Summary- Career research

Update September 2019: Having been written in 2018, this article no longer reflects the most recent understanding of my career-choices. Nevertheless, it has useful work done in assimilating info right from working in a career in dubai to working at an EA org.

Entry question:

What should I be doing career-wise in the coming months with a focus on maximizing impact over lifetime? By impact we mean total number of lives saved over a lifetime.

What can I do to create large impact?

According to 80k-hours-career-guide, there seem to be a few approaches to having maximum impact. One can be involved in earning-to-give (ETG), direct work (DW), advocacy or research. When we are too unsure about what we want/can do, then we can look into building flexible-career-capital (FCC). FCC is the building of skills and knowledge that will be useful in a wide variety of industries over time, allowing us the freedom to work on pressing problems in the future.

ETG is self-explanatory. An example of DW would be to work for an NGO that stages interventions to help the poor get back upon their feet, i.e., working directly where needed. Working in Management consulting (MC) or Data Science (DS) would be a way to keep building FCC, as these jobs allow you to become valid in a multitude of industries. The promotion of solutions to pressing problems is called advocacy; Inspiring/persuading friends to contribute to pressing problems is an example of advocacy.

In the following section we attempt to look briefly at the different approaches to creating impact and some top examples of people who work in the industry, as featured in the 80k-hours-career-guide.

Note1: This essay uses many abbreviations, which are delivered during the first usage of the expanded form. An appendix in the end maintains the list of abbreviations and their full forms for your reference.

Note 2: This essay heavily relies on the research done by 80k-hours-career-guide.

Approach 1: Earning-to-give

A career in ETG might look like one of the following:

• An investment banker who will earn in millions and give away >50% of his salary.

• A Management Consultant who will earn > 250k$ and give away >30% of his salary.

• A Data scientist/Project Manager/Programmer who will earn 200k$ (within a few years) and give as much as possible

• An Entrepreneur who will earn in millions of $ and donate >50% of his salary

  Taking up Entrepreneurship although with very small chance of success, has the potential to cause major influence with earning, advocacy and DW. Ben West (LinkedIn) an entrepreneur (who was guided by 80k-hours-career-guide) is expected to donate millions to charity. He is going to keep a minimum wage for himself and donate the rest of his salary. Ben West is a fantastic and inspiring example of someone who is going to be ETG. There is a lot of luck involved with entrepreneurship, but nevertheless, it is the attitude that is at praise here - A person who can earn millions saying he will keep minimum wage.

Approach 2: Direct Working

80,000 Hours thinks that only a small proportion of people should earn to give long term. We think that most people should be doing things like politics, policy, high-value research, for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurship, and DW for highly socially valuable organizations - 80k-hours-career-guide

Most types of DW featured in the 80k-hours-career-guide fall under the following 3 categories:

1. Found &/or Lead or manage Effective-Altruism-Organizations (EAOs) to be most impactful. Some inspiring profiles (featured by 80k-hours) in this category are below:

   Tara Macaulay (Linkedin), was (then) head of operations (now CEO) in the Center for Effective Altruism (CEA). Tara has always been outstanding at her work, be it with saving money for her company or rising the ranks very fast. She has apparently left a lasting impact in Bhutan where she worked on direct impact projects. She interned without pay at CEA showing great leadership skills and then rose the ranks to become the current CEO. She has no MBA degrees and in fact only has a pharmacy degree but that hasn’t stopped her. The CEA gets a lot of funding (in millions) which it directs to worthy applicants that can create large impact.

   Rob Mather (LinkedIn), is the CEO of Against Malaria foundation (AMF) - critically acclaimed as one of the most effective organizations by GiveWell. He has had top education, and possibly an all-the-time high achiever who went to Harvard Business School and University of Cambridge. The AMF saves millions of lives a year, I repeat millions.

   David Goldberg (LinkedIn) is the co-founder of Founders Pledge - which makes Tech entrepreneurs legally bound to donate in case their startups succeed. He is definitely another all-the-time high achiever, who went to Cambridge, but has a degree in philosophy. He has done everything other than continuing with philosophy.

   Before all that, I spent a couple years in finance in the US, started and sold a business in Europe, and ran a chain of Segway dealerships in California. All in, a pretty bizarre career trajectory if I’m honest, which was largely the result of having no clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life until recently. - David Goldberg

   But now he has focused all of his might into the Founders Pledge to create huge impact.

2. Be an Analyst/researcher at EAOs (EAOs) such as GiveWell or 80000hours. Some inspiring profiles (featured by 80k-hours) in this category are below:

   In organizations like GiveWell, 80k-hours, CEA etc… they need people to write useful content in an understandable way and they need people to research what programs are effective and most impactful. In other words, they need people to solve problems with limited data, knowing what type of data is interesting, and being able to present it in clear manner. This is done by analysts or researchers. Here the main criteria are strong critical-thinking-skills, statistics and Mathematics. Most of the EAO’s have very few people (10-30), the top members possibly creating impact in the order of millions of dollars. As an beginner analyst you could already make an impact of 97k$ a year working for top EAOs.

3. Working in Policy

   This involves shaping the policy of governments to impact a population of a city, state, country or even the world. For example, an Economics PhD working with the government, will sometimes have the chance to impact a large population by influencing policy based on logic and numbers. Although these chances are rare an Economics PhD is still considered one of the best PhD’s to pursue (I guess owing to the impact).

   Niel Bowerman (Linkedin), previously the Assistant Director of Future of Humanity Institute, studied at Oxford University, is another outstanding talent featured in the 80k-hours website. He does not have an MBA. He is a physics major who previously handled fundraising, operations management etc… And now he is the head of AI policy for 80k-hours. With this he is able to guide potential candidates in the right direction to assist in mitigating the risks of AI through policy.

Approach 3: Advocacy

Advocacy is a powerful method to multiply your impact. A simple form of advocacy as mentioned earlier, is when you to convince your friend about ETG.

The second path (convincing your friend) does more good – in fact probably about twice as much – and this illustrates the power of advocacy. -80k-hours-career-guide.

Rosa parks is another example of why advocacy is high-impact. She refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, sparking a protest which led to a Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. Her actions led to major progress for civil rights.

Although this sounds amazing, at this point it is unclear for me what all I can do to promote advocacy other than talk to people or blog about it. Rosa Parks is a fine example but there seems to be a lot of random factors involved with the success. For the rest of this essay, I will not be taking advocacy into account. I hope to address this later.

Approach 4: Building career capital

Career Capital (CC) broadly talks about the skills, connections, credentials and runway that will allow for us to take on high impact tasks later. The greater the CC the better, roughly speaking. Better skills roughly translates to better output, more chance of learning and even more chance of making a lot of impact. In Sales, the more you sell the more the money you take home. The better your sales skills are, the better you are able to make more money, which can be in turn be donated to make maximum impact.

When we are young and we don’t know what problem we should be working on or where we can create a lot of impact, FCC comes in handy then.

flexible – useful in many different types of jobs, and likely to remain useful in the future. For instance, learning marketing or management is flexible because almost all organizations need these skills; -80k hours on CC

In an attempt to keep options open for us to move to the problem we can best address later, we should consider FCC. For example, if one does an MBA and goes into MC for the next few years, the exit opportunities are aplenty. A management consultant after a few years of work has wide scope for working in different industries and in different positions of choice, in some cases there is scope for DW, and in others one can even become partner and donate a lot of money to the cause that needs it the most. FCC is something that does not take you to a dead end. For example,

It’s widely accepted in the non-profit sector that it’s easier to switch from a business job to a non-profit job than vice versa. So if you’re unsure between the two, a business position offers more flexibility.

So the jobs we should be interested in are the jobs that will continue to be useful in different industries and will likely remain useful in the future.

Dillon Bowen (Linkedin) is working towards his Economics PhD based on the counseling he got from 80k-hours-career-guide. Economics PhD is a highly recommended graduate program by 80k-hours-career-guide, due to the expected high impact. Such a PhD allows for jobs in academia, MC, or even in the government to work in policy. So, it allows you the CC to choose later, how and where you want to work.

Peter Huford (LinkedIn), taught himself how to program having started in a political science. Now, he is improving his skills in business, programming and finance and is also having extra time to work on other charity projects. Peter seems to be a great example of one who is building great FCC.

Summary

The importance of DW has been stressed a lot by 80k-hours. In the long run that is what I guess I should be doing. But for the next few years, no harm in making money as well as building CC. But money is not the objective, getting oneself in shape to do good is; Gaining skills to make crazy impact is. The different examples of people creating their best impact shows us what is possible and how reasonable to keep the expectations, I guess. I would like to be like these people, high-achieving and high-impact-causing.

I need to be evaluating the different options available, and come up with where I can make the most impact based on the different paths that I take, considering the success and failure probabilities. The next section attempts to identify potential careers and review them considering my personal fit.

ETG, DW and building FCC are the main things discussed further in this essay. Advocacy is not discussed further within this essay. I hope to take it up on another post at another time as I don’t see it having much consequence for me at this time. Of course, we should do everything we can to get others to also pursue Effective Altruism (EA).

Finding the right career for you

According to the 80k-hours career guide, the process to find the right career path for oneself is as follows:

• Make a list of options

• Compare different options based on CC (Skills, Connections, Credentials, Runway), Personal fit, job satisfaction and impact.

• Write out your key uncertainities: What are the things that you are uncertain about? Can you quickly test them? Are they going to change your ranking largely?

Making a list according to 80k-hours sounds far-too-specific like “economics researcher focusing on global health”, “marketing for meat substitutes” etc… I am currently looking to build FCC. I also need to consider if the FCC allows me to do lot of impact in the future. I have no idea on what exact problem I would like to work on or I would best fit in. So, the focus is on the choice of direction for the next few years.

What is needed

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 mathematics. 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. -80k-hours-career-guide on talent gaps

In this article on talent gaps, the some of the top skills required to fill the talent gap are listed as:

1. Government and policy experts
2. Good calibration, wide knowledge and ability to work out what’s important
3. Management
4. Machine Learning/AI
5. Movement building, public speakers, public figures,
6. Generalist researchers

From the above we have an idea of what is needed in the EA community. We shall factor this into the career paths we consider for evaluation.

Career Quiz: recommended list of careers

The 80k-hours career guide has a career-quiz of 6 questions based on which you get a few career recommendations. The questions and my answers written are:

1. Could you become good at math, science or logic? Yes.

2. Could you become good at writing and speaking? Yes.

3. Are you happy betting on a small chance for a big impact? No.

4. Are you happy trying to work in the most demanding fields? Yes.

   Challenging work for long hours should not be a problem I suppose. I have seen evidence of this in my past, with my master thesis (10-14 hrs a day, programming, reading), with my work in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (easily clocked 10 hrs or more a day for 1 year straight), with the courses in my masters and for a few months recently where I clocked 10-11 hrs a day, doing 8 hrs of paid work and 2-3 hrs of blog work.

5. How far through your career are you? Early.

   I (age:27) finished masters and have been working for ~2 years.

6. How do you want to contribute? All possible ways.

   Direct, advocacy, ETG, research etc…

And the output is:

• Policy oriented Civil services
• Economics PhD
• DS (skill building and ETG)
• Working at effective non-profits
• Machine learning PhD
• Software engineering (skill building and ETG)
• Trading in quantitative hedge funds

When I am ready to bet on small chances then the output changes to:

• Congressional staffer
• Policy oriented Civil services
• Machine learning PhD
• Working at effective Altruist organizations
• Founding effective non-profits
• DS
• Party politics

In addition to the above career paths, I would also like to evaluate some other paths like, my current job in Design Engineering, and the difference between working in the US, the Netherlands and Dubai.

