Good question! I agree with Probably Good's view of the trifecta between us (and I'd also highlight Animal Advocacy Careers for their animal welfare focus!).
I'd say that the recommendation comes down to the user's focus. If the job seeker wants to find the best opportunities in light of expecting transformative AI in the coming years, the 80,000 Hours job board selects roles in light of that question, including roles for building career capital. If the job seeker is ambivalent on timelines to transformative AI, other boards will have more variety for them.
As to non-curatorial differences:
We all have different filters in light of our audiences' needs, and in general I expect the experience to differ slightly between each board.
The team behind our advisor bot is also pushing hard to make it very useful to job seekers, and I have some exciting features planned for the end of the year that leverage 80k's capacity. So you might actually see growing variance between the boards!
I'm sorry it's frictive to recommend many boards, but I will say I'm also quite glad that we have multiple strong boards sharing excellent roles based on our different philosophies!
I was surprised to read the content of the post because the title is something I strongly agree with, but the post itself isn't really about the philosophy of moving fast and breaking things. Instead, it's a rant about the opportunity cost of spending money on long shots.
I think conversations around risk tolerance and our tolerance for mismanaged money are very important, but I think posts like this don't do a good job of moving these conversations forward. There are good arguments to be made on both the risk-neutral and the risk-averse sides, but the effect of one side getting screamed at is likely to just raise hackles. Because these conversations are important, they should be conducted with the patience and grace appropriate to any major problem. I don't think this sort of post is good for the forum.
From my perspective as the 80,000 Hours job board manager, two things explain the difference in experience between hiring managers and job applicants:
Applicants often have great credentials, but still aren't exactly a fit for the roles, which often require high context (whether in EA or in AI safety) and a particular skillset.
"We need more people working on these neglected issues" doesn't necessarily mean that orgs have the management capacity to absorb more people. You ask "Do they sometimes keep teams small because adding more people adds coordination, meetings and review overhead?", and I think this underweights just how tricky coordination is. Being able to scale and integrate more talent is very difficult.
I'll also note that there are lots of impactful roles outside of EA orgs (which are indeed very competitive). For example, we mostly don't highlight EA orgs in our top career review.
The claim that "biosecurity often selects for people who already have a wealth of experience in their respective fields" doesn't seem that obvious to me. Looking at the number of biosecurity roles we've posted on the 80,000 Hours job board in 2025, broken down by experience tag, I see:
Entry-level: 32
Entry-level + Junior (1-4 yrs): 12
Junior (1-4 yrs): 69
Junior (1-4 yrs) + Mid (5-9 yrs): 31
Mid (5-9 yrs): 73
Mid (5-9 yrs) + Senior (10+ yrs): 20
Senior (10+ yrs): 40
Multiple experience levels: 10
I agree with you that there aren't a ton of opportunities for junior people, but I think the above data indicates it isn't because of orgs focusing more on people with more experience. This seems like an important part of your claims, though I think some of your recommendations are robustly good (specializing can be the right call, building career capital elsewhere can be the right call).
Obvious caveats apply: We aren't perfect at finding every biosecurity opportunity on the 80,000 Hours org, what we post is shaped by our own values.
There are some great replies here from career advisors -- I'm not one, but I want to mention that I got into software engineering without a university degree. I'm hesitant to recommend software engineering as the safe and well-paying career it once was, but I think learning how to code is still a great way to quickly develop useful skills without requiring a four-year degree!
I think earning to give is a really strong option and indeed the best option for many people.
Lack of supply is definitely an issue, though it can be helped by looking for impactful opportunities outside of "EA orgs" per se -- I don't know if this is your scenario, but this is often a problem. Knowing nothing about a person's situation and location, I'd prompt:
Can you look for roles in government in order to work on impactful policy?
Are there start-ups or other learning opportunities you could apply to in order to develop career capital?
Is there a niche in the world you're suited to fill? Could you find a co-founder and start filling it?I say a bit more here.
A clarification: We would not post roles if we thought they were net harmful and were hoping that somebody would counterfactually do less harm. I think that would be too morally fraught to propose to a stranger.
Relatedly, we would not post a job where we thought that to have a positive impact, you'd have to do the job badly.
