80,000 Hours: The Book

Forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, forty years: a career is about 80,000 hours. Yet it’s striking how little serious thought goes into career decisions relative to, say, choosing a mortgage. Indeed, you are almost supposed to tell a story about how a random incident changed your life. One summer a circus came to town—and that’s the whole reason I became an economist! (True story!). Career advice, when it exists, often amounts to the platitude of “follow your passions!” Ugh. If you ask people what their passions are, music, arts and sports top the list but guess what? There aren’t enough jobs in those categories to go around.

Benjamin Todd’s newly updated book, 80,000 Hours is a unique examination of careers that runs the numbers in a serious way. The book is framed along Effective Altruism lines and it has some good public policy material. Pandemics, for example,

The world has plenty of religious cults, despots and would-be school shooters who might decide they want to take everyone else down with them…. The world [c]ould be one lab leak away from catastrophe.

Given what we know about the pace and accessibility of bioengineering tools, the chance that there will be a pandemic that kills over 100 million people during the next century seems high, plausibly similar or greater than the risk of large-scale nuclear war or climate change above six degrees. An engineered pandemic could also kill over 90% of the population,suggesting its overall scale is significantly larger.

But risks from pandemics are, even now, far more neglected than either of these. In comparison to $6bn–$10bn of philanthropic funding for climate change, and $1.6 trillion of total climate finance, pandemic prevention only receives $1bn of philanthropic funding, and total spending aimed at reducing the chance of worst-case pandemics is probably under $10bn.

See also my paper Pandemic Preparation Without Romance on what to do about it.

The opening chapters present the EA framing but most of the book has good advice even for the purely selfish–advice on building skills, networking and how to actually get a job. From what I have said so far, one might get the impression that the idea is to rationally choose your career at age 16 and then optimize your life around that plan. Not so! Todd rightly divides career paths into explore, build and deploy categories. Most people under-explore. It’s ok to jump around jobs and places, especially when you are young, so long as you are building skills and not just accumulating items for the CV. There’s evidence, for example, that scientists’ best work tends to follow periods of exploration with exploitation.

I also appreciate that Todd specifically warns about about armchair theorizing. Pro-and-con lists, for example, are ok but far less useful than getting out of the chair and actively exploring. Go talk with people, try something for a week, go somewhere. Look for cheap tests.

Start with what’s easiest. We often find people who want to, say, try out economics, who then apply for a master’s degree. That’s a huge investment of time. Instead, think about how you can learn This could mean first reading an economics textbook, or taking a single course.

You can think about creating a ‘ladder’ of tests. Start with the cheapest ways to test your options, then after each step, re-evaluate. A ladder might look like this:
a. Read our relevant career reviews, all our research on a given topic, and talk to LLMs about what the jobs are like (two to five hours).
b. Speak to someone in the area (two hours).
c. Speak to a friend to get an outside perspective on what’s best (two hours).
d. Speak to three more people who work in the area and read one or two books (twenty hours).
e. Given your findings, look for a relevant project that might take one to four weeks of work – like applying to jobs, volunteering in a related role, or doing a side project in the area – to see what it’s like and how you perform.
f. Only then consider taking on a two- to twenty-four month commitment – like a work placement, internship or graduate study. Being offered a trial position with an organization for a couple of months can be ideal because both you and the organization want to quickly assess your fit.

80000 Hours is The Random Walk Down Wall Street of career advice, the one book that really matters.

Explore, build rare and valuable skills, point them at a meaningful problem, and passion will follow rather than lead. And for those who don’t want to read a book, speak to an 80,000 Hours advisor. It’s a very cheap test.