Comparing different careers

The following parameters are used to compare each career path based on the 80k-hours-career-guide - what each of the them mean is elaborated in the coming sub-section. :

• Career Capital
  • Skills
  • Connections
  • Credentials
  • runway

• Job satisfaction or supportive conditions

• Personal Fit

• Impact

Career Capital

Skills – what will you learn in this job, and how fast will you learn? You can break skills down into transferable skills, knowledge and personality traits. Some especially useful transferable skills include: personal productivity, analysis and problem-solving, the ability to learn quickly, decision-making, social skills, and management. - 80k hours CC

‘Is the career path going to lead to transferable skills like in programming or DS, which is useful in a number of industries?’, ‘Is it going to allow you to gain soft skills like critical thinking?’, are questions to consider.

Connections – who will you work with and meet in this job? Your connections are how you’ll find opportunities, spread ideas and start new projects. The people you spend time with also shape your character. For both reasons, it’s important to make connections who are influential and who care about social impact. - 80k hours CC

‘Are my connections going to get me jobs in different industries or other industries?’, ‘Are my connections going to inspire me to do good?’, ‘Are my connections influential?’, are some of the questions to reflect on while considering each career path.

Will this job act as a good signal to future collaborators or employers? Note that we don’t just mean formal credentials like having a law degree, but also your achievements and reputation. If you’re a writer, it’s the quality of your blog. If you’re a coder, it’s your GitHub. -80k hours CC

‘How good is this career path to help you grow or express your achievements ?’. Credentials are very important to sell yourself to the next interviewer.

how much money will you save in this job? Your runway is how long you could comfortably live with no income. It depends on both your savings and how much you could reduce your expenses by. We recommend aiming for at least six months of runway to maintain your financial security. 12-18 months of runway is even more useful because it gives you the flexibility to make a major career change. It’s usually worth paying down high-interest debt before donating more than 1% per year or taking a big pay cut for greater impact. -80k hours CC

Ability to quickly save enough money for the next 18 months is what seems to be defining runway. ‘How much can I donate’ is a question answered by the ‘impact’ parameter though.

CC can be looked at as a weighted sum of skill, connections, credentials and runway. This can already help us weed out the very mediocre performing career paths.

Supportive conditions

Impact on personal life

• Is the work engaging?
• Will you get freedom to decide how to work, clear tasks, clear feedback and variety in what you do?
• Colleagues- Will you like them and will they support you?
• basic needs- Will you earn enough money, will the hours be manageable, and will the commute be reasonable? Fit with rest of your life
• Will you be able to improve your personal relationships, and uphold any other important personal priorities? -80k hours CC

i.e.,

• Engaging work
• Good Colleagues
• Career that satisfies basic needs
• Career that fits with rest of life

Supportive conditions is not very important for me unless a career is known for screwing up health.

Personal Fit

‘What are your chances of excelling in that area?’ is defined by the personal fit.

Impact

Number of lives saved is the ultimate variable we are interested in. This impact is the sum of lives saved in ETG, DW, Advocacy, and research when we choose a particular career path.

Total

The total can be computed per career path, as follows:

$ (f1 x Career Capital +f2 x Impact +f3 x supportive conditions) x Personal fit

f1, f2, f3 are weights for their respective variables. These values are decided by us based on how important that particular variable is. If we are early in the career we add more weight to CC. The more altruistically-minded we are, the less weight we need to place on the supporting conditions.

Source: how to compare different careers

Personal fit x Impact

Multiplying the personal fit with impact seems to show only half of the story (we shall call it rough-impact). To determine the effective impact of pursuing a career, we should do more than just multiply the impact with the personal fit. We should look at it like a decision tree with just one branch. If we succeed our impact is say X. If we fail our impact will be Y. Therefore,

Effective-impact = Personal fit x X + (1-Personal fit) x Y

When the personal fit comprises of succeeding in multiple events we use the above formula in the form of a decision tree with multiple branches.

In the next section we take each career path and obtain values for each of the above variables.

Evaluating different profiles

With this section I hope to take each career path, and evaluate it based on the parameters from the last section. In the end I should have a table for different career paths in the rows, and the parameters in the columns. For each of the parameters, I come up with a number usually from 1-10, based on the points I make in favor of or against the career path.

Design engineering for ETG

I am currently a Design Engineer in the precision industry. The function of such an engineer is to design parts/products to the specifications provided, assemble and verify them. In this post the following cases are evaluated within this profile:

• Design Engineering in NL/Europe
• Design Engineering in US
• Design Engineering to Sales in NL

Skills:

• Not very challenging all the time, not pushed to do more and given only a small amount of feedback.

  I work for ~40 hrs a week in NL and I am barely at any pressure or pushed to achieve great things. Learning in general is slow. I suspect that there will be more pressure in the US or if I move to Sales, but there is a lot of paper work to do in general - in addition to the lack of challenging problems given for solving.

• Small percentage of critical thinking

  Critical thinking is about 20-30% of the time. Most of the time I am not working on hard problems. I am doing a lot of work that does not translate necessarily to improvement of my skill such as making small modifications to existing setups, or covering for poor procedures written by others.

• Not very valuable even with 30 years of experience

  For the first five to ten years in this position, salary increases somewhat, but any additional experience does not have a big effect on pay. - payscale

  My colleague who is an electrical engineer with experience of >20 years earns ~15k Euros more than me.

• Decent transferable skills

  I will have quite some knowledge of the Semiconductor industry, maybe a good chance to port to Sales, so I think it does offer some sort of FCC. Even within the company I work for they were looking for normal people to shift to management side provided they had a few years of experience. I have seen the useless nut-heads in sales who do not understand the product and have no idea what it can do, still pitch it to others and try to make a sale. I think I would be a welcome relief to such a space needing solid engineers who can also talk.

  Although I am not sure why going into automotive or space might be interesting, moving into such industries might be hard or impossible. I have seen people move from other industries to precision engineering, but not the other way around. I suspect going the other way might need a lot of pre-knowledge, and current knowledge might not be fully portable. So I guess I will have to stay in Precision engineering for ever (or move to sales or management).

  This job is usually not intense and has a long development cycle, so work hours are not too long, allowing us time to learn other things and improve in the areas needed after the paid work. But learning more about design seems to only come with more experience in the field, rather than reading about things.

  I don’t expect the resulting skills to be very much different between here and the US. A decent amount of transferable skills, the minimum quantity of critical thinking, a decent amount of creativity while working seems to result in a skill rating of 6.5/10.

Connections:

I work with other design engineers and physicists in the job. I might be able to find opportunities in related fields using these contacts. As I am mostly working with only my team, it doesn’t give me opportunities to meet top players in the industry. As a result the connection rating is at 4/10.

Credentials:

For a writer it is his blog, for a coder it is his GitHub, for a mechanical designer, it is his portfolio of work done till now, which would help find other jobs in the same industry. Jumping jobs is sometimes the best way to get a nice raise. I see myself growing up the ladder very very slowly (4-5 years per promotion). It is a slow working environment (mainly because of the long development cycles) and as a result I would have fewer credentials. Right now maybe I can boast to future precision companies regarding what I do at my current employer. Moving within the precision engineering industry should not be a problem, but I think it stops with that. I would put DE at a rating of 6/10 for credentials.

Runway:

I can’t move immediately into sales or even to the US. The runway for all the cases will correspond to what I earn at DE in NL. It is estimated for 18 months worth of dough, 2-3 years of saving is required. An average rating of 5/10 is given here.

Supporting conditions:

I would rate it at an 8/10 as the work is usually engaging, with good colleagues who are likely to help. It satisfies my basic needs for sure and fits well with the rest of my life by allowing me time to work on other important things.

Personal Fit:

To excel in this area would mean,

• I can be a typical engineer for the rest of my life and grow through the ranks slowly. This is like the minimum I should be able to achieve at any cost. I estimate this at 95% chance of success for me.

• There seems to be a decent opportunity into sales. But is sales a good fit for me? I suspect I can be good at it. I have seen random people move into sales and succeed. My cousin was an ordinary Mechanical Engineer who rose the ranks in sales and now earns lots of money in Dubai. Another cousin moved from electrical engineering (brainy guy though) and managed a killer career that got him to a US green card directly. Considering that Sales can make more money, I should atleast try a brief stint in it. I can always fall back to DE as and when I like. I expect the chance of success to be 75%.

• Moving to the US

  There are a couple of ways I can go to the US, either by direct applying or by migrating from one country to the other via an L1 visa. In 5 years time I would expect to have worthy experience with which I can try for a switch to the US. By then I would have a Netherlands (NL) Citizenship and if things don’t work out in the US, I can always fall back into NL and do what I do.

  • Chance of becoming really good in DE (80%)
  • Chance of managing an L1 or getting selected directly (60%)

So in total: 80%*60% = 48% of success.

Impact:

Most people move on to other jobs if they have more than 20 years’ experience in this career. Experience has a moderate effect on pay for this job.- Payscale-mechanical-engineering

• The impact of being a typical engineer for the next 40 years in NL is estimated to be ~200 lives based on:

  • beginners salary of 53k$
  • Salary raise of 4% per year for the next 40 years
  • 10% increase every 5 years
  • 20% donation
  • 4k$ being the current cost of a life
  • increase of 2% per year on the cost of lives

• The impact of moving into sales can probably significantly switch things up, conservatively I guesstimate it at atleast 2 times the impact of full time DE. Yes I am pulling these numbers almost out of my ass, as I don’t have good estimates of it. I will refine this number later if needed. Resulting in 400 lives.

• The impact of moving to the US could be much better as the pay is reasonably higher. 280 lives in the US for 35 years + 13 lives for the first 5 years in NL = ~300 lives, based on:

  • for a beginners salary of 100k
  • Salary raise of 4% per year
  • 2% increase in salary from 50 years of age
  • 10% increase every 5 years
  • 20% donation
  • 4k$ being the current cost of a life
  • increase of 2% per year on the cost of lives

Personal fit x Impact

Based on the numbers calculated earlier in the ‘personal fit’ and ‘impact’ sub-sections for DE, we compute the effective impact.

• DE in NL

    rough-impact = 95% x 200 = 190
  

This is the least I expect I am able to do. I assume that in case of failure (5% chance) I am unable to contribute anything at all. So I do not compute the effective impact separately as done below.

• DE followed by sales

I can briefly try sales and if all hell brakes loose then I can always move back in DE. Considering such a decision tree we get:

	rough-impact = 75% x 400 = 300	
	Effective Impact = 75% x 400 + 25% x 95% x 200 ~= 350 

• DE in US

Just like in sales, I can always move back to being a DE in NL as I hope to obtain by citizenship before moving to the US. So,

	rough-impact = 48% x 300 = 144
	Effective Impact = 48% x 300 + 52% x 95% x 200 ~= 248

Conclusion DE ETG

With the above calculations we see that DE in NL might be better than DE in US if we do not consider the decision tree (rough-impact). But if we do consider the decision tree (effective impact), it turns out that trying DE in US would be better than doing DE in NL. So it seems important to use the effective impact than the rough impact in most cases.

We could make the Decision tree even more complicated, with many branches etc… to work out certain situations in detail. But for now, it appears that trying Sales and US options could be good options to get myself into, as opposed to a conservative option of DE in NL.

Design engineering (Machine Design) in ‘Europe’ for DW

Skills:

• Lot of skills acquired that is not useful in DW

  Right now I am learning a very specific set of skills. Skills related to making proper drawings, how to design for the precision industry, how to keep things simple etc… Great for the precision engineering market but I don’t think it preps me for the Leadership or research type of jobs that would be needed in DW.

• Gaining management skills takes a long while before it even begins

  Becoming a design leader (a.k.a tech leadership roles), would take say 5-8 years atleast (age 35) where I am managing a technical team, knowing on a high level what my team is doing.

• Not very challenging all the time, not pushed to do more or given a lot of feedback

  I have already talked about this in the last section on DE for ETG. As an engineer I have to do a lot of unnecessary things, like repairing poor documentation, doing repetitive experiments manually, calling people to get work done etc… Time is really precious and you would want every single minute to count. I see myself ‘wasting’ a lot of time here. I work for <40 hrs a week and I am barely at any pressure or pushed to achieve great things.

Overall, the dearth of transferable skills, minimum time spent on critical thinking and an ordinary amount of creativity building gets it a rating of 5/10.

