The thing is, lots of jobs at charities just aren’t that impactful.

Some charities focus on programmes that don’t work, like Scared Straight, which actually caused kids to commit more crimes. Others focus on ways of helping that, while thoughtful and helpful, don’t have much leverage, like knitting individual sweaters for penguins affected by oil spills (this actually happened!) instead of funding large-scale ocean cleanup projects.

But there are also many organisations out there — both for-profit and nonprofit — focused on pressing problems, implementing effective and scalable solutions, run by great teams, and in need of people.

If you can build skills that are useful for helping an organisation like this, it could well be one of the highest-impact things you can do.

In particular, organisations often need generalists able to do the bread and butter of building an organisation — hiring people, management, administration, communications, running software systems, crafting strategy, fundraising, and so on.

We call these ‘organisation-building’ skills. They can be high impact because you can increase the scale and effectiveness of the organisation you’re working at, while also gaining skills that can be applied to a wide range of global problems in the future (and make you generally employable too).

Why are organisation-building skills valuable?

A well-run organisation can take tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people working on solving the world’s most pressing problems and help them work together far more effectively.

An employee with the right skills can often be a significant boost to an organisation, either by directly helping them deliver an impactful programme or by building the capacity of the organisation so that it can operate at a greater scale in the future. You could, for example, set up organisational infrastructure to enable the hiring of many more people in the future.

What’s more, organisation-building skills can be applied at most organisations, which means you’ll have opportunities to help tackle many different global problems in the future. You’ll also be flexibly able to work on many different solutions to any given problem if you find better solutions later in your career.

As an added bonus, the fact that pretty much all organisations need these skills means you’ll be employable if you decide to earn to give or step back from doing good all together. In fact, organisational management skills seem like some of the most useful and highest paid in the economy in general.

It can be even more valuable to help found a new organisation rather than build an existing one, though this is a particularly difficult step to take when you’re early in your career. (Read more on whether you should found an organisation early in your career.) See our profile on founding impactful organisations to learn more.

What does organisation-building typically involve?

A high-impact career using organisation-building skills typically involves these rough stages:

1. Building generally useful organisational skills, such as operations, people management, fundraising, administration, software systems, finance, etc.
2. Then applying those skills to help build (or found) high-impact organisations

The day-to-day of an organisation-building role is going to vary a lot depending on the job.

Here’s a possible description that could help build some intuition.

Picture yourself working from an office or, increasingly, from your own home. You’ll spend lots of time on your computer — you might be planning, organising tasks, updating project timelines, reworking a legal brief, or contracting out some marketing. You’ll likely spend some time communicating via email or chatting with colleagues. Your day will probably involve a lot of problem solving, making decisions to keep things going.

If you work for a small organisation, especially in the early stages, your “office” could be anywhere — a home office, a local coffee shop, or a shared workspace. If you manage people, you’ll conduct one-on-one meetings to provide feedback, set goals, and discuss personal development. In a project-oriented role, you might spend lots of time developing strategy, or analysing data to evaluate your impact.

What skills are needed to build organisations?

Organisation builders typically have skills in areas like:

• Operations management
• Project management (including setting objectives, metrics, etc.)
• People management and coaching (Some manager jobs require specialised skills, but some just require general management-associated skills like leadership, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution.)
• Executive leadership (setting and achieving organisation-wide goals, making top-level decisions about budgeting, etc.)
• Entrepreneurship
• Recruiting
• Fundraising
• Marketing (which also benefits from communications skills)
• Communications and public relations (which also benefits from communications skills)
• Human resources
• Office management
• Events management
• Assistant and administrative work
• Finance and accounting
• Corporate and nonprofit law

Many organisations have a significant need for generalists who span several of these areas. If your aim is to take a leadership position, it’s useful to have a shallow knowledge of several.

You can also pick just one skill to specialise in — especially for areas like law and accounting that tend to be their own track.

Generally, larger organisations have a greater need for specialists, while those with under 50 employees hire more generalists.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

There’s no need to focus on the specific job or sector you work in now — it’s possible to enter organisation-building from a very wide variety of areas. We’ve even known academic philosophers who have transitioned to organisation-building!

Some common initial indicators of fit might include:

• You have an optimisation mindset. You frequently notice how things could be done more efficiently and have a strong internal drive to prevent avoidable errors and make things run more smoothly.
• You intuitively engage in systems thinking and enjoy going meta. This is a bit difficult to summarise, but involves things like: you’d notice when people ask you similar questions multiple times and then think about how to prevent the issue from coming up again. For example: “Can you give me access to this doc” turns into “What went wrong such that this person didn’t already have access to everything they need? How can we improve naming conventions or sharing conventions in the future?”
• You’re reliable, self-directed, able to manage your time well, and you can create efficient and productive plans and keep track of complex projects.
• You might also be good at learning quickly and have high attention to detail.

Of course, different types of organisation-building will require different skills. For example, being a COO or events manager requires greater social and system building skills, whereas working in finance requires fewer social skills, but does require basic quantitative skills and perhaps more conscientiousness and attention to detail.

If you’re really excited by a particular novel idea and have lots of energy and excitement for the idea, you might be a good fit for founding an organisation. (Read more about what it takes to successfully found a new organisation.)

You should try doing some cheap tests first — these might include talking to someone who works at the organisation you’re interested in helping to build, volunteering to do a short project, or doing an internship. Then you might commit to working there for 2–24 months (being prepared to switch to something else if you don’t think you’re on track).

How to tell if you’re on track

All of these — individually or together — seem like good signs of being on track to build really useful organisation-building skills:

• You get job offers (as a contractor or staff) at organisations you’d like to work for.
• You’re promoted within your first two years.
• You receive excellent performance reviews.
• You’re asked to take on progressively more responsibility over time.
• Your manager / colleagues suggest you might take on more senior roles in the future.
• You ask your superiors for their honest assessment of your fit and they are positive (e.g. they tell you you’re in the top 10% of people they can imagine doing your role).
• You’re able to multiply a superior’s time by over 2–20X, depending on the role type.
• If you’re aiming to build a new organisation, write out some one-page summaries of ideas for new organisations you’d like to exist and get feedback from grantmakers and experts.
• If founding a new organisation, you get seed funding from a major grantmaker, like Open Philanthropy, Longview Philanthropy, EA Funds, or a private donor.

This said, if you don’t hit these milestones, you might still be a good fit for organisation-building — the issue might be that you’re at the wrong organisation or have the wrong boss.

How to get started building organisation-building skills

You can get started by finding any role that will let you start learning one of the skills listed above. Work in one specialisation will often give you exposure to the others, and it’s often possible to move between them.

If you can do this at a high-performing organisation that’s also having a big impact right away, that’s great. If you’re aware of any organisations like these, it’s worth applying just in case.

But, unfortunately, this is often not possible, especially if you’re fresh out of college, for a number of reasons:

• The organisations have limited mentorship capacity, so they most often hire people with a couple of years of experience rather than those fresh out of college (though there are exceptions) and often aren’t in a good position to help you become excellent at these skills.
• These organisations usually hire people who already have some expertise in the problem area they’re working on (e.g. AI safety, biosecurity), as these issues involve specialised knowledge.
• We chose our recommended problems in large part because they’re unusually neglected. But the fact that they’re neglected also means there aren’t many open positions or training programmes.

As a result, early in your career it can easily be worth pursuing roles at organisations that don’t have much impact in order to build your skills.

The way to do this is to work at any organisation that’s generally high-performing, especially if you can work under someone who’s a good manager and will mentor you — the best way to learn how to run an organisation is to learn from people who are already excellent at this skill.

Then, try to advance as quickly as you can within that organisation or move to higher-responsibility roles in other organisations after 1–3 years of high-performance.

It can also help if the organisation is small but rapidly growing, since that usually makes it much easier to get promoted — and if the organisation succeeds in a big way, that will give you a lot of options in the future.

In a small organisation you can also try out a wider range of roles, helping you figure out which aspects of organisation-building are the best fit for you and giving you the broad background that’s useful for leadership roles in the future. Moreover, many of the organisations we think are doing the best work on the most pressing problems are startups, so being used to this kind of environment can be an advantage.

One option within this category we especially recommend is to consider becoming an early employee at a tech startup.

If you pick well, working at a tech startup gives you many of the advantages of working at a small, growing, high-performing organisation mentioned above, while also offering high salaries and an introduction to the technology sector. (This is even better if you can find an organisation that will let you learn about artificial intelligence or synthetic biology.)

We’ve advised many people who have developed organisation-building skills in startups and then switched to nonprofit work (or earned to give), while having good backup options.

That said, smaller organisations have downsides such as being more likely to fail and less mentorship capacity. Many are also poorly run. So it’s important to pick carefully.

Another option to consider in this category is working at a leading AI lab, because they can often offer good training, look impressive on your CV, and let you learn about AI. That said, you’ll need to think carefully about whether your work could be accelerating the risks from AI as well.

One of the most common ways to build these skills is to work in large tech companies, consulting or professional services (or more indirectly, to train as a lawyer or in finance). These are most useful for learning how to apply these skills in very large corporate and government organisations, or to build a speciality like accounting. We think there are often more direct ways to do useful work on the problems we think are most pressing, but these prestigious corporate jobs can still be the best option for some.

