Contrary to what seems an implicit premise of this post, my impression is—
most EA group organizers should have this as a side-project, and should not think about “community building” as about their “career path” where they could possibly continue to do it in a company like Salesforce - the label “community building” is unfortunate for what most of the EA group organizing work should consist of - most of the tasks in “EA community building” involve skills which are pretty universal a generally useable in most other fields, like “strategizing”, “understanding people”, “networking” or “running events” - for example: in my view, what can an EA group organizer on a research career path get from organizing an EA group as a side-project are skills like “organizing event”, “explaining complex ideas to people” or even “thinking clearly in groups about important topics”. Often the benfits of improving/practicing such skills for a research career are similar or larger than e.g. learning a new programming language
There are exceptions to this, such as people who want to work on large groups full time, build national groups, or similar. In my view these projects are often roughly of the scope of founding or leading a startup or a NGO and should be attempted by people who, in general, have a lot of optionality in what to do both before working on an EA group and eventually after it.
Vint Cerf seems actually more of a counterexample toward “community building and evangelism” as a career objective: anyone who wants to follow this path should note he wrote the TCP protocol internet is still running on first, co-founded one of the entities governing internet later, and worked for Google on community building only after all these experiences.
Another reason I’m sceptical of the value of this argument is my guess is people who would be convinced by it (“previously I was hesitant about organizing an EA group because the career path seems too narrow and tied to EA, now I see career paths in for-profit world”) are people who should mostly not lead or start EA groups. In most cases EA group organizing involves significant amount of talking to people about careers, and whoever has so limited understanding of the careers to benefit from this advice seems likely to have non-trivial chance of giving people harmful career advice.
Contrary to what seems an implicit premise of this post, my impression is—
most EA group organizers should have this as a side-project, and should not think about “community building” as about their “career path” where they could possibly continue to do it in a company like Salesforce
- the label “community building” is unfortunate for what most of the EA group organizing work should consist of
- most of the tasks in “EA community building” involve skills which are pretty universal a generally useable in most other fields, like “strategizing”, “understanding people”, “networking” or “running events”
- for example: in my view, what can an EA group organizer on a research career path get from organizing an EA group as a side-project are skills like “organizing event”, “explaining complex ideas to people” or even “thinking clearly in groups about important topics”. Often the benfits of improving/practicing such skills for a research career are similar or larger than e.g. learning a new programming language
There are exceptions to this, such as people who want to work on large groups full time, build national groups, or similar. In my view these projects are often roughly of the scope of founding or leading a startup or a NGO and should be attempted by people who, in general, have a lot of optionality in what to do both before working on an EA group and eventually after it.
Vint Cerf seems actually more of a counterexample toward “community building and evangelism” as a career objective: anyone who wants to follow this path should note he wrote the TCP protocol internet is still running on first, co-founded one of the entities governing internet later, and worked for Google on community building only after all these experiences.
Another reason I’m sceptical of the value of this argument is my guess is people who would be convinced by it (“previously I was hesitant about organizing an EA group because the career path seems too narrow and tied to EA, now I see career paths in for-profit world”) are people who should mostly not lead or start EA groups. In most cases EA group organizing involves significant amount of talking to people about careers, and whoever has so limited understanding of the careers to benefit from this advice seems likely to have non-trivial chance of giving people harmful career advice.