Connections:

As mentioned in DE for ETG, connections within the industry are already not that great. Connections to move to DW or meeting people interested in EA, is very hard. Thus rated as 3/10.

Credentials:

Credentials-wise I am very limited. The assignments given to me and available in general don’t allow me to boast crazy performance boosts or high impact. Learning is slow, making the initial years with poor credentials. I think I will not be able to boast any reasonable achievements within the next few years, other than my performance reviews, that might look good on my application to GiveWell type of EAOs. So I rate this at 5/10.

Runway:

In Netherlands I can save about 6-8k euros per year. Removing my donation, and all other extra expenses that seem to be popping out of nowhere, I think I can save about 6k per year. I can improve this if necessary by 4k/year by joining another company. Runway gathering takes a slow 3 years for saving for 18 months worth. An average rating of 5/10 is given here.

Supporting conditions

Work is engaging, I can always find decent challenges. Basic needs are met, colleagues seem to be fine and ready to help when you ask for help. Work outside of the 9-5 DE job, towards DW can also be quite engaging. It is hard to find like minded people here who share any interest in EA. Of all the people I have met, I do not know a single soul who does anything related to EA. They are too busy chilling, going to the beach, working and planning pleasurable activities, one after another. 5/10.

Personal Fit:

To excel in this area would mean to somehow gain skills to either found an NGO, or work in one say in operations or research.

• chances of learning skills at the age of 33 within design engineering (85%)

• possibility of learning the right skills while spending time in this industry (70%). This is assuming I can learn in my ample available free time of 14-22 hrs/week.

• Getting a job in either research or management in top NGO’s based on research or operations related credentials from DE (70%)

  I don’t expect it to be as tough as getting a job in MC. Plus I have quite some spare time on my hand. I could always look to improve my knowledge and skills. I would have 40 days of vacation every year, which I could really use to become better or even take internships.

So a total chance of 42% for success.

Impact:

It is argued in the appendix that impact of working in an EAO is estimated as >970 lives when we work for 40 years. A short version is: An analyst from GiveWell has made this calculation and estimates a contribution in the first year of ~97k$. This over 40 years comes to > 970 lives. Assuming one can keep up with this, with:

• 4% growth per year
• 2% growth per year after 50
• 7% growth every 5-7 years
• Cost of a life now, 4k$
• inflation in the cost of saving lives 2%
• All this for the next 40 years

That totals to 875 lives:

• 23 lives over the first 9 years in DE
• ‘970*35/40’ if I work in the EAO for the next 35 years.

Personal fit x Impact

Simply multiplying the personal fit and the impact gives us (rough-impact):

rough-impact = 42% x 875 = 380 lives

In case EAO doesn’t work out we can always move back to DE in NL, which implies the effective impact then becomes:

Effective-Impact = 42% x 875 + 58% x 95% x 200 = 480 lives

Conclusion DE for DW

With the intention of doing DW, it still seems alright. I don’t think it gives me any special skills but it gives me time (22hrs a week on avg), a citizenship, sabbatical leave with which I can slowly and meticulously plot my way out of DE to DW.

Data Science

With this section the following three career paths based on Data Science (DS) are evaluated :

• DS for DW
• DS for ETG in the NL
• DS for ETG in the US

Skills

• Nice set of skills for research and maybe management roles for EAOs

  Statistics, critical thinking, programming and machine learning could be the knowledge and skills I would transfer to research based jobs, and not necessarily leadership based jobs. However, I suspect that a role in project management after a few years could get me somewhere like an all-rounder in the field of DS.

• High FCC according to 80k-hours-guide

  The technical skills you develop also open the possibility to transition into different roles including software engineering, founding or joining early-stage startups, academia, and quant finance. - 80k-DS

  DS is used in many types of work including EAOs, consulting, finance etc… offering high FCC. Skills wise it looks like a great place to start, with little or no background in DS.

• Free time to develop additional skills

  Once I start DS in NL I suspect I have quite some time to do other things like programming, focusing on some high-risk paths like starting up or even building up to a machine learning PhD. Even if I am in the US, working time is apparently (reasonable and flexible).

• It appears that you are more valuable with more experience.

A good rating of 8/10 seems to be applicable for DS considering the skills aspect.

Connections

Connections depends on where I am working and which type of company I will be working for. For example working in a consultancy (like Mu Sigma), might allow for a great chance to meet many people and building the network. The network as a result would be better than in DE.

• Connections that further NGO opportunities: 4.5/10

• Connections that further DS in NL for ETG: 5.5/10

• Connections that further DS in US for ETG: 5.5/10

Credentials

DS has a fast paced scene, I gather from 80k-hours-guide. Faster feedback cycle, and large connection between work and outcomes can be felt. Further impression I get is that it will be easy to obtain braggable credentials. My belief that DS will give good credentials combined with an uncertainty, leaves it at a rating of 7.5/10.

Runway

DS in NL probably starts with a slightly higher salary than DE based on estimates from Payscale. DS seems to earn (53k€ and design engineers 40k€). This implies a faster runway than DE. DS in US allows a more faster collection of the runway for 18 months. But in any case right now it appears I will have to work in NL for the next few years. So I expect it to take about 2 years to build the runway. So I will give it 7/10.

Supportive conditions/Job Satisfaction

• For the most part it is engaging
• Cleaning up the data will be boring, as it takes up a lot of time.
• Basic needs will be satisfied (money, hours and commute)
• Am not worried I will have too many problems learning or fitting in, my point being it is not investment banking.

• I look at people in the US like my brother and other actual data scientists, and they seem to have time to do other things as well. Not like they are working 24x7. Also 80k suggests that the hours are moderate (about 50 hrs per week). This is peacefully doable.

• Also this is expected to be a very satisfying career according to 80k-hours, due to the fast feedback cycle.

• Mentorship culture is quite common apparently according to 80k-hours.

• project management could be even more fulfilling as it has more control and more responsibility than simple analysts. Analysts are more like the right hand for project managers.

It looks good overall, thus with a rating of 8/10.

Personal fit

Companies like KLM seem to have jobs for, engineers who are also aspiring data scientists. This could be quite lucrative for me and for the company, as I span both the spectra. Anyone can jump into DS (we are not talking about data core or machine learning as I am given to understand that it is something else). I have seen colleagues of mine who were doing a masters with me who moved into DS. The skills that are nice to have are basically stats, programming in python, R and SQL. So personal fit wise, these are not too hard to learn. And it appears that companies are not too strict on what you know if you are just starting out, but are interested in how fast you can learn and how well are suited for the job.

I am a fast learner and have worked on proper programming assignments before. I have done a fair bit of critical thinking, hypothesis forming and solving problems at work and my masters. I love it to begin with and I think there is a lot of room to get better and I can get better at it, with more defined ways of thinking. I am up for challenging jobs all the time. I love programming and can spend like any other sane human being a very large time working on it.

• DS as a means of ETG (Netherlands)

  Here success would mean moving to a job in DS in NL from DE. This is to be followed by 40 years of work, with 20% of donations every year. I know a few of my colleagues who are in DS right out of a similar masters degree as I. Plus from everything I have seen it is a learn-able skill, and appears to be definitely achievable.

  • 95% chance of entering into DS
  • 93% chance of working 40 years with 20% donations
  • In total, 88% chance of success

• DS as a means of ETG (US)

  Success should probably look like this: I should be able to get jobs in Europe within Google or Facebook and slowly plot my migration with an L1 visa. I could also do a one year masters for example to move to the US.

  • Getting US worthy skills in 5 years time (80%)
  • Getting an L1 (65%) (This is a guess factoring uncertainty)
  • So in total: 95%x80%x65% = 47% of success.

• DS in NGO’s

  With good stats and quants capability, I think I might have a good fit for analyst roles. Every hour in DS seems like preparation for the ultimate work in EAOs. There are also NGO’s which use DS to do good, like khan academy etc… If I spend enough time here, I could already start manage a team and gain even more FCC. So personally after 4-5 years (10k hours of skill development) I suspect I should be quite valuable for a job in EAO.

  • Chance to get into an NGO after 5 years in the realm of DS = 80%

  • Total chance = 95%x80% = 76%

Impact

DS in top companies seems to be earning people top dollars. My friend in the US earns 130-170k $ in Apple. I have also heard the pays in Facebook sometimes being about 200k$ with a few years of experience. A simple bachelor’s student in California in DS from a Waterloo university earns a base salary of 100k + stocks of 30k a year. As far as I checked Glassdoor and Payscale, the pay in Netherlands also seems to be higher than in DE. According to Payscale Data Scientists seem to earn 53k€ and design engineers 40k€. Not able to get proper estimates on Glassdoor, but it looks high though. Also DS is heavily hyped by 80k-hours for its ability to quickly transform into ETG.

Data Incubator reports that its graduates can get starting salaries of $100K to $200K.

Bootcamps could be an option for me but I think some info that is missing is that these people who get into these camps are not ordinary people. The interview process itself is rigorous to get into. But with skill it is possible to get lot of money for ETG. Skills can be learned with time. I am not able to find it again, but the last time I saw on Glassdoor, a Data Scientist is more valuable with experience.

There is a lot of scope for direct impact as well if one has skills, by using this science in companies like:

the Center for Disease Control, Google, Khan Academy, Bayes Impact and DataKind.

• Working for DS now and staying in NL/Europe for the next 40 years

  • for a beginners salary of 53k€ from Payscale
  • With salary growth of 4% a year
  • increase of 10% every 5 years
  • and 20% donation
  • cost of a life currently being 4k$
  • inflation of 2% a year

  237 lives.

• Working for DS for the next 5 years and moving to the US

  • for a beginners salary of 130k (based on salary of Bachelor’s student from Waterloo university in DS working at Facebook)
  • With compound interest of 4% a year
  • increase in salary of 2% after age 50
  • increase of 10% every 5 years
  • 20% donation
  • cost of a life currently being 4k$
  • inflation of 2% a year

  367 lives for 35 years in the US + ~13 lives for the first 5 years in NL= 400 lives.

• Working for DS now and moving to an NGO within the next 5 years.

  I assume the same impact irrespective of the NGO joined. By definition an NGO worth joining is atleast recommended by 80k-hours, for example. So my impact will be close to 970 lives.

Personal fit x Impact

Here also we calculate the rough-impact and the effective-impact.

• DS in NL

    rough-impact = 88% x 237 = 208
  

  In case DS fails I can always go back into DE in NL.

    Effective-impact = 88% x 237 + 12% x 95% x 200 = 231
  

• DS in US

    rough-impact = 47% x 400 = 188
  

  In case DS in US fails I will try DS in NL and if that fails as well I can always go back to DE in NL.

    Effective-impact = 47% x 400 + 53% x (231) = 310
  

• DS in the pursuit of EAO

    rough-impact = 76% x 970 = 738
  

  In case this fails, I can always fall back and pursue DS in NL.

    Effective-impact = 76% x 970 + 24% x (231) = 793
  

Conclusion for DS

DS in EAO is most lucrative if the numbers are right. This is something that I should estimate with more certainty, as this is turning out to be a lucrative and promising career. DS in general is very good for CC as well, according to 80k-hours-career-guide.

Something in addition to the above that I need to work on is knowing for myself, if I am actually cut out for work in EAO. I really care about impact and if EAOs are not for me then I should probably look into other things.

MBA into MC

Finishing an MBA allows travel into a couple of venues, of which one of them is Management Consulting (MC). 80k-hours has done a complete career profile on them which is used as the main source for this sub-section. MBAcrystalball suggests that an MC does just about anything that is needed to be done to improve the performance of a company. The impression I get is that you are given challenging problems, and you have to come up with solutions for it as a team. Each assignment usually lasts for a few weeks.