However, it’s important to remember you can build organisation-building skills in any kind of organisation: from nonprofits to academic research institutes to government agencies to giant corporations. What most matters is that you’re working with people who have this skill, who are able to train you.

Should you found your own organisation early in your career?

For a few people, founding an organisation fairly early in your career could be a fantastic career step. Whether or not the organisation you start succeeds, along the way you could gain strong organisation-building (and other) skills and a lot of career capital.

We think you should be ambitious when deciding career steps, and it often makes sense to pursue high-upside options first when you’re doing some career exploration.

This is particularly true if you:

• Have an idea that you’ve seriously thought about, stress tested, and got positive feedback on from relevant experts
• Have real energy and excitement for your idea (not for the idea of being an entrepreneur)
• Understand that you’re likely to fail, and have good backup plans in place for that

It can be hard to figure out if your idea is any good, or if you’ll be any good at this, in advance. One rule of thumb is that if, after six months to a year of work, you can be accepted to a top incubator (like Y Combinator), you’re probably on track. But if you can’t get into a top incubator, you should consider trying to build organisation-building skills in a different way (or try building a completely different skill set).

There are many downsides of working on your own projects. In particular, you’ll get less direct feedback and mentorship, and your efforts will be spread thinly across many different types of tasks and skills, making it harder to develop specialist expertise.
To learn more, see our article on founding new projects tackling top problems.

Find jobs that use organisation-building skills

See our curated list of job opportunities for this path, which you can filter by ‘management’ and ‘operations’ to find opportunities in this category (though there will also be jobs outside those filters where you can apply organisation-building skills).

View all opportunities

Once you have these skills, how can you best apply them to have an impact?

The problem you work on is probably the biggest driver of your impact, so the first step is to decide which problems you think are most pressing.

Once you’ve done that, the next step is to identify the highest-potential organisations working on your top problems.

In particular, look for organisations that:

1. Implement an effective solution, or one that has a good chance of having a big impact (even if it might not work)
2. Have the potential to grow
3. Are run by a great team
4. Are in need of your skills

These organisations will most often be nonprofits, but they could also be research institutes, political organisations, or for-profit companies with a social mission.¹

For specific ideas, see our list of recommended organisations. You can also find longer lists of suggestions within each of our problem profiles.

Finally, see if you can get a job at one of these organisations that effectively uses your specific skills. If you can’t, that’s also fine — you can apply your skills elsewhere, for example through earning to give, and be ready to switch into working for a high-impact organisation in the future.

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use organisation-building skills

These are some reviews of career paths we’ve written that use ‘organisation-building’ skills:

• Operations management
• Helping build the effective altruism community
• Non-technical roles in leading AI labs
• Earning to give
• Founding new projects tackling top problems
• Become an executive assistant for someone doing especially high-impact work
• Working at effective nonprofits
• Research management

Read next:  Explore other useful skills

Want to learn more about the most useful skills for solving global problems, according to our research? See our list.

Continue →

The post Organisation-building appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Update April 2019: We think that our use of the term ‘talent gaps’ in this post (and elsewhere) has caused some confusion. We’ve written a post clarifying what we meant by the term and addressing some misconceptions that our use of it may have caused. Most importantly, we now think it’s much more useful to talk about specific skills and abilities that are important constraints on particular problems rather than talking about ‘talent constraints’ in general terms. This page may be misleading if it’s not read in conjunction with our clarifications.

What are the most pressing needs in the effective altruism community right now? What problems are most effective to work on? Who should earn to give and who should do direct work? We surveyed managers at organisations in the community to find out their views. These results help to inform our recommendations about the highest impact career paths available.

Our key finding is that for the questions that we asked 12 months ago, the results have not changed very much. This gives us more confidence in our survey results from 2017.

We also asked some new questions, including about the monetary value placed on our priority paths, discount rates on talent and how current leaders first discovered and got involved in effective altruism.

Below is a summary of the key figures, some caveats about the data’s limitations, an explanation of the survey method, and a discussion of what these numbers mean.

Note: On Oct 12 this post was edited to make its conclusions clearer.

Some key findings

• EA organisation leaders said experience with operations or management, and generalist researchers are what their organisations will need most of over the next five years.

• They said the community as a whole will most need more government and policy experts, operations experience, machine learning/AI technical expertise, and skilled managers.

• Most EA organisations continue to feel more ‘talent constrained’ than funding constrained, rating themselves as 2.8/4 talent constrained and 1.5/4 funding constrained.

• Leaders thought the key bottleneck for the community is to get More dedicated people (e.g. work at EA orgs, research in AI safety/biosecurity/economics, etg over $1m) converted from moderate engagement. The second biggest is to increase impact of existing dedicated people through e.g. better research, coordination, decision-making.

• We asked leaders their views on the relative cost-effectiveness of donations to four funds operated by the community. The median view was that the Long-Term Future fund was 1.6x as cost-effective as the EA Community fund, which in turn was 10 times more cost-effective than the Animal Welfare fund, and twenty times as cost-effective as the Global Health and Development fund. Individual views on this question varied very widely, though 18/28 respondents thought the Long-Term Future fund was the most effective.

• In addition, we asked several community members working directly on animal welfare and global development for their views on the relative cost-effectiveness of donations to these funds. About half these staff thought the fund in their own cause area was best, and about half thought either the EA Community fund or Long-Term Future fund was best. The median respondent in that group thought that the Animal Welfare fund was about 33% more cost-effective than the Long-Term Future fund and the EA Community fund – which were rated equally cost-effective – while the Global Development fund was 33% as cost effective as either of those two. However, there was also a wide range of views among this group.

• The organisations surveyed were usually willing to forego several hundred thousand dollars in additional donations to make the right person available for a junior position in their organisation 3 years earlier, and over a million for the right person for a senior role. One reason for the high figures is that these positions usually require a rare combination skills, and so despite their value, people shouldn’t necessary aim to fill them.

How the survey was conducted

The methodology is described in more detail in Appendix 1. The weaknesses of the method are discussed below. We’ve tidied up and anonymised the free text responses to various questions and put them in Appendix 2.

Who was sampled

As last time, our goal was to include at least one person from every organisation founded by people who strongly identify as part of the effective altruism community that has full-time staff, and we got most of the way there. We also included some community leaders who currently work at other organisations.

The reader should keep in mind this sample does not include some direct work organisations that some in the community donate to, such as the Against Malaria Foundation, or Mercy for Animals. For our additional survey of people working on poverty and animal welfare, we surveyed 13 people at: The Humane League (3), GiveWell (2), ProVeg (2), Compassion in World Farming (2), IDinsight (1) , Charity Science Health (1), Fortify Health (1), Good Food Institute (1).

Weaknesses

• The survey is representative of leaders at the organisations listed – not the effective altruism community more broadly. This could be viewed as a strength or a weakness depending on what you want to know, but regardless – it needs to be kept in mind.
• Many people will have answered these difficult questions quite quickly without doing serious analysis. As a result the results will often represent a gut reaction rather than deeply considered views. In other cases, these answers reflect large amounts of thought over many years. We should update our views on these answers, but sometimes those updates will be small. Certainly the answers here are not the final word on the relevant questions.
• The survey included 37 people from a range of organisations, but they did not all answer every question (see the presentation for sample sizes on each question). The average number of answers across all questions was 25 and the question with the fewest responses had 18 answers.
• Last year we tried weighting answers by the budget of the organisation the respondent came from (splitting the weight where an organisation had multiple people fill out the survey). This made little difference to the answers and was by far the most time-consuming piece of the analysis, so we’ve skipped it this time. That said, the number of participants included from various organisations is somewhat arbitrary.
• We tested the questions in an attempt to make them clear and unambiguous but we know some were open to multiple interpretations or misunderstandings. For example, some people only considered the benefits of an expanded hiring pool to their own organisation, rather than the world as a whole as we intended.

Full analysis of the results

What skills and abilities do we need more of?

We asked two questions on this topic:

1. What types of talent will your organisation need more of over the next 5 years? (Pick up to 6)
2. What types of talent will we need more of in EA as a whole over the next 5 years? (Pick up to 6)

Operations, management, and generalist researchers are the types of talent respondents most frequently said their organisations will need more of over the next five years. This was a change from last year when management was a distant second to generalist researchers and operations was near the middle of the pack.

Relatively few respondents said increasing government and policy experts was a priority at their organisations but for the second year in a row it was the need most frequently mentioned for EA as a whole. It’s not clear whether respondents believed the need is for community members with this expertise to: 1) work in government; 2) work on policy issues at organisations outside of the community; or 3) found new organisations focused on policy.

In order, the next few most commonly listed needs for EA as a whole were more: operations, machine learning/AI technical expertise, and management talent. The most notable changes from last year were an increase in the perceived need for operations talent and a decrease in the perceived need for additional talent in movement building/public speaker/public figures/public campaign leaders.

The high demand for operations talent – both at the organisations surveyed and the community at large – is consistent with our article, Why operations management is one of the biggest bottlenecks in effective altruism.

We’ve also produced two podcasts on this topic:

• Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission
• Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism

Also in substantial demand were generalist skills like ‘the hustle to set the right priorities’, entrepreneurship, and emotional intelligence.

