Exploring the Increase in Impactful Engineering Roles on the Job Board

Welcome 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: An Analysis of Engineering Jobs on the 80,000 Hours Job Board, published by Jessica Wen on February 20, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
0 Summary
Cross-posted from the High Impact Engineers blog. The Google Doc version of the report can be found
here. The Google Sheets of the data is
here.
This report analyses the (physical) engineering jobs posted on the
80,000 Hours job board from October 2022 to February 2024. We find that:
The rate of new jobs added to the 80,000 Hours job board remains consistent throughout this period.
The rate of new engineering jobs added to the 80,000 Hours job board more than doubled in July 2023 and has remained at this higher level since then.
Half of the engineering jobs advertised on the 80,000 Hours job board are in biosecurity.
For the engineering jobs on the 80,000 Hours job board, mechanical engineering skills are the most in-demand, followed by bioengineering.
Almost half of the engineering jobs are US-based, and nearly a third are UK-based. The rest are mainly in Europe or Australia, with a handful based in India and other non-Western countries.
1 Introduction
1.1 Context
Before October 2022, the "Engineering" job tag on the
80,000 Hours job board included both software and "physical"[1] engineering. We spoke with 80,000 Hours to separate software and "physical" engineering into two different tags, which they implemented in October 2022. This has been a huge help for the High Impact Engineers community. At that time, I set up email notifications to receive alerts when new jobs were posted to the 80,000 Hours job board using the "Engineering" job tag.[2]
Speaking with other career coaches and community builders, there is a consensus that there is a general lack of information on the landscape of "EA jobs". Out of curiosity, I put this analysis of engineering jobs on the 80k job board together in ~8 hours.
I expect 80k is probably in a better position to run these kinds of evaluations of the landscape of impactful jobs, but I thought that it would be helpful and of interest to the High Impact Engineers community and potentially the wider EA community to see these statistics. I focus only on jobs tagged "engineering" on the 80k job board, but I expect similar analyses could be made with other tags.
After putting this report together, I shared it with Conor Barnes from 80,000 Hours to review. All the notes from 80k are from his feedback, which is greatly appreciated!
1.2 Some Caveats
Since I received these notifications via email over the past 15 months, most of the jobs from the notifications are no longer open. This means that the "Type of engineering" and the "Country" data are the most likely to be inaccurate without access to the original job description. I have made my best guess to fill in this data according to the job titles, trying to find similar open roles at the companies, and doing general research on the organisations' websites.
I have tried not to delete these email notifications, but I may have deleted some. As a result, this data set may be incomplete. However, I don't think this detracts too much from many of the conclusions that can be drawn from this set of data.
Finally, here are some caveats on my views on the 80k job board. I'm sure they would agree with me that their job board is not the definitive list of impactful jobs, or even the definitive list of EA jobs (whatever that means!). They do a great job at keeping on top of opportunities within and outside of the EA ecosystem, but it's important to keep in mind that there are lots of other impactful jobs that 80k might miss, or they might have a different model of impact than you do[3].
As a result, I hope that readers will understand that this is not a reflection of the jobs that "EA" deems to be "valuable"[4], but more an attempt to understand the oppo...