Skills

All the big heads in big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google are MBA degree holders, some with humble consulting beginnings (Sundar Pichai). MC is hyped by 80k for its CC. They seem to offer sufficient transferable skills. You actually work on different problems and become a generalist in an industry with quite some exit opportunities:

You can work in an industry you served as a consultant, venture capital, private equity, policy/civil service, work on a “strategy team” for a company. -80k-hours-career-guide on MC

Although a significant portion of your time will be spent on preparing PowerPoint presentations, email, and “grunt” tasks, such as creating databases, junior consultants gain responsibility relatively quickly, and work on solving challenging business problems.

We spend more time and effort than other careers we have seen so far and it appears to be filled with important things such as learning, growth, mentorship, regular feedback and working on tough problems with top performing peers. 80k hours values MC > DS comparing CC. These skills are hard to gain say if I work by myself at home. In conclusion, we rate it 10/10.

Connections

An interviewee mentioned that the quality of the colleagues is generally seen as a major benefit of the job. Other alumni of the firm and contacts from individual projects give consultants a large number of valuable business contacts.

MC is all about consulting for big companies. You constantly have to travel and meet with clients and deliver for them in their locations. Projects are 2-3 months short and you have the scope to get lots of connections. Also, your colleagues around you are high-achievers and could be very valuable in the future to get jobs, to get leads related to work etc… So I present this with 8/10. This is much better than anything we have seen so far including DS and DE.

Credentials

I think with MC you will make good credentials as you are solving problems after problems in short time for the top 500 companies. Consulting from top companies on your CV itself serves as a very important credential.

BIGGEST plus of being in consulting before launching a startup is the brand value on CV. When you have a startup idea and you go visit venture capitalists and potential investors - they will want to bet on the idea as well as on the man (with equal amount of importance to both). And if the man has BCG/McKinsey/similar on his CV, it lends credibility. -Friend who is currently in Investment Banking

Based on these I will put it slightly above DS. 8/10.

Runway

MCs earn 30-50% of what Investment Bankers earn. At the associate level you earn around 80k to 170k. Runway is not something I would be worried about if I was a Management Consultant as I would be earning a 100k$+ salary atleast. However, for the next few years the time to accumulate runway will be the same as for the job in DE/DS in NL, which will result in developing runway over 12-18 months.

Supportive conditions/Job Satisfaction

There is good feedback and training. Job satisfaction appears to be decent considering the challenging atmosphere and variety in work. I am not sure if 60 hour work weeks are really very bad. I think I can manage it for a few years atleast. Also this is not as bad as in other sectors like Finance. Even if things go wrong, if we try to sweat a few years we can cash in on the exit opportunities. Support conditions are a bit weaker than in DS or DE. I will keep it at a 7/10 as compared to 8/10 from DS.

Exit opportunities

If MC turns out to be not for you after a few years, then MC seems to have decent exit opportunities. People move on to do various things:

• Move to industry that you worked as a consultant

You can generally advance more quickly in industry by starting in consulting then entering industry several years later. -80k-hours-career-guide

• Get into policy/civil service but not sure how age plays a factor here
• Venture capital/ private equity
• Entrepreneurship
• Occupy ‘chief of staff’ position in a large company
• Join the strategy team for companies like Google
• Work in a company you consulted for

Lot of opportunity for growth and Earning.

Personal fit

The price for an MBA is very high ~50k€ for one year, in addition to the 12k€ cost for living. I already have to pay back to my parents in the order of 36k€ and I do not want the burden of an MBA loan as well. Hence I would like to study with a scholarship in a moderate university like Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) - QS global rank 20, Europe rank within top 10.

• ETG

  • Chances of getting >730 in GMAT (70%)

  • Chances of clearing the scholarship criteria for RSM having gotten >730 in GMAT (60%).

    I am not sure I have reasonable achievements for this, in addition to a serious lack of time to develop big achievements. But with a nice story on the CV, a good recommendation and some time spent in prepping for an MBA, maybe it is still possible.

  • MC jobs are highly competitive and 80k-hours-guide suggests to attach a 50% probability with getting a job at the top firms once you graduate.

  • Chances of staying within MC >5 years (60%)

  • Chances that I will deal with 60 hrs of work (85%)

  • There is a 1/8th chance of making it to partner(12.5%) by age 45, which brings down the personal fit quite a bit.

  • So a total of : 1.3%

• ETG once we leave industry after 5 years (by taking the exit opportunities)

  • Chance of clearing GMAT and getting a scholarship still make applies (42%)
  • Chance of getting the top MC job (50%)
  • Chance of getting a job that is paying similar-to/better-than DS (70%)

  You can generally advance more quickly in industry by starting in consulting then entering industry several years later

  If I was able to come this far, I assume from there on it is easy to get a job and advance more quickly in the industry. I don’t know how much I can earn, but I suspect it is atleast around 150k$.

  • In total 18.9%

• Working for an NGO after 3-5 years in MC

  I have not come across a wide range of opportunities in this aspect, nor has 80k-hours-mentioned DW exit opportunities for MC. There are some chances of working say at the Gates Foundation or other NGO’s. But it is barely clear how this would pan out or how an MC job would help in this case especially. The impact could be pretty high if we are able to work at NGO’s like Gates foundation. Also, I have not really seen MBA holders or management consultants who work in EAOs featured in the 80k-hours-career-guide more than once. It appears that EAOs are not a space for them. Corollary being, EAOs seem to not need an MBA. Anyways, the chances seem to pan out as:

  • Chance of clearing GMAT and getting a scholarship still make sense (42%)
  • Chance of getting the top MC job (50%)

  • Chance of getting into a the likes of Gates Foundation (70%)

    (it’s a Guess)

  • In total it is 18.9%.

Impact

• ETG (partner after 45)

  The Earning potential is listed in the MC report on the 80k-hours-career-guide , for people working in the top firms in US.

  • At associate level we get 130k
  • after 5 years 250k
  • after 7 years 450k
  • 600k + bonus after 7 more years
  • Donating 40% (Like this maybe)
  • cost of a life being 4k$
  • inflation of 2% on the cost of life
  • retiring at 57
  • getting 75% last drawn for the rest of life (another 20 years atleast)
  • I didn’t take into account the bonuses which is expected to be quite a lot. It is ambiguous how much it could be.

  We can expect to save upwards of 1050 lives in case we become partner, which is absolutely crazy.

• ETG, once we leave MC in 5 years

  • for a beginners salary of 150k-170k (assumption i.e., after quitting MC)
  • With salary growth of 4% a year
  • 2% salary growth after 50
  • cost of life being 4k$
  • inflation of 2% a year
  • increase of 10% every 5 years
  • and 30% donation

  This gives about 635-700 lives + first years at MC gives 70 lives = 700

• direct working potential

I assume the impact for now to be the same for all EAOs, including the ones that might be relevant to MC. This brings us to 970 lives i.e., 35 years of working in an EAO in addition to ETG as an MC for the first few years.

Personal Fit x Impact

So MC seems to have an unusually high skill offered, lot of connections, limited potential to do DW, but crazy potential for ETG. However considering my current level, along with my wish/ability to do an MBA with a scholarship, I feel that I have less chance as seen above in the personal fit. Looking at the rough-impact is demotivating.

	rough-impact = 1.3% x 1050 = 10 lives

However trying it and succeeding could impact many more lives. Betting on the small chance to create large impact might not be all that bad, if the failure alternatives are reasonable. That is why it is important to see the important steps to becoming a Partner at a firm, and obtain the effective impact. A decision tree with such an idea is below:

Explanation of the above table is as follows: Imagine this as a decision tree with each step branching into success and failure. At the success of one branch lies the beginning of the next branch. ‘Success’ column denotes the personal fit at each stage. ‘#lives if success’ is nothing but the impact. ‘EI: Success’ and ‘EI: Failure’, are the effective values obtained at each node in the branch. For example, at the ‘Make partner’ step, I have 156 lives saved if success, and 613 lives effective saved in case of failure. This is obtained by

'EI: Success' =  Success x '#lives if Success'; 
'EI: Failure' = Failure x '#lives if failure';
Effective value  = 'EI: Success' + 'EI: Failure'

As we move up to the previous branch we have to take into account the effective value from the next step as a result of the decision tree. i.e.,

	'EI: Success' (n) = Success (n) x Effective value (n+1) 
	'EI: Failure' (n) = Failure x '#lives if failure';

This is carried on till the top of the branch, i.e., ‘GMAT’, to obtain the Effective value as:

Effective value = 471+237 = 708 lives

One thing that needs explanation is the ‘#lives if failure’ column. If I succeed all the way, then the impact I could create would be greater than 1250 lives over my lifetime. I think this is huge as compared to other profiles. I could fail at different points in the decision tree. If I fail to get a scholarship or if I fail getting a decent score in GMAT, it would cost me a year in time. I can pick up my stuff and work towards DS for DW, hence I use the Effective-Impact of 790 lives corresponding to the effective-impact of DS for DW. Taking small risks now, seems like a good idea to better gauge what I am capable of. And taking risks without much severe consequence can lead to doing significant good. There is a 50% chance of getting a job at Mckinsey. In case it doesn’t work out then, it’s not the end of the world. I think I can still get to ‘DS for NL’, or look at other consultancies or marketing etc… During this time I would be in a much better position to evaluate what is the best direction for me to go in once I failed to get into Mckinsey. Let’s say the (failure) impact in this case is 65% of taking one of the exit opportunities in MC (its an optimistic guess). And that is ‘65% x 700’. After working 5 years if I realize that MC is not for me, I would take the exit opportunities. The impact would then be 700 as calculated earlier for ‘ETG taking exit opportunities in MC’. And in the last case if I push further and still fail then I would expect the impact to be 700 or greater atleast as I have come so far. And the effective value of such a tree is 708 lives.

To boost my chances or to see if I am a fit for MC much earlier I could also try to get a job directly. A quick search on LinkedIn shows that many people have moved to consulting from engineering (without an MBA and also from my same university). These people are sometimes from the exact university I studied and with probably similar technical knowledge as me. People from applied physics and offshore who have done a wide variety of other things seem to have gotten in. A very talented systems engineer and a person from aerospace background from my university has gotten in. Most of the people I immediately find online are people who do not have a business background. But it feels like they have done some other interesting things in their life. I can spend a few months and try this as well before starting anything. This way I could get some experience and see how I fare in consulting. If all goes well, I could use the few years of experience to do an MBA in a top college and continue killing it.

MBA into IB/ Finance/ Trading/private equity

I assume impact, CC and personal fit to be all the same for Investment Banking (IB), Trading and Private Equity (PE). All this will collectively be called Finance front office for now.

Skills

Sufficient exit opportunities exist in Finance. Skills in finance can apparently be earned within 6 months. Skills are good enough to transfer jobs even to MC and likely many more exit opportunities are available. 8.5/10.

Connections

Unlike MC, IB on the other hand is work in front of a PC most of the time and meeting clients does not happen very often especially within the first few years. 6/10.

Credentials

I think you will make good credentials in the end always. You are making crazy money, you have IB/PE written on your resume. If one can move from IB to MC, then I conclude it has sufficient credentials. 8/10.

Runway

After getting into IB runway might be crazy, but until then, the same runway as in DE or DS holds - 12-18 months to build the runway. 7/10.

Supportive conditions/Job Satisfaction

Some of the things part of a Finance front office job are:

• Need to kiss ass
• Need to face time in IB
• long freaking hours 80-100hrs/week
• No life what so ever but a shit load of money
• Very mundane work
• For every month you get only 2 days off while working in IB front office in the top companies.
• Loss of health

Need I go on?

Personal fit

If the mean income of a hedge fund trader is $650,000, then that’s $20m over a 30 year career. If you donated half, that would be enough to cover the salaries of about 5 non-profit CEOs or 2-3 academic researchers, while still having a huge amount left to live on.

• ETG

  • Chances of clearing >730 in GMAT (70%)
  • Chances of clearing the scholarship criteria for RSM after getting 740 (60%) (same as in MC)
  • Chances of not burning out and quitting (10%)
  • getting a job in the top tier firm (50%)
  • Chances of staying for more than 5 years (10%)

  If in MC most people don’t make partner and only 12.5% do, in IB I consider it to be even less.

