Being transparent about capacity
Epistemic status: medium, unsure if this is biased to what I have experienced, but think it is useful regardless.
I think that organisations and individuals should try be more transparent about their capacity, e.g. at conferences when people ask for volunteering / collaboration opportunities, a lot of orgs/individuals say yes, and then nothing ever really happens.
For example, some members from EA Bath attended EAGx Amsterdam last year. One of the members was pretty excited about EA and using his skills to help in climate change / GHD. He met with a lot of people who offered him opportunities and collaboration, so he followed up with them all after the conference, but it resulted in them all ghosting him, which lead to him being less sure that EAG/ EAGx’s were a good use of his time. I’ve had similar experiences too, with asking people if they have opportunities and them saying yes, and then I receive no reply when I email them.
I think that these people / organisations are genuinely excited for more people like me (students / entry-level) to get involved, but are also probably time constrained. Because of this I think it’s super important that people are honest, even if it means saying no. And if they aren’t excited about entry-level people working with them, then they should also be honest about this, and say that they are either not looking for anyone / looking for more senior people.
I think it is good to say yes in general to things, if I didn’t say yes to the previous Chair of EA Bath, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. But if you are >80% sure you are too time constrained to do something, I think it’s wise to be transparent and/or redo your time budgets/allocations.
Upvote, but I’m not really sure how to resolve this. As I see it, many organizations in EA are incentivized to overstate their capacity to take on people because many EAs struggle with imposter syndrome. That is, good talent in EA doesn’t reach out for opportunities because they don’t think they’re qualified.
I would gander that most organizations would respond to an email from a “unicorn.” That is, someone who is unusually valuable to them. Such “unicorns” also probably have imposter syndrome, so it’s in the organizations best interest to understate what their bar is, just to not scare away these people.
The frustrating part is that the same vagueness that helps unicorns reach out is what wastes everyone else’s time. There’s no clean way to signal “yes to you, no to most people.” Either reveal the bar or maintain the ambiguity.
This is frustrating and unfair to early stage professionals in EA, but I can hardly blame any organization that does this. Good luck out there, because you might be the unicorn for some organization :)