These results are quite close to those from last year.

Which skills were less mentioned?

• Web development
• Software development
• Communications, other than marketing and public figures
• People extremely enthusiastic about effective altruism
• Developing world experts.

We suspect that in most cases what’s driving the low scores is the preponderance of people in the community who already have these skills.

For a second year running the glut of philosophy graduates in the community leaves philosophers at the bottom of the list.

However, the situation could easily change. In 2016, there was significant demand for web developers and engineers. We expect the community will continue to grow on the whole so there will be an increased need for people with many talents even those that weren’t among the most cited. If you have sufficiently high personal fit in one of these skill-sets, it can still be a great option.

Most interesting among a group of people working to promote the ideas associated with effective altruism, is that few believe a key limiting factor over the next few years will be people enthusiastic about effective altruism. Rather it’s specific skills that are in short supply.

When choosing who to hire, decisions would most often turn on general mental ability, fit with the team (other than sharing EA values) and good judgement:

Surprisingly there was less interest in specific skills, involvement with EA or conscientiousness.

EA leaders believe that giving focused on the long-term future and the EA community is more effective than that on global development or animal welfare

We asked leaders the following:

Imagine a donation of $1,000 to the EA Community Fund. In your view, this is equally as valuable for the world as a pure donation of $X to the Global Health EA Fund. Or a donation of $Y to the Long-Term Future EA Fund. Or a donation of $Z to the Animal Welfare EA Fund.

We then converted this into relative cost-effectiveness. The median response regarding the cost-effectiveness of the different EA funds was the following:

We can look at the results another way, by seeing how many people thought each fund was the most and least cost-effective of the four (votes are split in case of a tie):

Again, it’s clear that the group had quite a strong preference for work to improve the long term future and quite a strong preference against the global development fund – a preference that has slightly strengthened in the last year.

We also asked respondents whether this question was a good proxy indicator for the relative value they expected to be generated by people going to work on those 4 different ways of doing good. Three quarters gave a 3 or 4 on a scale from 0-4, suggesting it was decent for most.

These answers contrast with a 2017 survey of 1,450 community members, defined as people who said ‘they could, however loosely, be described as an effective altruist.’ In that survey 41% of respondents gave poverty reduction as their ‘top priority’.

This suggests a significant difference of opinion between leaders at the organisations surveyed and the broader community.

What might be the cause of this? One possibility is that our survey shows that the intellectual leaders of the community are fairly united in wanting to focus on the long-term future. The broader survey, however, includes many people who report agreeing with effective altruism’s core ideas but have not had the opportunity to (or chosen to) engage with effective altruism full-time. They may not have had equal exposure to the arguments that convinced these leaders of long-termism, and may prioritise global poverty just because the base rate of support for global poverty is very high, and almost no one outside of the EA/rationality communities starts out focused on the importance of future generations. Moreover, effective altruism’s past press coverage and outreach focused on global poverty, which may mean effective altruism has specifically selected for people already dedicated to this problem.

A second possibility is that effective altruism leaders have been convinced of long-termism for bad reasons. We can think of several reasons this might be. Perhaps people who are working in an area full-time, or see themselves as intellectual leaders, have an incentive to believe arguments that make the movement seem counterintuitive, controversial or cutting edge. They may prefer causes favored by compelling abstract arguments over those that are more solvable. They may be easily captured by intellectual fashion or they may be ‘countersignaling’ by deprioritising forms of altruism with mainstream acceptance. There might also be selection bias in who becomes a leader of an effective altruist organisation – existing leadership might be wrongly biased toward hiring people who agree with them or share their idiosyncratic ideas.

Another possibility is the result mainly arises from a biased sample: the organisers of the forum could have been more likely to invite community leaders who are focused on the long-term future. We tried to test this hypothesis in several ways.

First, we tried to categorise what respondents themselves were working on and got long-term future (10), meta-research (8), movement building (7), animal welfare (4), poverty (2) and other (5). So it is true that there were many more attendees themselves working on long-termist issues than poverty. However, this could easily be explained by EA Leaders choosing to work in areas consistent with their priorities. If effective altruism’s leadership became convinced today that Cause Y was the top priority, we’d expect that many of them would be working on that cause in a few years’ time.

Next, we looked into our criteria for including people into the survey. We tried to include at least one person from every organisation founded by people who strongly identify as part of the effective altruism community that has full-time staff, and we got most of the way there. This doesn’t seem biased to us but it does exclude many global poverty and animal welfare organisations that members of the community donate to, including all of GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators’ recommended organisations.

We did include more people from organisations focused on long-termism. It’s not clear what the right method is here, as organisations that are bigger and/or have more influence over the community ought to have more representation, but we think there’s room for disagreement with this decision.

To check whether our decision about how many people to include from each organisation was driving the results, we repeated our analysis, giving each organisation a single vote, split between respondents from each organisation. This did not substantially change any of our conclusions.

What do people working directly on global poverty or animal welfare think?

As another approach to identifying potential bias, we reached out to 20 people who were working at GiveWell, or organisations recommended by either GiveWell or Animal Charity Evaluators at some point, who primarily identified as ‘effective altruists’ before taking their current job.

We’d expect that those in the community who do favor animal welfare and global poverty are more likely to go work in those areas. So if staff at these organisations prefer their own areas, it will just reaffirm that there is disagreement, and that the results of the survey are sensitive to debatable decisions about who to include.

On the other hand, if even staff at those organisations concede that work focused on long-term future issues is equally or more impactful, then it would provide evidence in favour of general agreement among staff in the movement as a whole.

We received 13 responses. Two said they did not know enough about work on the long-term future to have an opinion on the effectiveness of that fund so we were left with 11 respondents who ranked all 4 funds – 6 working on animal welfare and 5 working on global poverty.

The median respondent thought that the EA Community fund and the Long-Term Future fund were roughly equally cost-effective. They thought the Animal Welfare fund was 33% more cost-effective than the EA Community fund, and that the Global Health and Development fund was 66% less cost effective than the EA Community fund.

Among this group, 26% thought the EA Community Fund was most effective, 21% thought that of the Long-Term Future Fund, 35% thought that of the Animal Welfare Fund, and 18% thought that of the Global Health and Development Fund.¹

These data should be interpreted with caution. The sample was fairly small and there was a wide range of views. However, overall it looks like:

• It was most common for people in this sample to believe funding their own field was most effective;
• But it was nearly as common for people in this group to think funding for the Long-Term Future or EA Community Building was equally effective or more effective than work on their own causes;
• On the other hand, the reverse was not true – nobody in the previous sample working on EA Movement Building or the Long-Term Future thought work directly on global poverty or animal welfare was equally as cost-effective.

As a final test, we added these eleven additional respondents working at animal welfare and global poverty organisations to our initial sample of 27 EA leaders. This bring the sample closer to the actual distribution of people in the community doing direct work on these four problems.

In this expanded sample, the Long-Term Future fund and EA Community fund were still favored quite strongly, although the consensus was somewhat weaker than in our original sample.

The fact that our overall conclusions seem to hold up even after adding additional staffers at animal welfare and global health and development organisations to the sample is some evidence for the robustness of the finding that EA leaders strongly favor work on the long-term future and EA community building over global development and animal welfare. Of course, as argued above, the fact that EA leaders hold this view does not necessarily mean that they are right.

Tables with additional data from this supplemental survey can be found in Appendix 3.

What’s the key bottleneck for the effective altruism community?

We also asked attendees what they believed were the top 3 key factors limiting the community’s ability to do more good. We broke stages of involvement down into five parts, which follow sequentially, and asked where people thought the key bottleneck lay.

First place got 3 points, second place 2 points, and third place 1 point. The results are in the table below.

Note that each stage is a “conversion rate” from the previous stage. So if you answer stage (3), “more people taking moderate action”, it means that the key bottleneck is taking people from (2) to (3).

These results are almost identical to last year.

Attendees continue to believe that the main bottleneck in the pipeline isn’t reaching new people, but rather i) advancing people involved to the point where they’re dedicated to working on high priorities full-time, ii) and then helping those people accomplish more, with e.g. better training and access to information.

Because we agree with this view, 80,000 Hours has reoriented its material over the last year from the first 3 stages – which we previously felt might be the bottleneck – towards the last two.

We also put in the views from 9 people working at animal and poverty focused organisations – and scaled them up to have the same number of votes – which shows they are focused earlier in the pipeline, getting interest and encouraging people to take their first steps (perhaps becoming vegetarian, or donating).

Learn more about our views on how the effective altruism community can coordinate to do more good together:

• Doing good together — how to coordinate effectively, and avoid single-player thinking
• Should you play to your comparative advantage when choosing your career?
• Considering Considerateness: Why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate

EA leaders are willing to sacrifice a lot of extra donations to hold on to their most recent hires

Update May 2019: We’ve written up a more detailed exploration of these results, and why we do not think the precise numbers are a reliable answer to decision-relevant questions for job seekers, funders, or potential employers.

We asked organisations how much they’d be willing to give up in future donations in order to retain their most recent hires. Unfortunately, we do not have very much confidence in the answers to these questions and the particular way we worded them limits their relevance to most career decisions. We would not recommend updating very much based on them.