  So a grand total of :0.2%

• ETG once we leave industry after 5 years

  I will assume the same personal fit as in MC. 18.9%. If required I will refine it later.

Impact

• ETG

According to 80k-hours-trading, junior traders earn 300k - 3m per year, this they reach within 8 years. More senior you get, the more crazier it gets that Sr managers earn >10m$ “easily”. Assuming average earnings of 800k over 30 years, it appears that one can save 3771 lives with 50% donation.

• Exit after 5 years to something else

In 5 years we can save about 100-150 people and then cash in on the exit opportunities. Say we exit into MC I guess the impact to be 700 lives. In total 800ish.

• Using skills earned to move to EAOs

Not sure what skill applies here. I don’t have the confidence in selecting this career profile and hence am not spending much time in evaluating this. I assume it might be the same as the impact for an EAO,i.e, 970 lives.

Personal Fit x Impact

I am very afraid or completely not inclined to starting this career. I maybe can work for 2-3 years for 80 hours a week. But If I am not working for more than that then it seems like there is no point doing IB. IB is all about money and putting in crazy hours all through your life at the cost of sleep, health etc… I understand it has the maximum potential. I do feel guilty that so many lives are at stake. But as 80k hours says, personal fit is quite important. I strongly suspect I will burn out. I am repelled by all the points mentioned in the supporting conditions part of this profile. Instead if I did something else I could atleast get a decent impact out there over a long term.

So I am almost confident that I am not going into the likes of IB, so I don’t see any point in evaluating this any further.

Economics PhD

In this profile we are going to review 2 types of paths under an Economics PhD. They are :

1. Working in academia after Economics PhD
2. Taking up non-academic jobs which involves a rare chance at making large impact (what this rare chance is, is explained later)

Why Econ PhD

80k-hours-career-guide recommends it as one of the best studies you can do, if you are a good fit for it.

You gain a broad set of tools for understanding how the social world works, which is helpful for evaluating causes and interventions. This may help you better evaluate your future career options to have more impact. A notable example of this in action is the founding of GiveDirectly (one of GiveWell’s top recommended charities), which was founded by economics PhD students. -80k-hours-career-guide

Academic work also seems to be very important because of the impact it can have. In addition we get to also perform advocacy. Apparently economics PhD’s are taken quite seriously with their ideas and inputs.

Economics professors get a lot freedom to do research across a wide range of topics and disciplines, which gives you great option value for future research. -80k-hours-career-guide

And finally, the FCC seems to be quite good that you can go into any field related to statistics and critical thinking, such as DS, MC, Finance etc… with the odds of getting a job being quite high.

Skills

• Excellent job prospects

  Lowest unemployment rate amongst any science and engineering PhD’s

• Can go into wide variety of jobs after PhD (highly transferable)

  Academia as well as jobs in policy, think tanks, NGO research, World banks, IB and Consulting.

• Good safety net even if not in Academia

• This gets a 9/10.

Connections

Probably not much, but you get credentials which are very good which can allow you to get connections (not during the PhD I suppose). This gets a 6/10 rating.

Credentials

She explained that one of our main jobs as agency economists was to think about the big picture and be the voice of ‘common sense’ in the room. It is surprisingly difficult to find people who can do this, and the ‘PhD Economist’ credential is a signal that you might be the kind of person who can escape groupthink and see neglected but important side effects and chains of causality.- noahpinion

A PhD in Economics by itself is a solid credential. It gives you credentials for advocacy, in your job and blog life, as far as I have seen. It can thus be argued that you have a very important role in aiding decision making as people value your insight into matters. This puts the credentials at 8/10.

Runway

The runway of DE holds for now. So it will take 2-3 years before I have 18 months worth of runway. But it is worth to consider the money I might have during an Economics PhD. The salary is around 15k$/year during an Economics PhD. And this is going to be the order of the day for 5-7 years after joining an Economics PhD. We can make >100k$ with jobs after an Economics PhD but that is going to be after 10 years from now, as I need time to prep before getting a PhD followed by 5-7 years during the PhD. Hence, we are at a rating of 5/10.

Supportive conditions/Job Satisfaction

Economics PhD provides a solid safety net regarding jobs, and is expected to lead to a very fulfilling, intellectually satisfying career, except for during the PhD where there is less feedback and more anxiety. The rating thus is 7/10.

Exit opportunities

Finishing the PhD badly or dropping out are still options to a future in MC or EAOs etc.. So not much to worry about.

Personal fit

Getting a PhD in the top 10 universities is going to be really hard and seems like it needs dedicated years of growth in that field before embarking on the PhD. The top 20 seems like it maybe achievable, considering that I got into the top 20 universities in engineering for my masters. Maybe with a few years of work in economics I can pull something similar. Mentally extrapolating to top 20 from what might be necessary to get into top 5, it appears that the top 20 might still be hard being from a “non-quants background”. The probabilities are explained below:

• Chances of getting 165+ in GRE quants (90%)

  I love math. I already have experience with Linear Algebra, Calculus, ODE etc… It has all been part of my Gate training and I didn’t shy from learning from very top Authors.

• Chances of learning Economics enough to get into top 20 within 2 years (70%)

  An economics major isn’t required but you need proven math ability and it helps to have taken mathematical economics classes.

  I don’t know anything about economics and need to see how I fare by taking some courses. I think I can do better in math with practice and I am sure it would be fun. Chances that I fare well (i.e., scoring>80%) once I take a few economics courses I guess is 70%.

• Chances of a getting an Econ PhD within top 20 (other factors) (70%)

  These factors would be things like, recommendation letters, statement of purpose working to my favor, and the like.

• prepared to work for long hours (95%)

  I have done it in the past. Currently, I clock about 11 hrs on 4 weekdays per week, and still manage to go to the gym. 80k-hours says that I should be prepared to do 70+ hours a week (10 hrs a day). I would need to do that atleast during the first year of studies according to econ-job-rumors-website. This is not a lot. And I don’t see much panic around for the work after the PhD. So this is good.

• Research roles interest (80%)

  Love intellectual pursuits and have a strong drive to do self- directed research?

  Can’t say really. But I guess I would like intellectual pursuits. Self-directed research should not be a problem I think. And the passion for doing anything seems to be contained in the equation of motivation. With good skills to understand how the social world works and better critical thinking, all of this should be a breeze.

So the chance of completing decently an Econ PhD within top 20 is: 33.5%

1. Jobs in Academia

   Jobs in Academia allow us to do research in high priority areas

   the top 10 universities place nearly five times as many students to tenure-track positions at top 20 universities as those ranked 11 through 20. -Assessing placement economics

   Tenure tracks are those in which a professor is given a permanent contract. He can then carry out the research that he wants. Tenure tracks are quite hard to get within the top 20 universities. But,

   Both Miles and Noah have marveled at the number of smart people working at non-top schools. That includes some well-known bloggers, by the way—Tyler Cowen teaches at George Mason University (ranked 64th), Mark Thoma teaches at the University of Oregon (ranked 56th), and Scott Sumner teaches at Bentley, for example. -Qz complete guide to Econ PhD

   It seems fine to work in non-top schools.

   People who feel that economics research incentives do not align with trying to do research that is optimized for positive impact may want to spend 7 to 11 years doing what it takes to get tenure, and then work on whatever it is they want to work on. - Robin Hanson

   A tenure track would give a lot of freedom. Ultimately we would want a tenure track and there is a high chance that we might have to work a few years before getting it.

   Data indicates that more than half of the economics PhD’s get jobs in academia after their PhD - 80k career guide

   Based on the above, it appears that there is a 10% chance to get tenure directly after the PhD. Once I am done with my PhD from the top 20, getting a job in academia is about 60-70%. Getting a tenure track after a few years of conventional work is estimated at 80%. The total chances of getting a tenure track is thus:

    10% + 60%x80% = 58%
   

   So the total chance of pursuing a tenure track including getting into the top 20 universities is 19%.

    33% x 58% = 19%
   

2. Non-academia jobs with rare chance of saving >400 lives

   Success here is defined as getting into a government agency and getting the rare chance of making crazy impact (to be read as saving 400 lives once, by a rare action). In addition, donations are possible as a result of the job, and also advocacy. Getting to work at a government agency should be easier than pursuing a tenure track, which puts us at say roughly 60%. But being able to save an extra 400 lives comes rarely. I weigh this at 20%. This amounts to 60% x 20% = 12%. Seems high based on what I have read, but still. So the total chance of pursuing an agency job with the rare chance, including getting into the top 20 universities is:

    33% x 60% x 20% = 4%
   

Impact

1. Impact of being in academia

   Looking at the career reviews by 80k-hours-guide, we see that the impact by direct potential is rated as 3/5 where as for working at an EAO it is rated as 5/5. It has been estimated that the impact of working in an EAO is 970 lives. Extrapolating based on the rating this would put the impact of being in academia as ~582 lives. This shall be refined if there is a need for it.

2. Impact including the rare chance would be

   • impact of the rare chance which is 400 lives
   • impact due to advocacy 50 lives (pure guess)
   • impact due to a jobs paying greater than median academic salary of 108k, compounded at 4%, with inflation of 2% on the cost of a life (4k$), 20% donations and 10% hike every 5 years, for a period of 30 years, results in 243 people.
   • In total 750 lives

Personal fit x Impact

• Econ PhD to tenure track

Just as was done in the section on ‘MC’, the decision tree is as follows:

Effective Value: 624 lives.

The explanation of the ‘#lives if failure’ column is as follows: Any crossroad until I don’t embark on a PhD seems reversible, allowing me to take up a DS in NL job if things fail. Thus the effective-impact of 790 is used for the first 3 crossroads. The next two do not have any failure options. The last crossroad shows a value of 493 lives which assumes that I go into MC as a result of not getting a tenure track job. 493 lives is after accounting for the number of years lost while doing a PhD and trying for Tenure.

With this career path we are interested in going to the tenure track. But the Effective value (624) is more than the maximum impact with the tenure track (582). This is because the ‘#lives if other’ is higher than what a tenure track can provide. If this is the case, then there is not much point of pursuing this career, we’d rather pursue the other failure options directly? This is discussed further in the analysis section.

• Econ PhD with rare chance working at government agency

Effective value is 541.

The ‘#lives if other’ column is derived similar to the previous table. The rare chance can happen anytime after getting the agency job. In case we do not get the rare chance, then we have only ETG and advocacy to show, which would come to about 350 lives for 33 years of working in economics waiting for that rare chance. We hence use 350 lives in the last step for the ‘#lives if other’ column.

Although the rare chance path can lead to an impact of 750, in most of the cases we would get an impact of 350. Once we complete the PhD and get an agency job, we see that the effective-impact is a meager 398 lives (based on the last step of decision tree above).

12% x 750 + 88% x 350 = 398

More on the conclusion is talked about in the analysis section.

Working at an EAO

Research/DS as an Analyst/content writer, is what I see myself starting with in EAOs. With time I hope to take up more senior roles or start other important organizations with a better understanding of what is needed for this world.

Skills

We’ve asked leaders of effective non-profits whether it makes sense to start your career in the non-profit sector. They said you can usually advance faster in the corporate sector because you get better training, and that’s where they hire from. - 80k-hours-career-guide

It is widely accepted in the community that it is far easier to go from corporate job to EAO rather than the other way around. There is very little on the job training, and lack of senior mentorship, and the expertise is tied to the EA movement (unlike MC for example).

In case we lose our jobs, because of changing strategies within organizations, EAOs running out of funding or stagnation of the EA movement, then finding a job might be hard say after 10 years of EA experience. FCC is not only for being able to move from one industry to the other based on the current need of the world, but it is also for being able to adapt to changing scenarios. But 80k-hours-guide seems positive about this.

People sometimes worry that working at effective altruist organizations doesn’t lead to concrete foreseeable future career options. As we’ve argued above, you are likely to build skills and connections which mean you’ll have good opportunities in the future. However you might still feel uneasy not knowing what the future holds, even if on reflection you believe that you’ll have good future career options. -80k-hours-career-guide

For me it is scary when I think about taking it up right away, to abandon all the FCC I can get and immediately join an EAO. Although there are the advantages of having a lot of autonomy in work, and the possibility to test fit for a wide range of roles, it doesn’t seem like the first thing for me to do. I am afraid of the uncertainty, I would like to gain some FCC first. I give it a 6.5/10 considering my current scenario.

