Additional Career Support From 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours is a nonprofit founded in 2011 by Will MacAskill and Ben Todd aiming to solve the skill bottlenecks in the world’s most pressing problem. Over the past decade they have done an immense amount of research, and have produced vast amounts of top quality content on how to maximize your career’s impact. You can check them out here.

What is 80,000 Hours?

The average person spends about 80,000 hours working throughout their career. This means our careers are one of our most significant resources when thinking about how to do the most good. The organization 80,000 Hours is dedicated to providing research and support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

The content that 80,000 Hours produce is truly impressive in its quality and depth. Much of our views have been influenced by 80,000 Hours’ work, and inspired by them. If there’s a topic still missing on our website, there’s often a lot of material we’d endorse on it at the 80,000 Hours website. Even on topics we do cover, 80,000 Hours often have in-depth deep dives we’d recommend reading (they’re usually linked at the bottom of the page). This is especially true today, as we take our first steps as an organization and our content is still limited – but we expect this to continue to be true for quite a while. Some of the articles on the 80,000 Hours website we’d recommend the most include:

​That being said, there truly is an immense collection of valuable resources on their site, so we’d highly recommend exploring and engaging with their materials beyond the articles above.

How does Probably Good differ?

Probably Good and 80,000 Hours agree on much more than we disagree, and yet, browsing both sites you may find areas where our focus or recommendations differ. We encourage you to think carefully and figure out which specific recommendations and advice is most relevant to you as part of the process of figuring out the best path for you to do the most good.

One core question worth considering is your view on longtermism, which 80,000 Hours strongly advocate. If you either hold a longtermist view or are willing to consider it, we would especially recommend engaging deeply with the 80,000 Hours website and resources, as their materials are more focused on impact from a long-termist perspective.

Additional resources