Nevertheless, we report the results, as well as some of our concerns, below.

Out of 27 people who answered, 9 said they’d be willing to forgo $10 million or higher in additional donations to prevent a recent senior hire from leaving for three years. For junior hires, the median was $450,000, with 7 willing to forego $1 million or more.

Here is the exact question we asked:

For a typical recent Senior/Junior hire, how much financial compensation would you need to receive today, to make you indifferent about that person having to stop working for you or anyone for the next 3 years?

Here are the full results, which show a great deal of spread:

Typical senior roles were Director of Operations, Director of Research and CEO/Founder. Typical junior roles were a Research Assistant, Events Organiser, Administrator and Web Developer.

The answers are very similar to those in 2017.

Note that the question refers to the value of retaining a past hire, not the value of setting out to find the next hire, which could be quite a bit lower.

Given these high figures – much higher than typical salaries – why aren’t these organisations hiring people very quickly? We try to explain that seeming puzzle here. In the process we show that these results may not imply very much for people who don’t have a comparative advantage in working at these organisations.

The answer to this trade-off is most relevant for someone who has a job offer at one of these organisations, and is deciding between working there, or earning to give for them. Because the survey asks about existing staff, it’s even more applicable to people who are already working there.

We have additional concerns about these results.

First, we didn’t get respondents to consider the opportunity cost of their employees’ time, or donors’ money. As a result these numbers are inflated relative to what funders should actually be willing to pay to enable an organisation to hire someone. On the other hand, these figures probably don’t take account of the inconvenience caused to other groups if this staff member leaves, and has to be replaced by someone who otherwise would work elsewhere.

Second, it’s hard for even an organisational leader to know how much they should be willing to pay, respondents didn’t take very long in filling out the survey, and they may have been primed by reading the results of last year’s survey.

Also note that these are the amounts of additional donations organisations would be willing to forego in order to keep a recent hire. They would have given different answers if asked how much they’d be willing to pay out of their existing budgets. We discussed more weaknesses of the survey above.

On the other hand, it’s hard to know how to get better data on this question. Respondents consistently gave high answers, and figures like this have been widely discussed and largely accepted since we published similar results last year.

We can also tackle the funding vs. talent question with some other questions.

On a scale of 0 to 4, respondents saw themselves as 2.8 constrained by talent and 1.5 by funding, similar to last year and consistent with the donation trade-off figures.

(Interestingly, many of the organisations report being neither heavily constrained by funding or talent, suggesting they either feel they are already at their optimal size or are instead constrained by something else, which might be “insights” or “management capacity”).

Supposing the trade-off figures are correct, what does this mean for the value of direct work at these organisations?

If you think these organisations are among the best donation opportunities, then these figures reflect the value of new hires measured in donations to top charities above what they already receive. This suggests that unless the staff who took these roles had outstanding earning ability, they are probably having much more impact through direct work than they would have through earning to give. Though if there’s another organization they could donate to that is more funding constrained and therefore more cost-effective, then that could be better still.

What would be some evidence that you’re in such a position to do particularly valuable direct work?

• You have excellent personal fit for the role – if the organisation would otherwise be able to hire someone only marginally worse than you, the organisation won’t be willing to pay much extra.
• You have an offer to work at one of the more talent constrained organisations, which tend to be the larger ones.
• You have an offer to fill a relatively senior role – the figures are several times higher for senior roles on average.
• You won’t require much effort to train. New hires are less valuable to the organisation than their most recent hire, since recent hires have already been vetted and trained to some degree. This means the figures are an overestimate of the value of marginal hires, unless you’re in a position to “hit the ground running” at the organisation.
• You aren’t in a position to earn very large amounts.

These positions aren’t for everyone – indeed they’re not for most people. The attitude, skills and experience these groups are looking for are not common, which is exactly why they place a lot of value on someone when they do find the right person.

Still, if you’re unsure about your own situation, then these results suggest there’s huge value in finding out whether you might be a good fit. If you are, then it’s likely your highest-impact option.

As a first step to learn more, read our profile about these jobs.

Those who aren’t suited to any of these positions can come up with alternatives using our six-step process for generating promising career paths.

They think success in priority paths outside their organisations is also quite valuable

We also wanted to know how much financial value people would attach to some of our other top priority career paths, especially where the relevant organisations weren’t able to answer themselves.

We asked:

How much should Open Philanthropy be willing to pay today to immediately add someone to the community who is:

• Able to get a job on a strategy research team at OpenAI, DeepMind and/or FHI.
• Able to get an AI-related job as a senior security staffer in the US government.
• Able to get a job doing AI technical safety research at OpenAI, DeepMind and/or MIRI.
• Able to get a policy research role at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, focused on preventing global catastrophic biological risks.
• Highly capable in general, worried about catastrophic risks, speaks Chinese well though not natively, has lived in China for 2 years, and is about to start a Masters in Public Policy on a prestigious scholarship in China.

The results are shown below:

Note that this question brings someone into the community who otherwise wouldn’t exist – rather than just three years earlier in the previous question – so we would expect these figures to be higher. Though if we take the high discount rates on the arrival of staff that people reported – discussed below – the difference between 3 years earlier and 50 years earlier may not be as big as you’d expect.

These results are difficult to interpret because they depend heavily on respondents’ empirical and normative beliefs about Open Philanthropy’s counterfactual use of funds, as well as their interpretation of the question. For example, some respondents may have believed this spending would displace an equal amount of spending this year on Open Phil’s EA and long-termist program areas. Others may have assumed it would displace Open Phil’s “last dollar,” which might be global health spending thirty years from now.

Keeping those major caveats in mind, while there was a wide range of views, the results suggest that respondents believed recruiting people to fill these roles would be worth large amounts of funding from an aligned donor.

You can find out whether you’re a good fit for these positions above by reading our profiles on them here:

• AI strategy research
• AI policy implementation
• US AI policy expert
• AI technical safety research
• Catastrophic biological risk researcher
• China specialist

They report quite high discount rates on future donations

We asked leaders what donation in three years’ time would be of equal value to a donation of $100,000 today, and from that inferred an annual discount rate. We report the results below but we have very low confidence in them and strongly recommend against making major changes to your plans based on them.

While the median discount rate for donations was 16%, 12 out of 26 respondents gave a discount rate on future donations above 20%, and 6 above 50%. These latter groups believe they benefit significantly more from a donation now than the same donation guaranteed to arrive in a year’s time.

We have serious concerns about these results and believe they should be interpreted with particular caution.. For instance, there are many complications beyond the scope of this post that could cause these organisations to have much higher discount rates than would make sense for the community as a whole. As one example, an organisation could have an extremely high discount rate if it was close to folding due to lack of funds but this should only affect the community’s discount rate if keeping the organisation afloat is among the very best uses of money.

Overall, we would not recommend anybody make major changes to their plans based on these findings.

Half would give up two suitable hires in two year’s time in exchange for their last hire

We also asked a new question about how urgently organisations needed suitable staff to appear:

Imagine your last good hire, or a good hire at an org you’re familiar with. For what value of X would you be indifferent between that person appearing when they did, or two people of the same ability appearing in the community (and starting to work for your org if you like) X years later?

This is another case where we have serious concerns about our results and caution strongly against using them to make substantial changes to your career.

The question is somewhat confusing – a discount rate on new hires is a bit challenging to elicit, because people are not uniform and divisible in the way money is. A few respondents mentioned to us that they placed little value on the second person because their organisation didn’t need two people with the same skills, which wasn’t the intended spirit of the question. Other respondents may have thought this way, too. So as with all of these results, we should take these answers with a pinch of salt.

Nonetheless, the implied discount rates from answers to this question were astonishingly high, with a median of 41%, which would make 2 people who arrive in two year’s time equivalent to one today.

Three respondents gave an answer of just ‘six months’ – a mind-boggling 300% annual discount rate. Possible justifications for these figures could be i) that a project is going to fail if they can’t hire a suitable person right away, ii) they view the problem they are working to solve as incredibly urgent, such that any delays are damaging or risky, iii) additional staff today create additional management capacity or recruit further talented community members tomorrow, creating a positive feedback loop and a high rate of return on work performed today, iv) respondents believe the community faces rapidly diminishing returns on certain types of talent, v) respondents misinterpreted the question and assumed the additional person added to the community must also work at their organisation.

Overall, we wouldn’t place much weight on these specific figures. Estimating this kind of discount rate is very complicated and we aren’t confident people thought this through carefully in the limited time they had to answer the survey.

Current leaders came to be involved through a wide variety of different channels

We asked leaders:

How did you first get involved in effective altruism intellectually/online/by agreeing with the ideas? How did you find out about EA? What year did this happen?

Many people encountered multiple sources simultaneously, or couldn’t remember which ones came first, so we just counted the number of mentions of each.

The biggest early points of contact for leaders in the community were Peter Singer (8), LessWrong (6), and Will MacAskill (5). Other utilitarian-leaning philosophers were substantial (9), as was finding out about or attending an event run by Giving What We Can (5).

We were somewhat surprised at the dominance of philosophers on this list. Four people said they independently came up with the drowning child in the pond argument for giving to charity, or decided to earn to give for the most effective charities.