Connections

There is little doubt regarding the connections I could make when I am in the EA community as exclaimed in this article by 80k and by the person who worked in GiveWell. But my connections seem to only belong here and around here. They will help me find work within the EA community for sure.

If you think the EA community will keep growing, then the value of these connections just gets stronger over time. -80k-hours-career-guide

80k-hours-guide already seems to mention this in a number of places, that there is a problem if the EA movement stagnates for some reason. I can’t see why it would happen, but 80k-hours-guide mentions it a couple of times and this should be taken into account. But as I am looking for connections to improve my chances of success in EA, I give it a solid 7/10.

Credentials

Credentials here are less prestigious than Google, Mckinsey or World bank, but nevertheless some of the organizations have terrific credentials like having gone through Y-combinator etc…

Can get impressive achievements due to high levels of responsibility, Some impressive affiliations (Y Combinator, Oxford, Good Ventures), Less brand recognition … -80k-hours-career-guide

The community is very much evidence based and as a result I wouldn’t expect vague feedback or very subjective performance evaluations. This I suspect already to lead to boastable achievements. Being in a small organization, allows for high levels of responsibility allowing for more credentials to be earned. Sounds like an 7/10.

Runway

The current runway for DE will hold still as it will take me a couple of years to move to an EAO. Once in an EAO, runway accumulation takes even more time. Ability to save money for retirement becomes slow. Runway is more important than ever.

As with other startups, there is a risk of your organization running out of funding (though this hasn’t happened to any of the major organizations), or substantially changing its strategy, meaning you could lose your job. -80k-hours-career-guide

As a result, without 18k$ in the bank for emergencies, we should not go into this. 5/10.

Personal Fit

I think I am not yet a fit for EAO, but I can quickly get up to speed with what they want and start working for them asap.

• Ability to gain Experience (80%)

  A track record of engaging with research in the community and making productive contributions to it. -80k-hours-career-guide

  I currently don’t have any experience other than “blogging”, and being a 10-percenter for over 1.5 years. But I can try doing other things, like starting an EA organization in my city or working for 80k-hours or someone from home, producing some work for them and showing them in actions what I really am. I could also apply for an internship of 2 months, provided I get that time off from work.

• Relevant disciplines can be easily studied and skills built (85%)

  I have the time and so I can easily work on topics such as statistics, philosophy and writing from home to make myself EAO-ready.

• Care about EA (90%)

  They really care about effective altruism, and are happy to talk about it all day. -80k-hours-career-guide

  What else is there to do in life? I think it would be ideal to be in an EA environment and talk about it all the time. This would result in some healthy persuation for once.

• Can you manage your time and be efficient and self-directed? (85%)

  They’re self-directed, able to manage their time well, they can create efficient and productive plans, and keep track of complex projects. -80k-hours-career-guide

  With more responsibility I will thrive. I thrive in new situations, learn quickly and literally anything. I have demonstrated this ability at my current company and my internship (according to the feedback I have received). I am always looking for hard and challenging problems to work on. So I think I can manage a decent job and will get better based on how important the job is to me I guess. I am also very hardworking.

• Managing in case you loose your current job or the startup crashes (80%)

  It is possible the EA movement as a whole loses it’s momentum. 10 years into an EAO, if I lose my job I suppose the connections I have will support me. 80k-hours-career-guide is also positive about this. In the worst case I might have to go back to Netherlands, I can manage basic needs and will see what I can do best from then on. I doubt it comes to the worst case, but whatever happens I can manage my life. Yes the impact I produce will be bad, but I will try my best to bounce back from it.

  If I loose my job right in the beginning or even after a few years, and can’t find anything tangible, then I can always go back to what I used to do just before coming into the EAO. No contest!

  But it is scary, say you have to move to the US, and then you find that you loose your job. But that is with any startup and sometime you got to take your chances, with a good plan C.

In total I would have 41.6% of personal fit right now.

Impact

• Looking at number of lives due to this DW

  Working at an Effective EAO will allow me to save 970 lives as explained in the section on ‘DE for DW’ and also in the appendix.

Personal Fit x Impact

rough-impact = 41.6% x 970 = 404 lives.

Exit options

• Well positioned for senior positions in EA organizations

• Connections in EA community allow exits into wide range of sectors

Perfect. With any career we need to focus on building connections.

Founding a startup

People from all forms of life startup. Very few succeed. Here I consider startups in the level of Y-combinator. Generally it appears that skills in programming, business and finance might help you in starting up. Succeeding is a whole another chapter.

Skills

Starting a tech company will force you to rapidly learn highly useful entrepreneurial and technical skills, meet lots of people, and it looks impressive (even if your business eventually fails, at least in failure-tolerant cultures such as the US and UK). Overall, we think it’s one of the best options for CC.

8/10.

Connections

You will probably meet a ton of people in the community, possibly some influential people, depending on how good you are. There seems to be a decent chance that they will help me to find opportunities and spread ideas later. But beware of some horror stories and the connections as a result. I will just assign it to be less than MC. This is primarily due to uncertainty 7/10.

Credentials

In failure tolerant cultures, starting-up might already serve as reasonable credentials. So 8/10.

Runway

This career needs 18 months runway atleast. A lot of work needs to be done in your own time before you say become part of an incubator. So runway is quite crucial. My current job in DE will get me there in 2-3 years. Thus 6/10.

Supportive conditions/Job Satisfaction

I suspect there will be quite some stress, funding issues and long hours of work, but I barely see myself complaining. There is a high degree of autonomy and I have a personal stake in the situation. I should definitely try it out once I have some decent skill, a good idea or a good opening into one. I should always be on the lookout for some opportunities. I am sure it would be a great journey. 7/10.

Personal

Consider this career if you think you can develop strong technical skills, as well as the ability to deal with high risk of failure, work very long hours and do something unconventional.

In order to estimate personal fit I will look at the chances. I define success as being able to get into Y-combinator and come out as a successful business:

• Chance of having the vision to be a Y-combinator level startup and applying (5%)

  This seems like a lot especially considering my current level of skills. But I do pick up things relatively fast, and can work long hours. For now, lets just role with that number.

• Chance of getting accepted in Y-combinator (2.5% applications accepted)
• Chance of that startup succeeding (25% based on current Ycombinator list of 11 years)
• Total of 0.03% (by multiplying everything)

Impact

The high risk of entrepreneurship also means that it’s likely not enough people pursue it in order to gain personal status or wealth, so society is likely to be undersupplied with entrepreneurs. One study estimates that for every $1 of profit earned by an innovator, $50 of benefits are generated for society at large.

One concern is that some companies within technology have been accused of exploiting addictive tendencies to gain users, so the fact that a product gains lots of users may be a poor indication of its value in these cases.

Highly unsure of average impact. - 80k-hours-career-review

As it is quite hard to estimate or compute other impacts, we are just going to look at ETG.

I estimate the impact of starting up in tech to be ~6k lives based on:

• Total donations per annum (50% of 2.5m$)
• Increase in salary = 0% max per annum
• cost of one life (4k$)
• Inflation of 2% in cost of life
• Number of years of donation = 25

Personal fit x Impact

A decision tree of the above looks like:

In this decision tree, we take into account the factors discussed in personal fit and the impact. The rest of the columns are self explanatory except the ‘#lives if failure’ column. In case of failure I assume that I can work similar to an MC job having taken the exit opportunities. MC with exit opportunities is expected to make an impact of 700 lives. I guess that with the CC of starting up, I can manage 80% of this impact.

With every step in the decision tree it is expected that 5 years of our time is gone and so the impact is reduced with a factor ‘x/40’, where x stands for the number of years left to work. An effective impact of 488 lives is obtained as a result.

It looks like the startup scene is not for me for many reasons. I don’t have any ideas now, I don’t have very solid skills to leverage. It is very risky with personal fit absolutely not there. The effective impact is very low as well, and direct multiplying of the personal fit with the final impact is 2 lives. I am not sure what type of CC I can get and use. In any case for now I will leave it at this and I will evaluate my options in a few years or every 6 months and see if there is any scope for starting up.

Software engineering for ETG

Main source: 80k-hours-career-guide

Entry

Easy to enter apparently with a year of work, but as a junior software developer.

Many people can get an entry-level job after around a year of part-time learning, or you can do a full-time twelve-week coding bootcamp, such as App Academy. Be careful to avoid low-quality bootcamps. A comprehensive guide to getting your first job is here.

This profile focuses on software engineers employed by large technology companies.

Skills

• gain skills that there is a shortage off

• exit opportunities include: DS, quantitative finance, tech entrepreneurship, research and freelance work.

Knowing programming is also helpful in many other industries and is likely to become more valuable in the future.

• Not much scope for other things besides programming such as entrepreneurship or work with different organizations like in consulting. So skills are transferable and is usually a decent fit for ETG, not so much DW unless you find something to do in your freetime that creates a lot of impact.

• 7/10.

Connections

Being at large companies gives possibility to make connections with wealthy and influential people many of whom might want to do good.

6.5/10 due to the hype and factoring in uncertainty.

Credentials

Working at top-tier companies already gets you lot of prestige apparently comparable to working in finance or consulting. I also suspect programming assignments might typically have short product cycles, allowing for more credentials. I give it 7.5/10.

Runway

Software engineering is a moderately well-paid career. Average US earnings (including bonuses) for entry-level software engineers are $56,000-$72,000; graduates of bootcamps can start on around $100,000, and engineers at Google on around $120,000. However, progression is more limited than in many alternatives and many engineers “cap out” after a few years.

US seems to be the place to be and further more silicon valley. Runway for now is still with DE as I can’t move much before I collect some decent runway. Once I get a job in real programming say in the US, runway shall never be a problem. Therefore, 6/10.

Supporting conditions

Software engineers tend to work shorter hours than many corporate jobs, with 40-50-hour weeks being typical (though this does vary by company and team). Remote work, flexible hours and freelance work are common. The best companies in the industry, like Google, are leaders in evidence-based management and are widely regarded as among the best places in the world to work.

8/10.

Personal fit

We’ve seen many cases of people with humanities and social science degrees get junior software engineer jobs with high salaries, just through learning on their own or through doing bootcamps.

Many people can get an entry-level job after around a year of part-time learning,

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 22% growth in US employment of software engineers from 2012-22, which is much higher than the growth rate for all occupations (11%).

It should be easy as even humanities and science people have done it by their own. Demonstrating strong interest in programming seems to help.

• Working in NL/Europe:

  • Chance of getting into software company (within 1-2 years) (90%)
  • Chance of learning the skills of being Google worthy in Europe (85%)
  • Chance of getting into top tech companies in Europe in 5 years (other factors) (80%)
  • Total: 61.2%

• Working in US:

  • All of the above chances: 61.2%

  • Chance of getting an L1 (65%)

  We use the same chance as used earlier for getting an L1 visa transfer to the US.

Impact

SE for DW: At the end of the day I don’t expect to become a computer scientist in MIRI. I think this is very hard and for the brightest of minds who have been working on programming forever, for people who have been doing computer science for as long as they lived. I am only now starting and I suspect I am very far from getting close to any form of research. And that is why I consider this profession as ETG and that’s it. Also it doesn’t seem to be building skills for direct working I think. Especially that of an analyst, or a management person. I could be a web developer and develop apps for EAO’s, but I don’t at this moment see this taking off in that direction.

Assuming I start with a salary of 120 k at Google in the next 5 years and

• with an increase in salary of 4%
• with an increase in salary of 2% after age, 50
• every 5 year increase of 10%
• cost of life at 4k$
• inflation of 2%/year on the cost of a life

One can save about 360 people. In addition I could work on some advocacy, and DW due to the available free time. There is possibility to do more, by working remotely say from Thailand. This can ensure saving even more money and donating it.

