I’m curious actually why 80,000 hours didn’t aggressively expand in the past. It seems crazy to me that one of the core EA organisations only has 50 staff after existing for 15 years. Did you not feel growth was justified before, or has it just been a gradual process that you’re now pushing harder to accelerate?
Mostly the 2nd—We’ve expanded gradually but not aggressively over the years. We’re trying to grow more aggressively now. Why not more before? In part, we had a philosophy of ‘hire slowly, have a high bar’. We probably had this philosophy a bit too much. We regard not growing more earlier as likely to be a mistake. Another part was going through several CEO transitions in a few years, which led to strategic & leadership uncertainty, which is a hard situation to hire in. Hiring’s also just hard and a ton of labour from senior staff. Over the years, we’ve often wanted to grow more than we’ve felt we were able to while keeping up delivery on our core programmes.
I’m curious actually why 80,000 hours didn’t aggressively expand in the past. It seems crazy to me that one of the core EA organisations only has 50 staff after existing for 15 years. Did you not feel growth was justified before, or has it just been a gradual process that you’re now pushing harder to accelerate?
Hey Tristan,
Mostly the 2nd—We’ve expanded gradually but not aggressively over the years. We’re trying to grow more aggressively now. Why not more before? In part, we had a philosophy of ‘hire slowly, have a high bar’. We probably had this philosophy a bit too much. We regard not growing more earlier as likely to be a mistake. Another part was going through several CEO transitions in a few years, which led to strategic & leadership uncertainty, which is a hard situation to hire in. Hiring’s also just hard and a ton of labour from senior staff. Over the years, we’ve often wanted to grow more than we’ve felt we were able to while keeping up delivery on our core programmes.