Many EAs are fairly intellectual, and as such may feel like they’re missing out on something by working in operations roles. Although these positions are often challenging, they tend not to be academically or intellectually stimulating in the same way as school or university.
As an undergrad liberal arts major, it was only in the last 2.5 years that I grew to love the intellectual depth (and fun) of operations research/ops-oriented economic analysis, and project management practices and courses. To pick two examples addressing food insecurity, there’s this work by an economist and this work by operations research faculty. It could be worth pulling together an informal Google Doc syllabus — akin to AI safety syllabi like this — including resources from:
A more-digestible entry point is The Everything Storeon Amazon, which highlights how Bezos recruited a number of ORFE and Sloan alumni to make logistics and operations AMZN’s core competency. See notable alumni here, this Jeff Wilkevideo, and this excerpt from the book for an example of the heated operational debates within Amazon during its first decade, which could be good food for thought for distributed EA organizations.
At a management offsite in the late 1990s, a team of well-intentioned junior executives stood up before the company’s top brass and gave a presentation on a problem indigenous to all large organizations: the difficulty of coordinating far-flung divisions.
The junior executives recommended a variety of different techniques to foster cross-group dialogue and afterward seemed proud of their own ingenuity. Then Jeff Bezos, his face red and the blood vessel in his forehead pulsing, spoke up. “I understand what you’re saying, but you are completely wrong, ” he said.
“Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”
...At that meeting and in public speeches afterward, Bezos vowed to run Amazon with an emphasis on decentralization and independent decision-making.
“A hierarchy isn’t responsive enough to change, ” he said. “I’m still trying to get people to do occasionally what I ask. And if I was successful, maybe we wouldn’t have the right kind of company.”
Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them. That would come to represent something akin to the conventional wisdom in the high-tech industry over the next decade.
The companies that embraced this philosophy, like Google, Amazon, and, later, Facebook, were in part drawing lessons from theories about lean and agile software development. In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress.
One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.
This is a very good point:
As an undergrad liberal arts major, it was only in the last 2.5 years that I grew to love the intellectual depth (and fun) of operations research/ops-oriented economic analysis, and project management practices and courses. To pick two examples addressing food insecurity, there’s this work by an economist and this work by operations research faculty. It could be worth pulling together an informal Google Doc syllabus — akin to AI safety syllabi like this — including resources from:
HBS Management readings
INFORMS case studies
INSEAD, MIT Sloan Ops Mgmt, and Princeton ORFE papers and primers (among others)
PMI’s PMBOK® and other, free materials
A more-digestible entry point is The Everything Store on Amazon, which highlights how Bezos recruited a number of ORFE and Sloan alumni to make logistics and operations AMZN’s core competency. See notable alumni here, this Jeff Wilke video, and this excerpt from the book for an example of the heated operational debates within Amazon during its first decade, which could be good food for thought for distributed EA organizations.