Further readings

maximizing donations via software engineering

Working in Thailand

5 profiles of people who moved into programming

One of the comments:

Most companies will require you to pass a coding test before even talking to you about a software engineering position. So unless you can solve some of these programming challenges, don’t even bother applying

There is web development, app development and OS development as well.

Dubai

Seems like a lucrative option especially for ETG. I have a few cousins who are in their early 40s. These people were ordinary people in my home town, with a bachelors and having a normal job. All three of them went to Dubai one by one and got jobs. All three of them own BMWs now. They have multiple houses worth 200k$ in India (This is quite a lot for a house in India). They lead luxurious lives, none of their wives work and they have exotic holidays. My dad was exclaiming recently that one of them went to US for 1 week with his family for 18k$. That is sheer luxury spending or in other words someone who can clearly ETG and more. Dubai seems to be a money milking country. I should definitely give it a try at some point if things don’t work out. I would most certainly like to estimate how much my earning potential would be.

One of the cousins was a mechanical engineer. The other two are in insurance and banking. The one thing that is not nice with Dubai, is that we could loose our job in an instant, there is not much security about that. All work and contacts developed as a result might go waste. Might!

Entry opportunities

Dubai market is mainly based on projects. Dubai is trying to be a trading hub. They want to have a large influx of people into and out of Dubai continuously! There is no R&D, there is no manufacturing. Things like sales, marketing, management, banking, finance, seem to be relevant here. Sectors like Automotive, construction, marine, aviation, banking, insurance, can be targeted here.

Some examples of entry opportunities I have heard of:

• ‘site-engineer’ for construction, infrastructure, marine projects.

  Start with the lowest salary of 48k AED and slowly jump to different and more meaningful roles over time with good salary jumps. Within 6 years my classmate jumped to a salary of 300k AED (81k$). An average jump of 35% each year.

• Heat load mechanical engineer or similar, to sales

  My cousin who went to Dubai as a mechanical engineer, moved into the sales space and is now general manager of a group. This guy probably earns ~650k AED, 13 years of being in Dubai, having started at a salary of 48k AED. This implies an average jump of 22% over 13 years.

• Insurance

  Another cousin of mine made it into insurance after a mere Master in Commerce and a lot of hardwork. He is in Dubai for ~18 years. He also started out with 48k AED and moved on to 750k in the span of 18 years. This is about 16% increase on average for 18 years.

• Banking

  Another cousin who had been in Dubai for 10 years was earning 450k. He managed himself into this field with an electronics background. Roughly 25% jump every year for 10 years.

• MBA to consulting or management type of roles

  It seems to look like a better idea to gain some experience and then come to Dubai to find suitable roles. In the worst case you can go back to the country where you came from in case Dubai decides to fuck you up. Based on discussions with people in Dubai, I have come to an estimate of 400-450k AED if I move to Dubai after an MBA, assuming I kill it in my MBA as well as the job I take up after that.

• Design Engineering

  Highly unlikely that there is any sort of technical level work which can promise good growth and pay, especially design engineering. Haven’t seen any evidence that suggests that engineers at all are important and that they can earn as reasonably as people in management.

For me it appears that I should pursue the MBA track, gain some experience and then come here. I don’t want to put my precious years gambling and surviving in Dubai, rather I want to be earning FCC.

Exit opportunities

I have not much idea about exit opportunities. I have seen cases of people who are fired and don’t have jobs as a result. And so my plan would be to finish MBA here, work in consulting and then after a few years try Dubai. This way if shit hits the roof, I might atleast have my citizenship, which will allow me a fall back option into Netherlands. I suppose in the worst case I could make atleast half the impact of a successful career in Dubai.

Impact

As exclaimed earlier I think the best way right now is with an MBA and some consulting experience. This means by the age of 35 I could be in Dubai in some management position. A retirement age of 60-65 is considered here unlike the age of 70 in other countries, as I do not expect the current retirement age to grow in Dubai, as their economy does not need people to work long. This leaves us with the number of lives saved between 530 and 730. This is based on:

• working for another 25 years from from the age of 35
• starting at 400k AED (108k$)
• with growth of 10% per year until I am 55
• followed by a growth of 2% per year until I am 60
• using max. age for working as 60
• 25% donation (based on 15% for retirement and 50% expenditure)
• and 2% inflation on the price of a life that currently costs 4k$

Personal fit

All the chances of doing an MBA, apply here and in addition we have the chance of losing job in Dubai which I estimate at 20%, i.e., 80% of keeping the job in Dubai. Therefore we have:

• Clearing GMAT (70%)
• getting scholarship (60%)
• join Mckinsey (50%)
• getting job in Dubai with 3+ years of consulting exp (75%)
• Not loosing said job until 60 (75%)

Personal fit x Impact

We make a decision tree mostly based on the MBA track to MC and compute the effective value of continuing such a career in Dubai.

This produces an effective value of 655 lives.

Other interesting options

Startup employee

As said by 80k-hours-guide, being an employee of a seemingly taking-off startup could give us large earnings.

If you get the opportunity to join a startup that’s taking off, you may have greater earnings and impact by joining it than founding your own e.g. the 100th employee of Dropbox still made about $10m, equivalent to a 10% stake in a $100m company. - Startup-employee-80000-hrs

Joining a startup will be based on the field I choose to take on further. With most paths like MC, DS, I don’t want to begin at a startup as I don’t have much to offer, i.e., experience.

In startups we typically don’t get senior mentorship, training and the like. If it is really small say with 10-15 people, then you are expected to perform by yourself with very little help from others, as they might not know much. When things get technical, knowledge seems to only come to a point, experience seems to take you further. Regarding softskills I think I can pick it up on any job. No problem! But core skills, I think I can better pick it up at a place with senior mentorship. Although we get a lot of autonomy and responsibility in startups, its nice for soft skills but not really for core skills especially when you are developing it from scratch. I will evaluate possibilities of going into startup with each career.

Finance + DS

I do not know how to evaluate this. It appears that it gives more FCC than simply DS. But to go into it directly might be hard. I would atleast need to do some courses in Finance. In case I choose DS, I would first like to get a job and start with it and from there explore other options. In any case, I will evaluate these type of options when I choose the path and start looking for jobs.

Finance + SE

Same as ‘Finance + DS’. I will look into this when the time is right.

Party politics, Policy

As far as I have seen it requires a US or UK citizenship. Not sure how to see myself there. As a result seems quite far-fetched. There is not really a review or much info around, of the scope in 3rd world countries, and I didn’t dive into it either. Of course doing something related to policy could be possible through an MBA or an Economics Phd. But for now it doesn’t seem to be something in my path.

Think Tanks

It is likely you will work for significant periods of time, and potentially your entire career, without successfully influencing government policy. - 80k-career-guide

So demotivating to hear the above regarding think tanks. Am not sure as a result, if this would be the right career. I will first gain some FCC and then see how I can go about it. So for now this is not for me. As a pointer I want to say that what they require is very similar to an analyst or researcher in one of the EAOs. Seems to be much easier to apply for coaching in this case.

Some requirements are:

Either good quantitative research or writing skills depending on the role; ability to synthesize and clearly communicate your and other people’s research; personal interest in some area of government policy. - 80k-career-guide

For now not on my radar, I will get back with another review in a few months, especially due to the seeming lack of large impact.

Analysis

An excel sheet has been created pooling in all the data computed above of more than a dozen career options to choose from. Similar data is also available within the 80k-hours-career-guide, but that does not allow as much detail in comparison. For example, I don’t care if I ETG or do DW. I care about total impact (IT), i.e., number of lives saved. So I want to be able to get data on total impact and not individual impact of DW or ETG or advocacy, as is available on 80k-hours-guide. In addition to the above, I have made subdivisions within careers for which 80k hours does not have the data I need. For example, MC is split into MC for ETG and MC for DW. This allows me to see which career direction has what type of total impact.

Elimination of the obvious

Support conditions wise IB and the like, seems like a reject. I am quite afraid of the extremely long hours, the need to facetime, the lack of attention to health etc… I might be able to do it for a few years, but not for long. IB doesn’t make sense unless it is going to be done for the next 10-15 years, as it takes so much time to reach millions. I’d rather try to get into MC, which doesn’t seem like an option where I would necessarily burn out. I conclude that MC > IB.

CC wise, DE appears to give little or no support to the career ambitions I have, such as, to go into EAO’s in management or analyst roles. It’s also not good for ETG. DS seems like a clear winner when compared to DE as it does more than DE and aides in going towards DW. So, DS > DE.

Although Starting-up has unbelievable potential for impact, and pretty good CC, it still sucks as an option because of the very poor personal fit. In case great potential is foreseen in some startup idea or there is an option to join a startup, an evaluation of current options must be done then. Starting-up is not for me now.

An Economics PhD shall be done for either getting into academia or getting into places like government institutions where you might rarely get a chance to change many lives. The effective impact of a career in academia is estimated as 624 lives, where as the maximum impact of a tenure track position is 582 (which is <624) lives. This implies that the failure paths chosen in the decision tree have probably much higher impact (which is also the case). Also, compared to DS for DW this career path is not good, looking at personal fit as well as impact. If I take up this career, I see myself loosing up to 10 years from now before finishing my PhD. There is a very good chance that I don’t make the tenure track but still get into academia. This could easily set me back another decade before I start my real contribution in academia, further reducing the impact.

Say after graduating with an Economics PhD I work in a government agency, then there is a 20% chance of getting the rare opportunity to create a total impact of 750 lives. There is an 80% chance that I will end up with a total impact of 350. The rare opportunity might happen once in your career. This worries me as the probability of saving 400 more lives is quite low, even though we are at the final step in the decision tree.

In conclusion, considering paths with an Economics PhD, there seems to be a high chance that MC is a better option to pursue after the PhD, instead of academia or working in the government. Why are we making all this effort, losing up to a decade only to go into consulting?

Working in an EAO and working as a startup employee right now does not seem like a good option. The 80k-hours-career-guide suggests to work where we can gain senior mentorship and training, before coming into an EAO. The same seems to apply for working in a startup as an employee.

Working in Dubai sounds quite nice but I am not going to be working there anytime soon. It appears that I would have to start at a low level and gain CC in a way so that I can survive Dubai’s existing market. The failure scenarios or the exit opportunities do not seem to be very lucrative either. I want to first focus on gaining solid FCC and later look at my options for branching out or doing more. I think I can better go there with some special skill or experience, like after an MBA and some consulting experience.

Based on if I take DS or Software Engineering, accompanying them with Finance looks like a nice way to pursue FCC. I will check the feasibility while applying for jobs. Think Tanks or getting into Policy look quite far-fetched. I don’t know where to begin and even if I do the likelihood of spending your whole career in it and not influencing any policy, seems high according to 80k hours.

Eliminating Software Engineering

I think the DW potential with SE is very poor. It does not give me skills in statistics or research. Based on my current skill level I do not think I could ever work in places like MIRI either. SE could work for ETG if it allows me to startup or somehow it allows me to move into finance. But we all know that despite the impact of a startup, the chance of success is way too low. Regarding getting into Finance with SE, the whole path and effective impact is unclear. It is still expected to fare poorer than DS for DW. It looks like Software Engineering seems nice for post-retirement work, but considering my EAO plans or ETG plans, I don’t see Software Engineering serving me better than DS or MC.

MC for DW

An MBA by itself CC wise seems amazing due to the number of things you can branch into. A consulting role in the top firms after, is valued even more. You can go into entrepreneurship, or to other corporate companies in chief-of-staff roles or strategy teams, based on the industry you served and gained experience in as a consultant.

It is very clear that becoming a partner in MC has a very low probability but massive impact (>1050 lives, not including bonuses). Let’s say I go as far as finishing my MBA. If I am unable to perform well or unable to get a job in the top firms or if I see that I am never going to become partner, I want to be able to move to DW, as DW is the next in line for having massive impact (estimated to have an impact of ~1k lives).

