Would you be willing/able to share a bit more detail or context about this? I'm somewhat interested, but there isn't enough information here for me to feel comfortable to step forward and raise my hand.

If you want, I'd be happy to have a conversation, give you feedback, review your resume, etc. I've been involved in hiring for quite a few years, including at multiple EA organizations. I also know from personal experience how rough it is to send out many, many applications without success.

I read the book a while back and I enjoyed it. It was kind of fun to get some juicy details about bad things inside Facebook. My main takeaway was something along the lines of "a fish rots from the head." Leaders of an organization set priorities, direction, culture (to a great extent), and this books served as sort of a case study of leadership that has a fairly narrow focus. Poor social skills and poor common sense, entitlement, and the general idea that you get everything you want all stood out to me. The levels of sycophancy and self-interest were a bit surprising, but not terribly so.

Trying to apply ideas from this book to an EA context involves a bit of contortion, but in a sense I think that I'm not too concerned. The culture/values of EA tend to have a very different focus than Facebook did/does, and the leaders of the organizations often^[1] tend to have better common sense than what was displayed in Careless People. I would find it hard to imagine most senior leaders at EA orgs throwing fits because of a McDonald's meal or aggressively pushing for the promotion of their personal projects using company resources. If anything, the book left me thinking that EA orgs will probably avoid many of the issues described in Careless People due to the focus on ethics and morality.

1. ^{^}

   This is certainly not always true, and the level of common sense or general knowledge is noticeably lower than I would like. I've seen many people with very little or very narrow life experience ask about or propose things that I found silly or poorly considered. But my impression is that this is an eye-catching minority, and it is much more common for organizations to have leadership teams are more mature.

show me your role models who have directly improved the world

This somewhat related to mainanence and operations and how credit/respect is apportioned, but often the people doing the work are lower level employees who aren't famous or well-known. They aren't necessarily acknowledged at an annual organizational celebration, or in the local media. As an example, we might think that Rob Mather is great for founding/running the Against Malaria Foundation, but we don't know the names of the people who manufactured or delivered those anti-malaria bednets.

But here are some examples of people that I sort of, vaguely ^[1] consider moral role models:

• There is a guy in Oakland, California who goes by PengWeather online, and he cleans up trash in his free time. From an EA perspective we could certainly criticize his actions by claiming that they aren't effective, and that it might be better for the world if he instead donated $20 a week for a high-impact cause area. But I take inspiration from his initiative: he saw a problem, nobody was doing anything about it, so he decided to take action and make things better. People in EA talk about agency a lot, but it is rare that I see somebody doing things on their own.
• Esther Duflo. She is somewhat of a celebrity among people who care about development economics, but she is also a doer. She (and the teams of people she worked with) discovered what was an wasn't effective in a variety of situations, improving the popularity and visibility of using randomized control trials for economic field research.
• Jeff Kaufman. I've never met him, but he chose to earn to give, and boy did he give! He has a blog, and he posts on the EA forum as well.

1. ^{^}

   Generally I don't really have role models. I've seen enough people express good traits and bad traits that I try to focus on specific behaviors/actions rather than on people as a whole. Think of all the people who work in virtuous fields/vocations who are also real assholes.

   For example, Jeff Kaufman seems like a great guy from what I've read. But imagine that he has really bad emotional regulation, or he is really rude to strangers, or he isn't considerate to others, or he is a compulsive liar. If any of those things were true, that wouldn't change the fact that his earning to give is admirable. I try to not boil people down to a simple god/bad judgement, and instead look at people as a collection of their actions.

the suggested role models are all thinkers rather than doers

At least some of the people listed are either doers, or are a sort of combination of thinkers and doers. I'm do view these people mostly as thinkers, but I also have a sort of bias in that I didn't know about Hans Rosling in the 80s or about Paul Farmers work in the 90s. These people have done much more than simply give talks and write blog posts; they have also done things to directly improve the world.

Some of the people on the list

• Changed their careers in order to generate more donations for the global poor (Holden Karnofsky)
• Founded/created/ran organizations (William MacAskill)
• Volunteered at a hospital in Haiti (Paul Farmer)
• Counselled and provided guidance/advice to many, many people (Julia Wise)
• Studied the outbreak of disease across multiple African countries and worked for Sweden's International Development Agency (Hans Rosling)

I've enjoyed reading your writing over the past few years, and I'll miss you. Good luck with whatever you will be focusing on!

What do you have in mind when you're thinking of those who are not "able to donate"?

I was thinking about people who don't have any income, or who have significant uncertainty/stability in their futures, or who have large financial burdens/commitments.

More broadly, if you want to read more of my thoughts on this topic, I've made a few comments over the years about living in high cost of living areas, about general feelings of financial insecurity/instability, and about not pledging to donate. Those might provide a bit more insight into my throught and perspectives.

this allows them to accumulate moral status and recognition more easily than those of us without such advantages.

This feels very salient to me. I've seen EA job applications ask about how much money I donate, and that feels like evaluating people on outcomes rather than on inputs. I've definitly noticed the status/recognition given to people that are able to donate.

Conversely, I've definitly chosen to not pursue opportunities that advertise low payment; those have felt vaguely similar to the culture of unpaid (or poorly paid) internships in publishing: often only people who have other sources of money or similar safety nets are able to pursue them.

I may benefit from taking an online training bootcamp, is there something specific I should look out for, something in the project bit?

The appropriate advice would depend on what your career goals are.

• If you don't have any technical or computer programming skills and you want to start learning, I would find some intro-level courses on HTML, CSS, SQL, and Python. There are also good playlists on YouTube that are suitable for beginners, such as Sentdex or thenewboston. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is also very popular.
• If you want to learn more about management and operations, there are plenty of links in this EA Forum post.
• Spreadsheets are always helpful, so you can just Google for around for what are the most useful or valuable spreadsheet fermulas and then make sure you understand how to use them all.
• Maybe you have money that you can spend, so you decide to to an eCornell course, or a paid course on project management, or maybe you want to take a college course online for credit.

Most online courses (such as through Coursera, EdX, or other platforms) will involve some level of projects, but these will usually be very small and somewhat artificial projects. I suggest that you search for ways to combine the skills you are learning/developing with real world situations. Maybe your sister runs a bakery and you can use your new CSS and HTML skills to make a little website. Maybe you can use the spreadsheet skills for a class project in your Anthropology 101 in college to display the word frequency of a religious text and compare two different translations. So as you do these things, think of two different ideas: 1) am I learning a useful skill, and 2) how will I be able to describe this in a job interview or in a cover letter or in a resume so that it sounds impressive.