When did people “first get involved in effective altruism in-person/career-wise/taking real action”? The majority did so between 2008 and 2014:

This isn’t surprising because it usually takes several years from first getting involved to building up the track record to join an organisation’s leadership.

You can see what their first meaningful contributions to the community were in Appendix 2.

Conclusion

The effective altruism community’s greatest talent needs are in the fields of operations, management, generalist research, government and policy expertise, and AI/machine learning expertise. The result has stayed fairly constant over the last year, suggesting that these needs are stable and acquiring career capital in these areas could be valuable in the long-run.

People with these skills could do a lot of good through ‘direct work’, and should consider it if they haven’t already.

For those who don’t ever expect to work in the organisations surveyed these results are much less decision-relevant – with the exception of the questions of which of the Effective Altruism funds are most cost-effective.

On that question respondents had a strong consensus on the importance of work focused on the long-term future and building the community. This result was fairly robust to surveying additional staffers working at the latter two fields, but is in tension with the most commonly held views among the community at large.

Respondents again emphasized the importance of increasing the number and effectiveness of people dedicating their careers to doing good most effectively. They saw this bottleneck as more pressing than reaching more people, holding their attention, or having more people take moderate action.

Overall, the survey’s results seem consistent with our view that people can add a lot of value by taking steps to enter one of our priority paths as soon as they are able, or otherwise trying to get into one of our top 5 career categories.

Some of the questions in this year’s survey weren’t as informative as we initially hoped they would be. For next year’s survey we expect to either ask entirely new questions, or interview a smaller number of people in substantial depth, so that we can discuss their answers with them until they reach a reflectively stable view, and we understand what they really mean.

Read next

• These are the world’s highest impact career paths according to our research
• Doing good together — how to coordinate effectively, and avoid single-player thinking
• Should you play to your comparative advantage when choosing your career?
• Considering Considerateness: Why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate
• Why despite global progress, humanity is probably facing its most dangerous time ever

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who filled out the survey, and to Ben Todd, Carl Shulman and Owen Cotton-Barratt for looking over it ahead of time.

Appendix 1 – How the survey was conducted

You can see exactly how the survey was taken on Google Forms here.

37 people filled out the survey, though not all respondents answered every question. 18 people who were asked to take the survey did not fill it out, yielding a response rate around two-thirds. Most people responded in June 2018.

Most people who filled it out requested that their answers be anonymised before being shared with anyone else. Unfortunately, for privacy reasons, we can’t share individual survey responses.

The tables and figures are summarised in this brief presentation.

Appendix 2 – Answers to open comment questions

How did you first get involved in effective altruism in-person/career-wise/taking real action? When did this happen?

(Totally optional) Any other comments on what we need more of in the community, or what characteristics or lack thereof most often hold people back from usefully contributing?

• Need more gender and especially ethnic diversity.
• More mid career people with domain expertise in some relevant area + experience at well run organizations.
• Senior figures to mentor junior people.
• People who have an infrastructure building mindset.
• Places for relatively independent researchers to semi-privately get feedback from one another.
• Meta-level judgment.

(Optional) What other hypothetical EA Fund do you think would be similarly effective, or more effective, than the ones above? What would it be focused on? In your view, a donation of $A to this fund would be equally as valuable as a $1,000 donation to the EA Community Fund.

• Breakthrough science fund, $3,000
• Long-term future suffering prevention focus
• Prioritization research/shallow investigations of new areas, $1,000
• More activist versions of the others could be improvements.
• Improving Science and Knowledge Aggregation
• Global pro democracy/liberalism/progress/etc. fund
• Long-Term Future EA Fund that funds slightly more research on things that also reduce s-risks, $100
• A fund reducing the risk of great power war would be more effective (if it had a good fund manager), $400
• A fund on improving politics (in a long termisty way) would be pretty good, $800.
• Some long termist or EA fund managed by someone smart and sensible but with more bandwidth than Nick Beckstead, $600
• X-risk specific subset of Long Term Future is most of our expected value in that fund.
• Non-extinction risk long-run future
• Priorities research, $800

(Optional) Are there any ways that 80,000 Hours or other organisations in the community could help you get the talent or funding you need, which aren’t obvious, or they aren’t already doing?

• EA needs more gender and especially ethnic diversity.
• We’re going to need to meet a lot of angel investors as we start to spin out projects, which we would love to have some help with.
• Talent referrals would help. I also somehow forgot about the job board and didn’t think of putting my job on there, so I should probably do that.
• Maybe help coordinate moral trades
• Having some prestigious economist on 80k podcast to pitch global priorities research.
• No – 80k is already a known resource and strong ally when we need it, and what they’re doing day to day is already super helpful for our goals.
• Send us potential [staff members interested in the problem we’re working on]
• Send [us] names of awesome programmers!

If you’re still reading, you might be a good fit for a job at one of these organisations. Read more here and then get in touch.

Appendix 3 – Additional answers from animal and poverty focused organisations

(Optional) Do you think your answer to the question above is a good proxy indicator for your view on the relative cost-effectiveness of people in the community going to work on these 4 different ways of doing good?

Mean: 3.5/5

(Optional) What other hypothetical EA Fund do you think would be similarly effective, or more effective, than the ones above? What would it be focused on? In your view, a donation of $A to this fund would be equally as valuable as a $1,000 donation to the EA Community Fund.

• I don’t know if we need a new fund, but I think tailoring community building to focus especially on diversifying major funding sources and money in EA would be excellent (and not E2G, rather networking with already wealthy and influential people/foundations)

• Mental health could be at least as effective as Global Health, though probably not as effective as EA Community or Animal Welfare. Acknowledging that I have done zero research on this, I’m guessing that $5,000 to mental health could ~ be equivalent to $1,000 to the EA Community Fund.

• An explicit pro-veg fund, i.e. a fund with the aim to reduce the global consumption of animal products. The existing animal welfare fund focuses a lot on increasing animal welfare standards while there is a variety of benefits to the world by focusing on the reduction of animal products (climate change, public health, animal welfare, deforestation, etc.)

• I believe a fund aimed at giving opportunities to influence policy in LMICs would be ~2x as cost-effective as the Global Health EA fund, although I’m not confident in this view

• can’t think of any, but wish long term future fund can focus on other things like biosecurity or climate change (they are also long term future and don’t need separate funds)

• Not necessarily more effective, but a Fund for advocacy and/or human rights. (A fund for present day humans which doesn’t focus primarily on health-related interventions).

(Totally optional) Any other comments on what we need more of in the community, or what characteristics or lack thereof most often hold people back from usefully contributing?

• Good social skills, especially in working with non-EAs; people willing to do work that isn’t status-advancing; people who are willing to make longer-term commitments to projects

• Within animal welfare EA, effective management and operational skills are most lacking

• I want to see more EA women and POC with extremely advanced, EA-based decision making skills in leadership positions within the animal welfare movement. We need more EAs in decision making positions in the animal welfare movement in general, but there’s a real thirst right now for more women and POC in light of #MeToo.

• Social skills and trustworthiness

(Optional) Are there any ways that 80,000 Hours or other organisations in the community could help you get the talent or funding you need, which aren’t obvious, or they aren’t already doing?

• Write an in-depth career review of working in the plant-based and clean meat/egg/dairy sectors

• I need more EAs who are extremely socially skilled in leadership (decision-making) positions in the animal welfare movement. I feel like animal welfare is a perceived as a little entry-level and “soft” compared to AI and X-Risk. Just because the concepts in animal welfare are easier to understand than AI doesn’t mean we don’t need really smart and skilled people working on this issue.

• Make sure our job ads are being communicated to the community.

• [Certain schools with good economics departments] have large amounts of high quality MA students going to work for J-PAL every year. Promoting these people to instead work for EA charities or doing more directly aligned work could be high value. J-PAL is increasingly becoming a more academic organization and many of these high quality candidates could help improve development charities. The gap between wanting to work for J-PAL or do direct work is not insurmountable either, so I believe the organization giving talks to these programs would sway some students towards working directly for standout development charities.

• [For us,] help to get talent hasn’t yet been needed. However, for future higher management positions this could be very helpful, as we would like to tap into EA circles too.

How did you first get involved in effective altruism in-person/career-wise/taking real action? When did this happen?

Additional charts on animal welfare and global poverty staff opinions on EA funds

Votes for most effective fund

Ties are counted as a partial vote for each fund.

Votes for least effective fund

Other responses by animal welfare and global poverty staff

For a typical recent Senior/Junior hire, how much financial compensation would you need to receive today, to make you indifferent about that person having to stop working for you or anyone for the next 3 years?¹

The post What skills or experience are most needed within professional effective altruism in 2018? And which problems are most effective to work on? New survey of organisational leaders. appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Update April 2019: We think that our use of the term ‘talent gaps’ in this post (and elsewhere) has caused some confusion. We’ve written a post clarifying what we meant by the term and addressing some misconceptions that our use of it may have caused. Most importantly, we now think it’s much more useful to talk about specific skills and abilities that are important constraints on particular problems rather than talking about ‘talent constraints’ in general terms. This page may be misleading if it’s not read in conjunction with our clarifications.

