Submitted by Jess_Whittlestone

Should you work at 80,000 Hours?

17 Jess_Whittlestone 08 August 2013 02:04PM

The purpose of this post is to discuss some considerations relevant to whether it is high impact for you as an individual to work for 80,000 Hours.

Disclaimer: I am an employee at 80,000 Hours (from here on 80k). We are currently recruiting, and want to attract people to work for us who are likely to add the most value to 80k so that we can increase our impact. It seems likely that some such people might be found on LessWrong, so we want to encourage critical discussion on here about who should work at 80k.

This post will be in the format of an interview with Ben Todd, co-founder and executive director of 80,000 Hours, and thus best placed to begin a discussion about who should work for 80k. In what follows, we’ll cover:

If you want to support 80k, whether you should work for 80k or fund 80k. This involves some discussion of whether to earn to give or to work directly, adding to the discussion elsewhere on LW.
What skills and characteristics are most valuable to 80k
Whether working at 80k is likely to help your future career prospects
How working at 80k might compare to some alternatives: other EA organisations and professional jobs
Who probably shouldn’t work for 80k

What this post won’t cover:

Whether 80k itself is high impact. This has already been discussed at length on LW here and here.
Whether you’d enjoy working at 80k. We’ve already posted on our blog about why we think it’s good to work at 80k.

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