Regarding your first question, I think this is correct. I spoke to some EA operations folks at the 2019 EA Global and they said that the need for operations people has decreased. Seems like after the article came out, there was a large influx of people applying for different positions and those positions have been filled (for the most part). This isn’t to suggest that there aren’t any operations positions open anymore—I’m sure if you look at the 80k Job Board, you will find operations job opportunities.
Regarding your second question, I don’t have a good sense of how easy or difficult it is to get an operations position at an EA org these days. My general sense is that there are still quite a bit of qualified candidates applying to open operations positions so individuals who only have some but not a lot of operations experience may experience a disadvantage when applying to those positions. I can’t speak on behalf of any other EA org but at CHAI, we occasionally use contractors on a temporary basis to off-load some of our operations tasks. If you have some but not a lot of ton of experience (as you put it), I would suggest that you reach out to EA orgs that you are interested in and see if any of them are looking for any short-term / contractors.
+1 to Martin’s suggestion of reaching out to EA orgs and asking whether they need any short-term/contractor (or possibly volunteer) work doing.
Orgs will rarely run full hiring rounds for these, but my impression is that a fair amount of this kind of work exists. (Not saying that I think this strategy is anywhere near certain to work, but I would recommend it.) I never managed to make myself proactively ask people for roles like these, but the roles in this category that I got (which I think happened to me through chance really) mostly ended up being really useful for skill-building.
Regarding your first question, I think this is correct. I spoke to some EA operations folks at the 2019 EA Global and they said that the need for operations people has decreased. Seems like after the article came out, there was a large influx of people applying for different positions and those positions have been filled (for the most part). This isn’t to suggest that there aren’t any operations positions open anymore—I’m sure if you look at the 80k Job Board, you will find operations job opportunities.
Regarding your second question, I don’t have a good sense of how easy or difficult it is to get an operations position at an EA org these days. My general sense is that there are still quite a bit of qualified candidates applying to open operations positions so individuals who only have some but not a lot of operations experience may experience a disadvantage when applying to those positions. I can’t speak on behalf of any other EA org but at CHAI, we occasionally use contractors on a temporary basis to off-load some of our operations tasks. If you have some but not a lot of ton of experience (as you put it), I would suggest that you reach out to EA orgs that you are interested in and see if any of them are looking for any short-term / contractors.
+1 to Martin’s suggestion of reaching out to EA orgs and asking whether they need any short-term/contractor (or possibly volunteer) work doing.
Orgs will rarely run full hiring rounds for these, but my impression is that a fair amount of this kind of work exists. (Not saying that I think this strategy is anywhere near certain to work, but I would recommend it.) I never managed to make myself proactively ask people for roles like these, but the roles in this category that I got (which I think happened to me through chance really) mostly ended up being really useful for skill-building.