EA - What's surprised me as an entry-level generalist at Open Phil and my recommendations to early career professionals by Sam Anschell

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What's surprised me as an entry-level generalist at Open Phil & my recommendations to early career professionals, published by Sam Anschell on March 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not represent Open Philanthropy.Valentine’s day 2022 was my first day of work at Open Phil. As a 24-year-old who had spent two post-grad years as a poker dealer/cardroom union representative, I had little in the way of white collar context or transferable skills. Recently, a few undergraduates and early career professionals have reached out to learn what the job is like & how they can get further involved in EA. In this post I’ll try to provide the advice that I would have benefited from hearing a couple years ago.I’m hoping to widen the aperture of possibilities to early career professionals who are excited to use their time and talents to do good. I know how difficult it can be to land an EA job - it took years of on-and-off applying before I got an offer. It’s normal to face a string of rejections and it’s valid to feel frustrated by that, but I think the benefits to individuals and organizations when a hire is made are so great that continuing to apply is worth it. I encourage anyone who is struggling to get their foot in the door to read Aaron’s Epistemic Stories - I found it really motivating.TLDR:Before starting this job, I underestimated the $ value of person-hours at EA orgs. I may have done this because:There’s a disconnect between salary and social value generated (even though salaries at EA orgs are generous). Most for-profit companies value their average staff member’s contributions at about 2x their salary, and I suspect EA orgs value their average staff member’s contributions at more like 8x+ their salary.It could be uncomfortable to think that time at an EA org would be very valuable, both because of what it would imply for labor/leisure tradeoffs and because it could lead to imposter syndrome.It can be easy to mentally compartmentalize work at EA orgs as creating a similar level of social impact to work at nonprofits in general, despite believing that EA interventions are much more cost-effective than the average nonprofit’s interventions.Due to this underestimate, I now think I should have focused on working directly on EA projects and spending more time applying for EA jobs earlier. Here are some of my recommendations to early career professionals:Don't feel like you have to put multiple years into a job before leaving to show you’re not a job-hopper. EA orgs understand the desire to contribute to work you find meaningful as soon as you can!I suspect people apply to too few jobs given how unpleasant it can be to job hunt, and I strongly encourage you to keep putting yourself out there.I applied to a few hundred jobs before landing this one, as did many of my friends who work at EA orgs. Not getting any jobs despite many applications isn't a sign that you're a bad applicant.Doing even unsexy work for an organization that you’re strongly mission-aligned with is more motivating than you might expect.I write about impactful ways that anyone can spend time at the end of this post.A ~Year in the LifeWhat I did at workIt’s hard to look at a job description and get a sense of what the day-to-day looks like (and see whether one might be qualified for the job). Success in my and many other entry-level jobs seems to be a product of enthusiasm, dependability (which I’d define as the independence/organization skills to manage a task so that the person who assigns it doesn’t need to follow up), and good judgment (when to check in, what tone to use in emails, etc.) In my day-to-day as a business operations generalist (assistant level), I've:Helped manage the physical office space:Purchased, ren...