proteins to policy advocacy to climate change

The organising team has no doubt that HI-Eng members will continue to have an amazing impact through their endeavours, and we are honoured and grateful to have shared this journey with all our members and supporters.

History of the Organisation

High Impact Engineers originated as EA Engineers at EAGxBoston 2022 (April 1st-3rd) with a Discord server, newsletter, and career 1-1s. We soon migrated to Slack with a rebrand to High Impact Engineers in July 2022, relaunching at EAG SF 2022. We applied for a 6-month planning grant from the EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), which was approved in early September 2022.

After implementing some pilot projects following our theory of change, we re-applied for EAIF funding in early March 2023 for a longer grant but we were only approved for another 6 months of funding. In early November 2023, we re-applied for EAIF funding but were rejected. Applications to other sources of funding were also rejected. This difficulty to raise funding combined with our middling amount of impact contributed to our decision to transition HI-Eng to a volunteer-led model so that we can continue to provide value to the community at minimal cost.