The time I almost got a job at CEA

Sliding doors

The Roll Call by Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler, 1874)

In 2014, I applied for a job at the Centre for Effective Altruism. I don’t remember the actual title – probably a marketing position, as at the time I was working in life science/pharmaceutical public relations.

I’d come across effective altruism not long before, probably initially through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essay Money is the unit of caring, in which he suggests that someone who is taking doing good seriously would think like a businessperson, and in most cases opt to make money instead of doing the thing themselves.

This really changed my view of how to think about doing good. I discovered effective altruism not long after.

I didn’t get the job at CEA. I was sad not to get it, but it wasn’t a huge knock. I took an 80,000 Hours career consultation around the same time, and they suggested I become a software engineer, a career move I was already leaning towards. I quit my shitty PR job – which was sufficiently mind-numbing that I was already outsourcing much of it to a Nigerian lady on Upwork – and signed up for Makers Academy using money I’d saved from running a separate PR consultancy on the side. I got my first tech job three months later.

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I went along to the pub with a few friends for what turned out to be a sort of CEA old lags’ drinks – some folks who had worked there at various times and in various roles (one who was central to organising the first EA Global conferences, another who worked on the community-building programme, another who used to be the CEO).

I found out from one of them that they had, in fact, been on the panel which reviewed my job application and had given me the green light, but some other unnamed person had said no. I had been one ‘yes’ away from getting the job.

The person who did get that job was sitting at the table with me. And without giving too much detail, they’d had a very significant impact on the organisation and its structure in quite a dramatic way. All of the other people at the table had been around for that tumult and were downwind of it.

And of course for each of these people working at CEA was a path dependency for the various things that came next.

One person went on to do career coaching for ambitious people seeking to have an impact with their work. Another stayed in the EA sphere, working on a high-impact crowdfunding platform, flying to the Bahamas to do research under the FTX Foundation umbrella, and receiving grants to do AI safety research. Another ended up working for a crypto hedge fund that branched off from Alameda Research, which later ran as the sister company to FTX.

It felt like – even excepting the aforementioned drama – that their time at CEA had been at once exhilarating and exhausting, and that they all shared a sort of collective trauma from it. But that working at the vanguard of the effective altruism movement when it was but a fledgling was a highlight for all of them; a job whose camaraderie was unmatched before or since. Strange to think I came close to having that.