Quick takes

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

  I've now spoken to  ~1,400 people as an advisor with 80,000 Hours, and if there's a quick thing I think is worth more people doing, it's doing a short reflection exercise about one's current situation.  Below are some (cluster of) questions I often ask in an advising call to facilitate this. I'm often surprised by how much purchase one can get simply from this -- noticing one's own motivations, weighing one's personal needs against a yearning for impact, identifying blind spots in current plans that could be triaged and easily addressed, etc.   A long list of semi-useful questions I often ask in an advising call   1. Your context: 1. What’s your current job like? (or like, for the roles you’ve had in the last few years…) 1. The role 2. The tasks and activities 3. Does it involve management? 4. What skills do you use? Which ones are you learning? 5. Is there something in your current job that you want to change, that you don’t like? 2. Default plan and tactics 1. What is your default plan? 2. How soon are you planning to move? How urgently do you need to get a job? 3. Have you been applying? Getting interviews, offers? Which roles? Why those roles? 4. Have you been networking? How? What is your current network? 5. Have you been doing any learning, upskilling? How have you been finding it? 6. How much time can you find to do things to make a job change? Have you considered e.g. a sabbatical or going down to a 3/4-day week? 7. What are you feeling blocked/bottlenecked by? 3. What are your preferences and/or constraints? 1. Money 2. Location 3. What kinds of tasks/skills would you want to use? (writing, speaking, project management, coding, math, your existing skills, etc.) 4. What skills do you want to develop? 5. Are you interested in leadership, management, or individual contribution? 6. Do you want to shoot for impact? H

EU opportunities for early-career EAs: quick overview from someone who applied broadly I applied to several EU entry programmes to test the waters, and I wanted to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I'm still uncertain about, hoping to get some insights. Quick note: I'm a nurse, currently finishing a Master of Public Health, and trying to contribute as best I can to reducing biological risks. My specialisation is in Governance and Leadership in European Public Health, which explains my interest in EU career paths. I don’t necessarily think the EU is the best option for everyone. I just happen to be exploring it seriously at the moment and wanted to share what I’ve learned in case it’s useful to others. ⌨️ What I applied to & how it went * Blue Book traineeship – got it (starting October at HERA.04, Emergency Office of DG HERA) * European Committee of the Regions traineeship – rejected in pre-selection * European Economic & Social Committee traineeship – same * Eurofound traineeship – no response * EMA traineeship (2 applications: Training Content and Vaccine Outreach) – no response * Center for Democracy & Technology internship – no response * Schuman traineeship (Parliament) – no response * EFSA traineeship – interview but no feedback (I indicated HERA preference, so not surprised) If anyone needed a reminder: rejection is normal and to be expected, not a sign of your inadequacy. It only takes one “yes.” 📄 Key EA Forum posts that informed and inspired me * “EAs interested in EU policy: Consider applying for the European Commission’s Blue Book Traineeship” * “What I learned from a week in the EU policy bubble” – excellent perspective on the EU policymaking environment 🔍 Where to find EU traineeships All together here: 🔗 https://eu-careers.europa.eu/en/job-opportunities/traineeships?institution=All Includes Blue Book, Schuman, and agency-specific roles (EMA, EFSA, ECDC...). Traineeships are just traineeships: don’t underestimate what

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.

Hey everyone! As a philosophy grad transitioning into AI governance/policy research or AI safety advocacy, I'd love advice: which for-profit roles best build relevant skills while providing financial stability? Specifically, what kinds of roles (especially outside of obvious research positions) are valuable stepping stones toward AI governance/policy research? I don’t yet have direct research experience, so I’m particularly interested in roles that are more accessible early on but still help me develop transferable skills, especially those that might not be intuitive at first glance. My secondary interest is in AI safety advocacy. Are there particular entry-level or for-profit roles that could serve as strong preparation for future advocacy or field-building work? A bit about me: – I have a strong analytical and critical thinking background from my philosophy BA, including structured and clear writing experience – I’m deeply engaged with the AI safety space: I’ve completed BlueDot’s AI Governance course, volunteered with AI Safety Türkiye, and regularly read and discuss developments in the field – I’m curious, organized, and enjoy operations work, in addition to research and strategy If you've navigated a similar path, have ideas about stepping-stone roles, or just want to chat, I'd be happy to chat over a call as well! Feel free to schedule a 20-min conversation here. Thanks in advance for any pointers!

Having a savings target seems important. (Not financial advice.) I sometimes hear people in/around EA rule out taking jobs due to low salaries (sometimes implicitly, sometimes a little embarrassedly). Of course, it's perfectly understandable not to want to take a significant drop in your consumption. But in theory, people with high salaries could be saving up so they can take high-impact, low-paying jobs in the future; it just seems like, by default, this doesn't happen. I think it's worth thinking about how to set yourself up to be able to do it if you do find yourself in such a situation; you might find it harder than you expect. (Personal digression: I also notice my own brain paying a lot more attention to my personal finances than I think is justified. Maybe some of this traces back to some kind of trauma response to being unemployed for a very stressful ~6 months after graduating: I just always could be a little more financially secure. A couple weeks ago, while meditating, it occurred to me that my brain is probably reacting to not knowing how I'm doing relative to my goal, because 1) I didn't actually know what my goal is, and 2) I didn't really have a sense of what I was spending each month. In IFS terms, I think the "social and physical security" part of my brain wasn't trusting that the rest of my brain was competently handling the situation.) So, I think people in general would benefit from having an explicit target: once I have X in savings, I can feel financially secure. This probably means explicitly tracking your expenses, both now and in a "making some reasonable, not-that-painful cuts" budget, and gaming out the most likely scenarios where you'd need to use a large amount of your savings, beyond the classic 3 or 6 months of expenses in an emergency fund. For people motivated by EA principles, the most likely scenarios might be for impact reasons: maybe you take a public-sector job that pays half your current salary for three years, or maybe you'

I'm currently taking a career break intended to fit-test what impactful careers suit me. I've created a  spreadsheet with a weighted factor model (Altruism/Career projects tab) and a rough schedule. I'm eager to get feedback on how I'm planning to spend my time and how I've prioritized what to work on. blog-post on topic.  

I'd be excited to see 1-2 opportunistic EA-rationalist types looking into where marginal deregulation is a bottleneck to progress on x-risk/GHW, circulating 1-pagers among experts in these areas, and then pushing the ideas to DOGE/Mercatus/Executive Branch. I'm thinking things like clinical trials requirements for vaccines, UV light, anti-trust issues facing companies collaborating on safety and security, maybe housing (though I'm not sure which are bottlenecked by federal action). For most of these there's downside risk if the message is low fidelity, the issue becomes polarized, or priorities are poorly set, hence collaborating with experts. I doubt there's that much useful stuff to be done here, but marginal deregulation looks very easy right now and looks good to strike while the iron is hot.