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:

• 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.

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.

I strongly agree with @Bella's comment. I'd like to add:

• I encourage job-seekers to not think of EA jobs as the one way to have impact in one's career. Almost all impactful roles are not at EA orgs. On the 80,000 Hours job board we try to find the most promising ones, but we won't catch everything!
• Our co-worker Laura González Salmerón has a great talk on this topic.
• Even if the movement is not talent-constrained, the problems we're trying to solve are talent-constrained. The world still needs way more people working on catastrophic risks, animal welfare, and global health, whether or not there are EA organisations hiring for roles.
• Earning to give remains a wonderful option.

If your strategy is to just apply to open hiring rounds, such as through job ads that are listed on the 80,000 Hours job boards, you are cutting your chances of landing a role by ~half. It’s hard to know the exact figure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if as many as 30-50% of paid roles in the movement aren’t being recruited through traditional open hiring rounds ...

This is my impression as well, though heavily skewed by experience level. I'd estimate that >80%+ of senior "hires" in the movement occur without a public posting, and something like 20% of junior hires. 

As an aside and as ever though, I'd encourage people to not get attached to finding a role "in the movement" as a marker of impact. 

I really appreciated reading this. It captured a lot of how I feel when I think about having taken the pledge. It's astounding. I think it's worth celebrating, and assuming the numbers add up, I think it's worth grappling with the immensity of having saved a life.

Hey Manuel,

I would not describe the job board as currently advertising all cause areas equally, but yes, the bar for jobs not related to AI safety will be higher now. As I mention in my other comment, the job board is interpreting this changed strategic focus broadly to include biosecurity, nuclear security, and even meta-EA work -- we think all of these have important roles to play in a world with a short timeline to AGI.

In terms of where we’ll be raising the bar, this will mostly affect global health, animal welfare, and climate postings — specifically in terms of the effort we put into finding roles in these areas. With global health and animal welfare, we're lucky to have great evaluators like GiveWell and great programs like Charity Entrepreneurship to help us find promising orgs and teams. It's easy for us to share these roles, and I remain excited to do so. However, part of our work involves sourcing for new roles and evaluating borderline roles. Much of this time will shift into more AIS-focused work.

Cause-neutral job board: It's possible! I think that our change makes space for other boards to expand. I also think that this creates something of a trifecta, to put it very roughly: The 80k job board with our existential risk focus, Probably Good with a more global health focus, and Animal Advocacy Careers with an animal welfare focus. It's possible that effort put into a cause-neutral board could be better put elsewhere, given that there's already coverage split between these three.

I want to extend my sympathies to friends and organisations who feel left behind by 80k's pivot in strategy. I've talked to lots of people about this change in order to figure out the best way for the job board to fit into this. In one of these talks, a friend put it in a way that captures my own feelings: I hate that this is the timeline we're in.

I'm very glad 80,000 Hours is making this change. I'm not glad that we've entered the world where this change feels necessary.

To elaborate on the job board changes mentioned in the post:

• We will continue listing non-AI-related roles, but will be raising our bar. With some cause areas, we still consider them relevant to AGI (for example: pandemic preparedness). With others, we still think the top roles could benefit from talented people with great fit, so we'll continue to post these roles.
• We'll be highlighting some roles more prominently. Even among the roles we post, we think the best roles can be much more impactful than others. Based on conversations with experts, we have some guess at which roles these are, and want to feature them a little more strongly.