From the resources cited in this blog post (mainly 80k-hours-career-guide), the direct working potential is not clear for an ‘MBA followed by Consulting in the top firms’. So I asked Ram, a middle office analyst in IB and Vinod an x-Deloitte consultant currently pursuing his MBA in Cornell, a few questions on how an ‘MBA followed by the top consulting job’ will help me into DW.

In the context of being able to found and lead NGO’s, tackling business problems efficiently, working in strategy teams for NGO’s and even getting into Policy, an MBA with Consulting is expected to help, according to the x-Deloitte consultant. Ram seems to say something similar about the power of MBA followed by MC, but explains that academic roles don’t really need Consulting experience (or an MBA) unless making money and building a safe fund is my prerogative.

I’d say MC has nothing to do with where you wish to be at the end of it i.e. academic role that you desire. If academic project management is what you desire, you might as well start off there right away. Is making money and building a safe fund your prerogative in MC? Then, it is fine. Otherwise, not necessary for where you want to be. - Ram

To circle back to the beginning of essay though, most of the people doing amazing DW, featured in the 80k-hours-career-guide, are people without an MBA or consulting experience at the worlds top firms. At this point I feel this is in sync with what Ram said (above) when I asked him about exiting from MC into a non-profit for a job in project management in FHI.

Conclusion: I am inclined to think based on the above that, Consulting can get you to work for EAOs. But it is a roundabout way of getting into an EAO. It is also just a bit too much work for getting into an EAO, especially if there are other seemingly simpler options (DS for DW) which might reasonably build you for working in an EAO.

DS vs MC

As seen in the previous sub-section, it appears that pursuing DS for DW might be better than pursuing MC for DW. Hence, the last two career paths under my radar are DS for DW and MC for ETG. These careers in DS and MC appear to have potential to make large impacts and provide reasonable FCC to help us create maximum impact. The table below is a summary of results from evaluations in the above sections. Based on this table, it is tempting to say that DS for DW is what we should pursue.

All the above values in the table and in this essay have some uncertainty in them and some of the values are outright guesses. In all cases I have not considered the probability of loosing jobs or the EA movement going down or the result of there being an economic crisis. I assumed that these would count the same effect for both the careers under consideration. Since the Effective-Value for both careers seem to be in the same ballpark, considering the uncertainties/assumptions I would like to see if there is some overpowering reason to choose one over the other.

For me the ideal scenario looks like this: I get a scholarship at Rotterdam School of Management after a few prep years and then get a job in Mckinsey and become partner after 1-2 decades. A career in ETG would have been pursued with an impact greater than 1050 lives (not including bonuses which could go as far as 3 million$). But if things don’t work out after the MBA or even after consulting, I should be able to jump into DW to end up with atleast 970 lives of impact.

I feel at many times that I might not be suited for MC in top firms, as it seems to be for people who have been achieving all their life. I don’t really think I am one of those high-achieving people. But 80k-hours-career-guide seems to point out that early on we know little about our strengths and that it is better to do the exploration early and learn from the experience. I did think in the past, that I could never get a ‘9/10’ in my grades during my masters, but I got many in the second year. I thought in the past that my first job would be a disaster because I knew nothing, but until now I have been getting very good performance evaluations. These might not be big achievements, but all I want to say is that I don’t know my potential yet or atleast I am pretty bad at estimating my potential. I am young and I can really improve with time. And also, EA shall define my actions:

“Instead of asking what you could do, you ought to have been asking what needs to be done.” —Steven Brust, The Paths of the Dead

If being in Consulting has crazy impact then I should atleast try my level best until a time when I don’t have sufficient back up scenarios. I could try prepping for and applying to firms and checking my fit over the next few years. I could figure out a plan to become better by taking up some tasks that might aid in getting a scholarship for an MBA. As seen much earlier in the essay, failing at the beginning stages does not set me back too much in my career. I could always start DS at age 30 even. I have considered in the personal fit a 12.5% (1/8) chance for becoming partner once I join a top firm. Even though only 1 out of 8 people make it to the level of partner many might not be in competition to make it to all the way till partner. So essentially this number could be higher.

Even if I am ready to try my best and explore opportunities from my side, it still appears to be a nightmare to start. To begin with the reviews on Glassdoor for Mckinsey Netherlands seems to suggest quite bad work-life balance and work pressure, which is not really motivating. I need to carefully consider jumping into consulting, as if it is really not suited for me and I get fired then it could cause some irreversible damages. Once I try out MC and spend a few years in it and see that becoming a partner is no longer feasible, my options to get into DW are not completely clear. I am in Holland right now and the top companies like BCG seem to prefer fluency in Dutch, which I think will realistically take me 2-3 years to learn. So prepping for an MBA by first working in top firms seems less and less feasible.

Whereas with DS things seem achievable right from the start, for almost anybody in any field. I have personally seen random people from my University who worked in Engineering moving into DS. Working on solving problems with software seems to be my exact personal fit. Most of the featured profiles in the 80k-hours-career-guide have no MBAs/consulting experience. They might not even be in DS but statistics and critical thinking are very valuable and transferable skills, that are required in EAOs. And it is well known that working in EAOs provides some of the best impact.

Final remarks

The most in-demand roles are researchers and managers … -80k-hours-career-guide

Rightly so, we have been looking at DS and MC to light the way forward. I see myself still leaning towards DS until a day comes when an external evaluator tells me otherwise. The Evaluator could be from 80k-hours-career-guide or someone whom I respect. DS still seems like the choice with less uncertainty and decent impact as seen in the previous sections.

I am going to work on the DS course by Coursera as suggested by 80k-hours-career-guide. Doing the course might be a good start, to obtain quants skills, to do data interpretation and work on business logic which might be useful for MC/MBA later (in case things change in the next 6 months). Consulting firms also seem to employ Data Scientists. So I would like to start with DS and take it from there.

Over the next few months I want to apply to 80k-hours-career-guide for their one-on-one career advice and also ask the input of some special successful people I know, now that I have done some ground work. As per the advice of 80k-hours-career-guide a career evaluation shall take place every 6 months.

Appendix

Abbreviations

Calculating impact of direct working in 80k-hours

In this appendix the goal is to estimate number of lives saved by working in an EAO. It is first attempted to estimate the impact of a researcher at 80k-hours-EAO. This is checked against an estimate from a researcher from GiveWell. Further this value is reflected upon considering replaceability of a researcher in a given job.

The Estimation

80k-hours-EAO has redirected 3k people to improve their good doing through their interventions, over 7 years, i.e., 375 career-redirected-people/year. It is assumed that all the career-redirected-people would atleast be able to save 200 lives each (by working in an ordinary DE job and donating 10%) over their lifetime. So a total impact of 375 x 200 = 75000 lives saved, in one year.

20% of this impact (conservative estimate based on this) goes to the EAO (including donors). Of this 20% we assume 40% to belong to the EAO alone, and 60% to the actual donors who make it possible (GiveWell estimate). The EAO shall thus be able to save = 20% x 40% x 75000 = 6000 lives per year.

An analyst in the first year would contribute about 0.18% of impact of the EAO. This is calculated as follows: There are about 15 people excluding advisors, 2 co-founders, 6 core members, 3 freelancers and 4 operations people in 80k-hours-EAO. In the first year assuming my contribution is 10% of the co-founder, core team at 30% and operations team at 10%, my contribution would be 1.8% of the entire EAO. In addition to this, contribution from the analyst when he is replaceable is expected to reduce contribution by 90% (GiveWell analyst estimate). This brings the contribution of an analyst as = 1.8% x 10% = 0.18%. The total number of lives saved by an analyst in his first year at 80k-hours-EAO is = 0.18% x 6000 = 7.05 lives in the first year.

Assuming one can keep up with this, with: - 4% growth per year - 2% growth per year after age 50 - 7% growth every 5-7 years - inflation in the cost of saving lives 2% - Cost of a life now, 4k$ - All this for the next 40 years

This comes to about 500 lives in total as the contribution of an analyst in an EAO like 80k-hours. It is to be noted that some of the numbers are largely conservative, such as the average number of lives saved is at 200. This is assuming a 10% pledge at a salary of 53k$. This is a very basic salary and everyone who is intervened by 80k-hours, should be expected to do more. Also the rate at which 80k-hours is making career changes for people is rapidly increasing. Over the last 2 years it has been ~1k career-changes per year. If we take the number of career changes to be 1k, then the total number of lives saved by the above calculation goes to 1140 lives saved over a life time. So for now it is said that 500-1000 lives is estimated to be saved as an analyst.

An analyst from GiveWell has made this calculation (from which I have heavily referenced) including the replaceability of 10%, and he claims a contribution in the first year of ~97k$.

Assuming one can keep up with this, with: - 4% growth per year - 2% growth per year after 50 - 7% growth every 5-7 years - inflation in the cost of saving lives 2% - Cost of a life now, 4k$ - All this for the next 40 years

Extrapolating over the next 40 years would save 1400 lives. So in summary it appears that a lot of lives can be saved based on the reach of the EAO (conservatively >500 with potential of greater than 1.4k)

Reflection

In the discussion above it has been assumed that because we are replaceable, we loose 90% of the value added by us to the EAO. This resulted in a multiplying the numbers of lives saved by an additional 10%, resulting in 500 to 1500 lives.

Recently I came across an argument regarding “Why I am not replaceable”, in the 80k-hours-guide. And it argued that if I take up job at an EAO, then I free up the other person who is “supposed to replace me”, to do good elsewhere. This is because most organizations are talent constrained rather than funding constrained. So there are X analyst jobs and X-1 analysts. So in essence everyone worthy can get a job and claim the impact of that particular job for himself without factoring in the replaceability. Furthermore, if you don’t take up the job, the organization might not fill the role for quite some time according to 80k-hours-career-guide.

… you won’t always be replaced – if you don’t take the job, the organisation might not fill the role for years. This often seems to be the case: there are roles the organisations have been trying to fill for a while, but haven’t been able to.

And in that case the GiveWell estimate would go from 97k to 970k/year, and the number of lives saved would go from 1400 to 14000. Wow! Some serious impact it looks like.

But,

To get a sense of how much value you create by working at an EA organisation, we asked the organisations how much funding they would have traded for their most recent hire. They gave an average of $126,000 – $505,000 and a median of $77,000 – $307,000 per year.

In conclusion: At this point we have a couple of estimates regarding what is the value created by an Analyst over his lifetime. The estimate computed by me suggests a lower bound of 500-1000 lives. Factoring the non-replaceability, this goes from 5k-10k lives. The givewell analyst’s estimate turned out to be ~1500 lives. And lastly, by asking how much funding the EAO would have traded for a new hire, we have a rough estimate of ~1000 lives taking the median value of 77k$/year. Looking at the above it feels reasonable to imagine that working at an EAO can have a lot of impact, around 1k lives.

P.S

The Indirect effects is not taken into account at all.

P.P.S

I feel like I have been heavily hoping for this answer to be ridiculously large say in tens of 10s of k’s of people saved. But its only 2-3x more in the conservative case, than the impact of being a basic design engineer. I want to say JUST 2x more, but allow me to wash my mouth.

Stanford economists have demonstrated that the average value of a year of quality human life is actually closer to about $129,000.

It is not the difference between 200 and 600 Indian rupees my dear self, it is the goddamn difference between 25 million to 75 million $ in value, and that too just for one freaking year of quality human life.

My internal bells just went off! Essay writing you rock. -STM

Agents are in general extremely scope insensitive it appears. As Elezer says, we need to “shut up and multiply”. Shut up and multiply has never been so resounding inside my head. A year later after reading about it I see myself being scope insensitive again. Damn!

Uncertainities

Over the whole essay in many places I have made assumptions or skipped some details to reduce the delay of the work I am producing, with the idea of having rough estimates and refining it further, if it is really needed. Some of the uncertainties I would like to delve into in the coming months are:

• the chances of the EA movement failing
• Chances of getting into top EAOs in the next 5 years with DS
• the chances of becoming a partner
• Impact for DW with an MBA and MC in less than top firms