We might post roles if we thought the average entrant would make the world worse, but a job board user would make the world better (due to the EA context our applicants typically have!). No cases of this come to mind immediately though. We post our jobs because we consider them promising opportunities to have a positive impact in the world, and expect job board users to do even more good than the average person.
I'm curious to know which roles we've posted which you consider to be capabilities development -- our policy is to not post capabilities roles at the frontier companies. We do aim to post jobs that are meaningfully able to contribute to safety and aren’t just safety-washing (and our views are discussed much more in depth here). Of course, we're not infallible, so if people see particular jobs they think are safety in name only, we always appreciate that being raised.
Hi Jian,
Good question! I agree with Probably Good's view of the trifecta between us (and I'd also highlight Animal Advocacy Careers for their animal welfare focus!).
I'd say that the recommendation comes down to the user's focus. If the job seeker wants to find the best opportunities in light of expecting transformative AI in the coming years, the 80,000 Hours job board selects roles in light of that question, including roles for building career capital. If the job seeker is ambivalent on timelines to transformative AI, other boards will have more variety for them.
As to non-curatorial differences:
I'm sorry it's frictive to recommend many boards, but I will say I'm also quite glad that we have multiple strong boards sharing excellent roles based on our different philosophies!
I was surprised to read the content of the post because the title is something I strongly agree with, but the post itself isn't really about the philosophy of moving fast and breaking things. Instead, it's a rant about the opportunity cost of spending money on long shots.
I think conversations around risk tolerance and our tolerance for mismanaged money are very important, but I think posts like this don't do a good job of moving these conversations forward. There are good arguments to be made on both the risk-neutral and the risk-averse sides, but the effect of one side getting screamed at is likely to just raise hackles. Because these conversations are important, they should be conducted with the patience and grace appropriate to any major problem. I don't think this sort of post is good for the forum.
Hi Nicolae,
From my perspective as the 80,000 Hours job board manager, two things explain the difference in experience between hiring managers and job applicants:
More on both of these in my recent blogpost.
I'll also note that there are lots of impactful roles outside of EA orgs (which are indeed very competitive). For example, we mostly don't highlight EA orgs in our top career review.
Great points. I would love to see more of this too!
The claim that "biosecurity often selects for people who already have a wealth of experience in their respective fields" doesn't seem that obvious to me. Looking at the number of biosecurity roles we've posted on the 80,000 Hours job board in 2025, broken down by experience tag, I see:
I agree with you that there aren't a ton of opportunities for junior people, but I think the above data indicates it isn't because of orgs focusing more on people with more experience. This seems like an important part of your claims, though I think some of your recommendations are robustly good (specializing can be the right call, building career capital elsewhere can be the right call).
Obvious caveats apply: We aren't perfect at finding every biosecurity opportunity on the 80,000 Hours org, what we post is shaped by our own values.
What an upgrade, especially the top nav. Nice job!
There are some great replies here from career advisors -- I'm not one, but I want to mention that I got into software engineering without a university degree. I'm hesitant to recommend software engineering as the safe and well-paying career it once was, but I think learning how to code is still a great way to quickly develop useful skills without requiring a four-year degree!
@Sudhanshu Kasewa has enlisted me for this one!
I think earning to give is a really strong option and indeed the best option for many people.
Lack of supply is definitely an issue, though it can be helped by looking for impactful opportunities outside of "EA orgs" per se -- I don't know if this is your scenario, but this is often a problem. Knowing nothing about a person's situation and location, I'd prompt:
A clarification: We would not post roles if we thought they were net harmful and were hoping that somebody would counterfactually do less harm. I think that would be too morally fraught to propose to a stranger.
Relatedly, we would not post a job where we thought that to have a positive impact, you'd have to do the job badly.
We might post roles if we thought the average entrant would make the world worse, but a job board user would make the world better (due to the EA context our applicants typically have!). No cases of this come to mind immediately though. We post our jobs because we consider them promising opportunities to have a positive impact in the world, and expect job board users to do even more good than the average person.
Hi Geoffrey,
I'm curious to know which roles we've posted which you consider to be capabilities development -- our policy is to not post capabilities roles at the frontier companies. We do aim to post jobs that are meaningfully able to contribute to safety and aren’t just safety-washing (and our views are discussed much more in depth here). Of course, we're not infallible, so if people see particular jobs they think are safety in name only, we always appreciate that being raised.