Quick takes

Aimed at an audience newer to EA/AI safety It seems like many people have been confused lately about why 1) AI safety orgs are in desperate need of good hires and 2) org hiring rates are very low. My understanding is that there are many reasons for this, but a 2021 post states it pretty well: The best career advice seems to be to focus on developing a rare and valuable skill that orgs currently need. In AI safety, this skill is a combination of specific context, agency, mission-alignment, and strategic vision. You can develop it by reading a lot, writing out your thoughts, talking to people at events, and completing real projects. It's hard to do really impactful work. You need a plausible explanation for why your efforts are the best way your salary can be spent. This takes time, effort, and careful strategizing. Most of the world has high schools, colleges, and internships to train people for jobs, but a similar system is only recently becoming legible for AI safety and EA. The rare skills are rare for a reason. Still, I think the broader EA community could do a better job of communicating what it means for these "talent-gaps" to exist.

The "Desperate" AI Safety Talent Bottleneck is deeply misleading. Please.stop. I worked at Google. Google does not tell applicants that there is a talent bottleneck and they are desperately hiring. They say "we're cool, join us!"  I didn't get into Harvard.  Harvard does not tell applicants that they are desperately seeking students. I am not misled.  I've gotten rejected from countless AI Safety organizations. AI Safety tells applicants - we are in desperate need of talent (operators/generalists)! Please join us!  I've coached 70+ aspiring career pivoters on navigating the ecosystem. A common theme is the dejection & disappointment from all this rejection. Because of this false marketing, I am the one picking up the pieces to calibrate professionals on how difficult, competitive, and picky organizations are, how to build context, and how to endure the marathon, which is like any other job hunt.  Please.stop. Some alternatives: * We are an exciting, growing organization and you should apply for our roles! * Many people are excited to work for us - here are qualities of candidates we're especially excited about. * EA roles are competitive, and we would still love to see your application. Relevant posts: * https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/B6d8Wzk4gNzHsXvdi/ai-safety-is-extremely-bottlenecked-on-grantmakers?commentId=n2Rd7RR4y9EnKP42F * https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b82SLXwEHRCs3TFJA/why-experienced-professionals-fail-to-land-high-impact-roles * https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jmbP9rwXncfa32seH/after-one-year-of-applying-for-ea-jobs-it-is-really-really 

MATS Residency applications close this Friday, Oct 31. The Residency is built for experienced researchers with an established track record, ready to do independent, full-time AI safety work. Residents get: • $155k–$285k compensation • Abundant compute • Support from leading AI safety researchers If you know someone with a strong research background who's been thinking about AI safety, please send this their way. Apply: matsprogram.org/residency

AI safety needs people everywhere but quickly stated, current talent bottlenecks to me look like: -- Founders -- Grantmakers -- (technical) Research leads  -- Policy entrepreneurs and implementors (which includes a lot of technical work) -- bets in international coordination and/or cooperation -- All manner of supporting talent -- program leads, ops proper, public outreach, content creators, comms   Most sought-after qualities for talent are: -- context, mission alignment, domain understanding, sophisticated views on AI strategy and threat modelling etc. -- "good judgement", "sound epistemics", "reasoning transparency" and other similar ideas/meta-skills from the EA/rationalist cannon -- a willingness to get shit done/bias for action (rather than be in learning mode, or people who need a lot of management and oversight, or folks with too many preferences/constraints) -- low ego, similar to above -- ambitious folks, since they would be really trying to be their own managers, take on bigger projects, grow themselves and their teams etc.    Finally, even having these, it's not enough to just claim to have these; job-seekers mainly trip up in being able to demonstrate and be legible about having them.

I've had some interesting conversations this week with hiring managers for my SPAR project of improving hiring processes for new (smaller org <7 f/t employees).  I couple of best practices are coming out of it, on why AI Safety orgs are struggling with hiring ,and especially for important specialized roles:   * Founders and hiring managers need to learn at least 20%-50% of a role yourself before hiring, ensures that you're able to evaluate the canditate successfully and to be credible to candidate. * For unfamiliar domains (i.e. specific skilled roles, i.e. CFO), a trusted paid advisor to help design and evaluate tests (and conduct interviews) is worth the investment. * Orgs may lack advisors in their network or underestimate how hard roles are, hiring junior mission-aligned people instead. * The Founder's core job is to: Set Strategy, Raise funds, and Hire. Organizations need to source candidates widely. Not relying upon just inside referrals.   