What are the highest-impact opportunities in the effective altruism community right now? We surveyed leaders at 17 key organisations to learn more about what skills they need and how they would trade-off receiving donations against hiring good staff. It’s a more extensive and up-to-date version of the survey we did last year.

Below is a summary of the key numbers, a link to a presentation with all the results, a discussion of what these numbers mean, and at the bottom an appendix on how the survey was conducted and analysed.

We also report on two additional surveys about the key bottlenecks in the community, and the amount of donations expected to these organisations.

Key figures

Willingness to pay to bring forward hires

We asked how organisations would have to be compensated in donations for their last ‘junior hire’ or ‘senior hire’ to disappear and not do valuable work for a 3 year period:

Most needed skills

• Decisions on who to hire most often turned on Good overall judgement about probabilities, what to do and what matters, General mental ability and Fit with the team (over and above being into EA).

Funding vs talent constraints

• On a 0-4 scale EA organisations viewed themselves as 2.5 ‘talent constrained’ and 1.2 ‘funding constrained’, suggesting hiring remains the more significant limiting factor, though funding still does limit some.
• We tried probing the same issue another way: organisational leaders thought doubling their funding over the next 3 years (relative to it staying constant) would allow them to do 28% more good while doubling their quality-adjusted pool of applicants would have allowed them to do 49% more good (relative to it staying constant). (Both figures there are for a size-weighted average).
• Considering the next 3 years, the median organisation had a time discount rate on donations of 14% per year. That is, they valued a $100 donation now as much as a $114 donation next year.
• 22 donors who are ‘earning to give’ were surveyed on how much they expect to give in future – their expected donation growth rate was 28% per year for the next five years.

Relative effectiveness of working to solve different problems

• We asked leaders their views on the relative cost-effectiveness of donations to 4 different funds being operated by the community – one focussed on Global Development, another on Animal Welfare, another on growing the Effective Altruism Community, and another on improving the Long-Term Future.
• The median view was that the EA Community and Long-Term Future funds were equally cost effective, and in turn 10 times more cost-effective than the Animal Welfare fund, which was twice as cost-effective as the Global Development fund. Views were similar among people whose main research work is to prioritise different causes – none of whom rated Global Development as the most effective. However, individual views on these issues varied over five orders of magnitude (see below for details).

Full analysis

Many of the results are shown below. All the resulting tables are available in the following presentation.

Our goal was to include at least one person from every organisation founded by people who strongly identify as part of the effective altruism community with full-time staff, which we largely accomplished. The survey includes (number of respondents in parentheses): 80,000 Hours (3), AI Impacts (1), Animal Charity Evaluators (1), Center for Applied Rationality (2), Centre for Effective Altruism (3), Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (1), Charity Science: Health (1), Foundational Research Institute (2), Future of Humanity Institute (3), GiveWell (2), Global Priorities Institute (1), Leverage Research (1), Machine Intelligence Research Institute (2), Open Philanthropy (5), Rethink Charity (1), Sentience Institute (1) and Other (6) (who were mainly researchers). The survey mostly took place at the EA Leader’s Forum in Oakland in August 2017 – we then emailed the survey to groups that didn’t attend that forum to fill in the gaps.

The reader should keep in mind this sample does not include some direct work organisations that some in the community donate to, including the Against Malaria Foundation, Mercy for Animals or the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley.

The methodology is described in detail in Appendix 1. The weaknesses of the method are also discussed below. I’ve tidied up and anonymised the free text responses to four questions and put them in Appendix 2.

What do the results mean?

EA leaders report significant talent gaps

Many organisations reported being willing to give up large donations to retain their most recent hires. For a three year period, some gave figures over $10 million for a senior hire. For junior hires, the median was $250,000, but about a third gave figures over $500,000.

Here is the exact question we asked:

For a typical recent Senior/Junior hire, how much financial compensation would you have needed to receive today, to make you indifferent about one of them not having been available for you or anyone to hire for a further 3 years?

Here are the full results, which show a great deal of spread:

What can we infer from this?

First, we need to question whether the estimates are accurate. It’s very hard to make estimates like these, and the respondents didn’t have long to analyse the figures. You can see more discussion of the weaknesses of the survey later.

This said, it’s hard to know how to get better data on this question, and there are lots of examples of high figures, so it’s not the result of a few answers skewing the results.

To sense-check the figures, we also asked about talent constraints from two other angles. The answers we received support the general idea that EA organizations are more talent-constrained than funding constrained:

Why don’t those organistions that have money but can’t hire the people they need just offer to pay more money until they can? Respondents gave a wide range of answers to this, which you can read in questions 3 in appendix 2.

Supposing the tradeoff figures are correct, what does this mean for the value of direct work at these organisations?

If you think these organisations are among the best donation opportunities, then these figures reflect the value of new hires measured in donations to top charities. This suggests that many of the workers are having much more impact than they could by earning to give.

When might someone be in such a position to do particularly valuable direct work?

• You have excellent personal fit for the role — if you’re only marginally better than the person who would have been hired otherwise, the organisation won’t be willing to pay much extra.

• You have an offer to work at one of the more talent constrained organisations, which tend to be the larger ones.

• You have an offer to fill a relatively senior role — the figures are several times higher for senior roles on average.

• You won’t require much effort to train and select. New hires are less valuable to the organisation than their most recent hire, since recent hires have already been vetted and trained to some degree. This means the figures are an overestimate of the value of marginal hires, unless you’re in a position to “hit the ground running” at the organisation.

These positions aren’t for everyone, but if you’re unsure about your own situation, then these results suggest there’s huge value in finding out whether you might be a good fit. If you are, then it’s likely your highest-impact option.

As a first step to learn more, read our profile about these jobs.

EA leaders believe that giving focussed on the EA community and long term future is more effective than that on global poverty or animal welfare

The median response about the cost-effectiveness of the different EA funds was the following:

The results weren’t noticeably different for the 9 dedicated global priorities researchers in the sample.

Looking at the 90th to 10th percentile range, there was a 3,000x range of relative cost-effectiveness. While there was a lot of agreement that the value of EA Community Fund and Long-Term Future fund was similar – which makes sense, since they’re both run by Nick Beckstead – there were wildly varying views on the value of poverty reduction and animal welfare.

On the other hand, if we look at the median view, there’s only a 20x difference between the most and least cost-effective funds.

To look at the results another way, we can see how many people thought each fund was the most cost-effective of the four (votes are split in case of a tie):

Again it’s clear that the group had quite a strong preferences for EA movement building and work to improve the long term future.

These answers contrast with a survey of 1,450 people in the community at large, of whom 41% gave poverty reduction as thier ‘top priority’.

How much should a donor adjust their view of cause effectiveness based on these survey results? If they generally accept the effective altruist view of the world, I think quite a bit.

In my opinion the group surveyed included many of the most clever, informed and long-involved people in the movement. Most people in the group did not start out their work to improve the world by favouring the first two options – rather they passed through a phase of focussing on global development or animal welfare and subsequently changed their minds (including me).

Furthermore, as a rule of thumb, people are too reluctant to update based on the stated views of others rather than too enthusiastic.

However, there are a few reasons for caution. Firstly, the survey is not only about the four different cause areas, but also about four specific donor funds – the results may in part reflect people’s confidence in the fund managers themselves. Nick Beckstead has less other funding to support long-run future and effective altruism community building than either of the other two fund managers have to support their areas, which may make his marginal donations seem more valuable. Secondly, the survey is about marginal donations rather than average donations across the cause as a whole – it also doesn’t directly ask about the value of sending talented people into a field. Thirdly, the EA Leaders Forum necessarily had a high representation of people working to build the EA community as this was the main topic of discussion. A group that has chosen to work on community building can be expected to have an unusually positive view of the value of that work.

Explaining away the strong result for the long-term future fund is harder. One of the largest organisations – GiveWell – only gave one submission to this question, which may have suppressed support for their cause area (global development). On the other hand, many people not working in long-term focussed organisations nonetheless rated it as most effective.¹

On balance I think these results are informative. But they would be even more persuasive if asked of a wider range of people conducting research within the EA community without any bias towards selecting people interested in a particular cause.

If it’s safe, you could consider moving forward some donations

While the size-weighted average discount rate for donations was 12%, a number of respondents replied suggesting that their organisation’s discount rate on future donations was quite high (>20%). That is to say, they benefit significantly more from a donation now than the same donation guaranteed to arrive in a year’s time.

The highest discount rates were for early stage projects which could run out of money and are looking for the nonprofit equivalent of ‘venture capital.’

Giving sooner could be straightforward for people with existing savings, or the ability to borrow cheaply, for instance by expanding their mortgage.

If respondents are correctly estimating their discount rate, our results suggest that donors who are earning the market return on their savings (3-7%) or able to borrow at low interest rates could do more good by moving their donations to cash-poor organisations sooner rather than later.

The larger the gap between the organisation’s discount rate and the rate of investment returns, the greater the potential gains for the charity or donor by bringing forward donations.

Two downsides to be considered are that:

• Giving organisations very large reserves right away may make them less responsive to the views of donors, as they will not have to regularly show impressive results in order to continue attracting donations.
• If you borrow or draw down your savings, then you expose yourself to risk if your expected future income never materialises. This could occur if you get sick or lose your job. For this reason I would only recommend this strategy to people who will remain financially secure even after donating early.

