The EA forum has a lot of information and advice about careers. But ugh, searching through the forum to find a bunch of posts about careers sounds boring and high-friction... and most of them won't be useful to me... if only someone else had compiled a bunch of recent posts that I could quickly skim...
Here is a quickly-prepared collection of highly rated forum posts about jobs and careers. I have categorized them according to their topic (note that the categories are somewhat arbitrary).
Posts about Career Paths and Career Aptitudes
- My current impressions on career choice for longtermists (Holden Karnofsky)
- EA needs consultancies (lukeprog)
- Consider a wider range of jobs, paths and problems if you want to improve the long-term future (Robert_Wiblin)
- A new, cause-general career planning process (Benjamin_Todd)
- Some promising career ideas beyond 80,000 Hours’ priority paths (Ardenlk)
- Early career EA's should consider joining fast-growing startups in emerging technologies (billzito)
- Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists (Will Bradshaw)
“Writing about my Job” Posts
- You should write about your job (Aaron Gertler)
- Writing about my job: Operations Manager (Joy Bittner)
- Writing about my job: Research Fellow, FHI (rgb)
- Writing about my job: Economics Professor (Kevin Kuruc)
- Writing about my job: Internet Blogger (AppliedDivinityStudies)
- My experience as a CLR grantee and visiting researcher at CSER (Jaime Sevilla)
Specific Advice Relating to Careers
- Many Undergrads Should Take Light Courseloads (Mauricio)
- Be Specific About Your Career (Mark Xu)
- Advice I've Found Helpful as I Apply to EA Jobs (Akash– that’s me!)
Posts about the Hiring Process
- Hiring Process and Takeaways from Fish Welfare Initiative (haven)
- Notes on hiring a copyeditor for CEA (Aaron Gertler)
Personal Narratives about Careers
- How to Get an EA-aligned Job: My Experience (sofiabalderson)
- My Career Decision-Making Process (ShayBenMoshe)
Posts about Policy Careers
- How I got an entry-level role in Congress (new_staffer)
- Working at a (DC) policy think tank: Why you might want to do it, what it’s like, and how to get a job (Locke_USA)
- Working in Congress (Part #1): Background and some EA cause area analysis (Locke_USA)
- Report on careers in politics and policy in Germany (careersthrowaway)
- Takeaways on US Policy Careers (Part 1): Paths to Impact and Personal Fit (Mauricio)
- Takeaways on US Policy Careers (Part 2): Career Advice (Mauricio)
Posts about Open Job and Internship Listings
- Redwood Research is hiring for several roles (Jack Ryan, billzito)
- Announcing Alvea—An EA COVID Vaccine Project (kyle_fish)
- Momentum 2022 updates (we're hiring) (arikagan, NickFitz)
- EA Internship & Research Opportunities for Undergraduates (emmawilliamson, sabrinachwalek)
Miscellaneous
- The Cost of Rejection (Daystar Eld)
- Thoughts on being overqualified for EA positions (Ben_West)
Quick summary of the method
I had a personal assistant go through the EA Forum and search for posts related to careers. Their primary process involved going through tags (e.g., “Career Advising”, “Effective altruism hiring”).
They then identified all of the posts with >75 karma (arbitrary cutoff) posted between 2020-2022 (another arbitrary cutoff). This process occurred in early March of 2022.
I then glanced at the titles, skimmed some of the posts, and categorized them. The categories are loose, and the posts could have been categorized differently. I did not read all of the posts.
A few final thoughts
- I’d be excited to see more low-effort collections of posts. There is a lot of content on the forum. Collections can reduce friction & amplify important posts that people may have missed (for more, see this post.)
- We found several posts about policy careers, but we didn’t see this for any other paths (e.g., AI safety, management, entrepreneurship). These areas might be good targets for future posts.
- Our method was scrappy, so we likely missed many posts. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of career resources.
- There are valuable articles/posts about careers in many other places (e.g., 80,000 Hours, Paul Graham’s blog). This compilation only includes things that were posted on the forum, which is a small subset of the valuable resources that exist.
- Karma is an easy way to filter, but it is not a measure of how impactful/useful a post is.
- I certainly missed some posts that should have been included. If you know about any additional posts, please put them in the comments!
I am grateful to Cajo Matriano and Angelica Belo for identifying relevant posts.
Thanks for putting this together, Akash! Another cool resource is the Forum wiki and the career-relevant post tags (the tags that usually appear below the title and author on a post), like:
And as a reminder, you can add tags to posts if you think they should have a tag that they don't have (if you're logged in). You can also vote on the relevance of a given tag to a given post by upvoting (or downvoting) the tag.