As someone who hires people (I am hiring right now, see bottom of the post), I often get emails asking whether someone should apply for a role I've listed. If you're considering contacting a hiring manager to ask if you're a good fit for the role, you should just apply. Why? * Job descriptions are wish lists. Everyone wants someone who checks all the boxes. If the dream candidate applies, you'll probably get rejected. In reality, everyone has weaknesses, and an 80% match candidate is highly competitive. * Self-skepticism correlates with candidate quality. Applicant pools are filled with people who can't do the job but don't understand their abilities well enough to realize it. Conversely, many highly competent professionals self-select out. If you are humble and self-reflective enough to consider your chances honestly, you are probably more competitive than you think. * You probably won't get a response. Hiring is always a busy time, and hiring managers don't have time to review every email. Often, you'll receive nothing, leaving you with wasted effort. I try to reply as much as I can, but there's only so much that can be done. * Any response you get is biased toward yes. If an org has a good filtering process, the biggest determinant in hire quality is whether good candidates apply. More "bad fit" candidates pose little strain, while one more "great fit" candidate could double the success of the hiring round. The incentive is always to get more people to apply. It's unclear whether a seeming good fit is a great fit who is overly worried about their weaknesses or a bad fit exaggerating their strengths, but it doesn't matter. Hiring managers are better off if both apply so they encourage them to do so. As a result, you spend some time writing an email, the hiring manager spends some time reviewing your email, they take time to send a response, and you receive the answer that you probably should apply, so all that effort led to nothing. Skipping t

Our board now has more roles than before (1600+), and a public Airtable version that you can use to set up custom views and automations (including with Slack). A quick guide for using the new Airtable: 1. Open the public Airtable and click "Use this data". Make sure "Create a synced table" is selected. Choose which Airtable base you'd like the jobs data to live in. This creates a read-only synced table with our published roles. 2. Create a filtered view in the new table (e.g., filter by cause area, location, or role type). 3. From here, you can set up Slack notifications: 1. Trigger: "When record enters view", selecting the filtered view you created in step 2.  2. Action: "Send a Slack message" (via Airtable’s built-in Slack integration) 3. Compose your message using field tokens to pull in live data from each role, e.g. New role: {Job Title} at {Org Name} | {Job URL}. Use markdown for basic formatting like bold or italics.  If you use our job board, here’s a few ways you can help us to help you: * Test out the new Airtable and let us know if there are any issues or if you do anything cool with it. * If you land a role that you found on the job board, please get in touch! Even a short message about how our services helped you makes a huge difference to our ability to continue providing these services. * If you know of any orgs you think we should monitor for the board (including ones you work for), please share them! * If you work at an org that's listed on the board, note that links to your roles from our job board automatically include utm_source=probablygood_board so if you track referral sources, you'll be able to see applications that came via us. If you have a question on your application forms regarding where candidates heard about the role, please also consider adding "Probably Good" as an option.  * If you’re a hiring manager/recruiter who ends up hiring a candidate who found your role through our job board, please let us know! Othe

I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer! The summer 2023 incubator round is focused on biosecurity and scalable global health charities and I'm really excited to see what's the best fit for me and hopefully launch a new charity. The ideas that the research team have written up look really exciting and I'm trepidatious about the challenge of being a founder but psyched for getting started. Watch this space! <3 I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+ advising calls I did and feel very privileged I got to talk to so many people and try and help them along their careers! I've learned so much during my time at 80k. And the team at 80k has been wonderful to work with - so thoughtful, committed to working out what is the right thing to do, kind, and fun - I'll for sure be sad to leave them. There are a few main reasons why I'm leaving now: 1. New career challenge - I want to try out something that stretches my skills beyond what I've done before. I think I could be a good fit for being a founder and running something big and complicated and valuable that wouldn't exist without me - I'd like to give it a try sooner rather than later. 2. Post-EA crises stepping away from EA community building a bit - Events over the last few months in EA made me re-evaluate how valuable I think the EA community and EA community building are as well as re-evaluate my personal relationship with EA. I haven't gone to the last few EAGs and switched my work away from doing advising calls for the last few months, while processing all this. I have been somewhat sad that there hasn't been more discussion and changes by now though I have been glad to see more EA leaders share things more recently (e.g. this from Ben Todd). I do still believe there are some really important ideas that EA prioritises but I'm more circumspect about some of the things I think we're not doing as well as we could (