What kinds of talent do we need more of?

People were asked both about what skills they wanted to see more in the community as a whole, and which skills they needed to attract for their own organisation. The results were widely dispersed:

The most in-demand roles are researchers and managers, but we’d also like to highlight increasing demand for subject specialists, especially experts in policy, biology/life sciences, economics and mathemathics. Many people in the community think that these skill sets are needed to solve the highest-priority problems, but they’re also in short supply in the community.

We’d also like to highlight significant demand for people doing operations, administration and executive assistant work. These staff do things like create hiring processes, design office spaces to maximise productivity, and manage budget tracking processes. These roles are vital for running all of the organisations surveyed, but many are not able to hire as many good candidates for these roles as they would like. In particular, since this work is a little unglamorous, we think its value gets underappreciated, which makes these roles especially high-impact. We intend to write more about these roles in the future.

How to improve your judgement

The most requested skill-set was generalist research ability and great judgement about what’s true and what’s important. These are frustratingly vague descriptions though, similar to saying ‘we want really smart people’. Can we say a bit more about what EA organizations are after here?

One reason we think people request this skill set is that the community faces a great deal of uncertainty about questions in very ‘messy’ areas, where it’s hard to give a solid answer (e.g. which global problem is most pressing; what strategy the movement should take). This means that people who are able to do the following are extremely valuable: (i) synthesise many different types of information (ii) use that to create a practical recommendation (iii) which is well calibrated (i.e. neither over nor under-confident) and (iv) generated in a way that it can be explain to others so they can check it for themselves. A further reason to care about judgement is that it helps to avoid damaging errors in strategy or communications.

How can you cultivate these skills? One option might be to study a serious quantitative subject as an undergraduate or at grad school.

What if you’re not able to study now? We’ve compiled a list of ways to improve your rationality and decision-making.

More generally you will want to spend a lot of time talking to other people who think in a careful and reasonable way. Julia Galef has described this process of coming to use statistical reasoning in your everyday life like so:

“Bayes’ Rule is probably the best way to think about evidence. In other words, Bayes’ Rule is a formalization of how to change your mind when you learn new information about the world or have new experiences. … After you’ve been steeped in Bayes’ Rule for a little while, it starts to produce some fundamental changes to your thinking. For example, you become much more aware that your beliefs are grayscale, they’re not black and white. That you have levels of confidence in your beliefs about how the world works that are less than one hundred percent but greater than zero percent. And even more importantly, as you go through the world and encounter new ideas and new evidence, that level of confidence fluctuates as you encounter evidence for and against your beliefs.”

One approach for prompting this shift in thinking is to read the book Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and then participate in prediction competitions like the Good Judgement Project Open Tournament. These will require you to think in gradations of certainty, compile conflicting pieces of evidence, and respond to feedback about your accuracy.

Which skills were less mentioned?

• People extremely enthusiastic about effective altruism
• Communications, other than marketing and public figures
• Web development
• People extremely enthusiastic about working on x-risk
• Developing world experts
• Software development
• Philosophers

Sorry to our many philosopher readers!

In most cases what’s driving the low scores is the preponderance of people with the skills on this list, though in some cases the organisations recently hired people in these categories (reducing the short-term need), and many of the organisations have recently deprioritized marketing.

However, the situation could easily change within a couple of years. Just last year, there was significant demand for web developers and engineers, and this demand could return equally quickly.

Moreover, if you have sufficiently high personal fit in one of these skill sets, it can still be a great option. For instance, the Global Priorities Institute is still hiring philosophers and philosophy is still one of the most frequent paths into global priorities research. We’ve also heard about some demand for freelance web developers.

How do the results compare to last time?

We changed the questions to make them more informative than last year’s survey, which makes direct comparison quite hard. However, the results seem in general quite similar.

The most likely shift is a higher willingness to pay for talented hires than a year ago.

Weaknesses of the survey

• The survey included 38 people from a range of organisations, but they did not all answer every question (see the presentation for sample sizes on each question). People without an organisation affiliation could not answer questions about e.g. their organisation’s willingness to pay for hires. The question with the fewest responses had 15 answers.
• For the org-size weighted means, some individuals’ answers could end up being very influential. This occurred if only one person from an organisation with a large budget answered a question. Each staff member from GiveWell could get a 10% sway over the weighted average, or 20% if only one answered. For this reason we report both the weighted and unweighted averages. Fortunately, in most cases they did not differ much.
• I expect many people answered difficult questions quite quickly without doing serious analysis. As a result the results will often represent a gut reaction rather than deeply considered views. As evidence of this, many people answered one of the trickier questions in reverse (giving 1/x rather than x). In other cases answers may reflect large amounts of thought over many years. We should update our views on these answers, but not treat them as the final word on the relevant questions.
• I tested the questions in an attempt to make them clear and unambiguous. However, some of them remain vague. For instance, one question asks about “If your quality-adjusted pool of applicants doubled for the next 3 years (vs staying constant)”. Different people may have interpreted this doubling quite differently.

What’s the key bottleneck for the effective altruism community?

At the same event, we ran another survey (with a very similar methodology) asking what attendees believed is the key factor limiting the community’s ability to do more good. We broke stages of involvement down into five parts, which follow sequentially from each other, and asked where people thought the key bottleneck lay. The results are in the table below.

Note that each stage is a “conversion rate” from the previous stage. So if you answer stage (3), “more people taking moderate action”, it means that the key bottleneck is taking people from (2) to (3).

The key finding was that attendees believed the main bottleneck in the pipeline wasn’t reaching new people, but rather i) advancing people involved to the point where they’re taking the highest-impact opportunities, ii) and then helping those people accomplish more, with e.g. better training and access to information.

Because we agree with this view, 80,000 Hours has reoriented its material over the last year from the first 3 stages – which we previously felt were the bottleneck – towards the last two.

How diminishing are returns in the community?

We also asked about the rate of declining returns from extra funding across the community. We asked respondents to imagine that a well-informed donor in the community wins either a $1bn lottery, or a $100m lottery, and has to donate all of their winnings.

We then asked them to guess how many times more good they would do with $1bn rather than $100m. Across 20 respondents the median guess was 4.5, and the average was 5.1.

How fast will donations to meta-charities grow over time?

In summer 2016, we carried out another survey of 22 EA meta-charity donors who are earning to give, about their expected donations over time. The donors were all people who have donated to CEA/80k in the past, and who we thought might give over $50,000 per year (total) within the next five years. This group captures most of the large donors to other EA meta-charities, though will miss some. Over 90% of the people we asked responded, including all of the largest donors.

Here are the original aggregated results (updated results follow):

• Total donations per year, now: $5.6m
• Expected donations in five years: $16.3
• Annual growth rate: 23%

Across the sample, the donors gave a 75% chance of still being engaged in earning to give and donating in five years, which has already been taken into account in the expected donations figure.

Note that not all of these donors will donate everything to meta-charities. Rather, they expect to give to a range of EA areas, such as international development. The most popular alternative is direct efforts to mitigate existential risks. So, we’d guess that the amount available for meta-charities is about half of the total, or perhaps less.

In the year since the survey:

• Open Philanthropy project started funding EA meta-charities, in some cases covering up to 50% of their budgets, effectively doubling the total available funding.
• Two respondents have left earning to give and switched into direct work — we changed their expected donations in 5 years to zero.
• One large donor dramatically increased how much they intend to give.

This gives the following updated figures:

• Total donations per year, now: $11.1m
• Expected donations in five years: $38.7m
• Annual growth rate: 28%

Again, note that probably only around a half of these are available for meta-charities.

This is a significant amount of funding, but note that many of the organisations have grown their budgets at over 50% per year, and it seems likely this could be maintained. If this happens, then the funding available from existing donors will grow more slowly than the funding needed by the organisations.

This suggests the organisations could become funding constrained if they can’t find new donors in the next five years. In particular, there is a need to find donors who can “match” Open Philanthropy, which could provide much more funding, but generally doesn’t provide more than half of an organisation’s budget.

If the past track record of finding new donors continues, then this should be achievable with some effort.

Also note that the current donations are only just about enough to cover the large meta-charities that already exist. This suggests there may not be a large funding pool ready to go for new projects.

There are, of course, many reasons to be skeptical about these figures, and they should only be treated as highly approximate estimates. The donors might be biased upwards by excessive optimism about their future income or commitment to doing good. In the past however we have found people have underestimated their donations.

The estimate was significantly affected by 3 respondents, who each shifted that figure 4% or more. In a few cases the expected giving was based on highly volatile returns on startups the donors had founded.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who filled out the survey, and to Ben Todd and Peter McIntyre for help developing the survey.

Appendix 1 – How the talent survey was conducted and analysed

You can see exactly how the survey was taken here.

38 people filled out the survey, though not all people answered every question. 6 people who were asked to take the survey did not fill it out, yielding a response rate of 86%. Where necessary they were replaced with the next most senior person in their organisation. The following organisations had one or more respondents in the survey (usually senior staff):

• 80,000 Hours (3)
• AI Impacts (1)
• Animal Charity Evaluators (1)
• Center for Applied Rationality (2)
• Centre for Effective Altruism (3)
• Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (1)
• Charity Science: Health (1)
• DeepMind (1)
• Foundational Research Institute (2)
• Future of Humanity Institute (3)
• GiveWell (2)
• Global Priorities Institute (1)
• Leverage Research (1)
• Machine Intelligence Research Institute (2)
• Open Philanthropy (5)
• Rethink Charity (1)
• Sentience Institute (1)
• Unaffiliated (5)

The unaffiliated respondents were three EA researchers who are currently not working at EA organisations, and two major donors were also asked their opinions where relevant. DeepMind was a slightly odd inclusion, but the person working there recently left a job at another of these organisations, so we used their response.

Most people who filled it out requested that their answers be anonymised before being shared with anyone else. Unfortunately, for privacy reasons, we can’t share individual survey responses.

A median, mean, 10th percentile, and 90th percentile were calculated for each question’s results. For questions about organisations, a size-weighted mean was also calculated – i.e. if an organisation that made up 20% of the total budget of all the included organisations had two people fill out the survey, each of those would be given a 10% weight in this size-weighted average. If only one person answered a question from that organisation their answer would be given a 20% weighting.

The survey was checked for outliers that massively changed the answers, and only one was found. The answer was not an error, so an average with that answer excluded was also reported.

The survey on the biggest bottleneck and declining returns to extra donations was just a sample of 22 people present at the EA Leaders Forum 2017 who chose to fill out the survey (approximately 60% of attendees).

The survey on donors’ future giving expectations was conducted by personally contacting 22 donors who we knew to be planning to give substantial sums to effective altruist organisations.

Appendix 2 – Answers to open comment questions

(Totally optional) Any other comments on what we need more of in the community, or what characteristics or lack thereof most often hold people back from usefully contributing?

Operations (4)

“Applied skills, so being able to execute on projects. Taking action, so having a better thinking to doing ratio. ”

“Willingness to do whatever is most needed, extreme conscientiousness and attention to detail.”

“We need more general operations people, and people who would be excited to work in the same job >5 years (I’m worried we’re selecting too heavily for people with super steep growth trajectories, which are unreliable for building a org’s foundation).”

“Tendency to just keep volunteering and trying to find a way to make things go better/faster/more helpfully, without need of encouragement/permission.”

Communication and ability to welcome new members (2)

“People who, in addition to their enthusiasm about and deep familiarity with EA, also have the ability to see value in, and communicate with people doing relevant work. It can often be imposing for a newcomer to engage in the EA community; I would support taking steps to lower the entry point for the average person.”

“More concrete missions for newcomers/more efficient use of early enthusiasm”

Quality of thought (5)

“Really sharp people with good judgement”

“I’d guess we especially need people with “Good calibration, wide knowledge and ability to work out what’s important.” There’s so much stuff to look into and try to figure out, for EA cause prioritization/discovery and some other topics”

“The ability to be corrected and improved.”

“The other abilities that seem most important to me are reviewing evidence and coming to good conclusions, social skills, focusing on the object level, and creativity.”

“Ambitious experimentalists; people who enjoy rigorously examining unconventional ideas; people who prefer academia or industry over nonprofit work”

Different kinds of people (3)

“Ethnic and gender diversity.”

“I agree with the standard critique that we need to extend beyond the tech/macho culture and demographics so others, e.g. mainstream policy/activism leaders, feel more welcome.”

“I would love more older people with experience who are as flexible in their thinking and willing to update as most current talented EAs”

(Optional) Which problems beyond those already addressed by the four EA Funds above do you think are highest-priority for the community to research and work to solve?

Politics, collective decision-making and coordination (7)

Improving collective decision-making
Political cooperation
Global coordination
Politics
Mainstream values spreading, e.g. high-leverage anti-Trump work.
Improving public institutions, e.g. public discourse, etc, infrastructure, science
Political action and lobbying

Specific approaches to existential risk (3)

“…a separate fund focused on pathway changes that might affect the far future for the better: generally improving governmental/intergovernmental processes, thinking about the risks / benefits of fast vs slow technology improvement, how economic changes in the developing world might be expected to overall affect pathways.”
General x-risk research (figuring out what we’re missing)/global priorities research
Biosecurity

S-risks (3)

Reducing s-risk (in cooperative ways).
S-risk?
S-risks

Rationality (3)

Rationality
Improving epistemics
Individual and group rationality

Improving science research (2)

Improving science
Improving science? Pretty uncertain about this.

Other (4)

What institutions do we need to identify, sort, train, and efficiently incorporate new talent?
Basic research
Maybe mental health
Wild animal welfare

(Optional) Only answer this question if you answered 4 or 5 on the previous question: If you tried to spend more money on attracting talent what might you do? Would you raise salaries? Would there be negative side effects which stop you from doing whatever those things are (e.g. increasing costs for existing employees)?

“I think raising salaries 50% might boost hiring about 10% (e.g. it would make the difference for 1 in 10 candidates). Maybe existing staff would become 5-10% more productive, and more likely to stay. But we’d probably want to raise all salaries, so total costs would increase about 30%.”

“I don’t really know anything we could reasonably do with money to get more qualified people to join. They just don’t really exist.”

“We face institutional limits on how much we are able to pay. Also there is just simply a lack of people with the relevant skills.”

“Staff moves time from fundraising to recruiting. I’m pessimistic about standard approaches such as raising salaries or working with headhunters due to the extremely idiosyncratic requirements we have.”

“It is difficult to simply offer higher salaries; in that situation, your current staff would be unhappy unless you raised their salaries to meet the new standard. If you don’t raise their salaries then you risk losing them, and if you do raise those salaries then you risk increasing the burn rate of your organization in a significant way.”

“Raise salaries and invest in recruiting, since many good candidates likely aren’t aware of opportunities”

“Would like to be able to raise salaries, but have commitments that make this non-trivial. Would perhaps make efforts to create a particularly attractive work situation/role/give particular freedom or authority. Downsides include possibly fairness/bitterness among veteran employees.”

“The money would go to figuring out (and setting up the institutions to) identify, sort, and train the talent.”

“More training programs with proper salaries.”

“I’d endow chairs and fellowships.”

“I think the bottleneck is more about something like coming to trust and train people rather than a shortage of people who could eventually do the work.”

“I don’t think salaries has been a bottleneck to getting great people.”

“I’d consider providing bounties for referrals.”

“Could raise salaries, but then we would do it for existing employees which makes it more expensive – a bit reluctant to do that. Expect it would worsen the culture a bit. Could also offer better benefits or more flexibility in what people work on.”

“Raising salaries can cause fairness concerns if salaries of the rest of the team remain unchanged, can make us look worse to donors, and is unlikely to be very helpful for attracting top talent since the most suitable candidates are also the most altruistic ones. I’m not sure how we’d spend more money to attract talent. The main thing would be reducing senior staff time allocated to fundraising and increasing senior staff time allocated to hiring.”

“There are various things we might do, including raising salaries, hiring a recruiter, doing more outreach (e.g., establishing prize funds), and running more researcher trials in cases where we’re relatively uncertain about a researcher’s fit”

(Optional) Are there any ways in particular that CEA/80K could help you get the talent or funding you need?

“We would very much like to find an excellent, established career economist. Would guess that kind of person wouldn’t come through 80k though. Most likely, would like to meet people doing Philosophy/Econ PhDs at top schools, who seem extremely smart and EA-aligned.”

“get people to complete [relevant] PhDs ;)”

“We desperately need top-notch operations people.”

“We aren’t hiring much right now.”

“I often direct recent graduates to 80K. Increasing the amount of attention given to [cause of choice] would be helpful, but I understand that the same would be said by the leadership of other respective causes as well.”

“Connecting us with high-power marketing talent, or nudging such talent toward us—we’ve done our own search and came up dry because the quality we need carries a price tag we couldn’t hit (so finding the right person within the network of personally/intrinsically motivated EAs is high value).”

“Push more wannabe political/policy people my way, for coaching and/or direct assistance.”

“Probably. We’re trying to build [x] field, and that’s going to require pretty close coordination between orgs.”

“You could help by recommending donor prospects to us.”

“CEA could run test projects in research-writing/one-on-one/marketing/operations-assistant, and send us the best people. I’m not sure if this would be worth the cost for CEA, but I could see it being a decent boost to us.”

“Test more people so that others benefit from the information. Focus on growth with groups that have relevant skills.”

“Talk to me about what goes wrong and help me figure out who I need to hire.”

“Not much for our current hire, who will probably be someone we know due to the need for domain knowledge, but next year, when we’re more interested in just “bright young person with good writing skills and a strong interest in social change,” that seems like it could come from 80k’s pipeline.”

“Yes, finding good administrative, operations, and diplomatic staff”

“It would be great to collaborate more to improve funneling [x]-speaking EAs through 80K’s guide and advice, and putting them in touch with us if they’re good fits. There maybe further ideas, I’d have to think about it more.”

“Maybe build up organizations / events / side-communities that are more strictly oriented toward “discuss and collaborate on interesting unconventional questions in a really technically demanding way”.

If you’re still reading, you might be a good fit for a job at one of these organisations. Read more here and then get in touch.

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