A couple of years it seemed like the conventional wisdom was that there were serious ops/management/something bottlenecks in converting money into direct work. But now you’ve hired a lot of people in a short time. How did you manage to bypass those bottlenecks and have there been any downsides to hiring so quickly?
So there are a bunch of questions in this, but I can answer some of the ops related one:
We haven’t had ops talent bottlenecks. We’ve had incredibly competitive operations hiring rounds (e.g. in our most recent hiring round, ~200 applications, of which ~150 were qualified at least on paper), and I’d guess that 80%+ of our finalists are at least familiar with EA (which I don’t think is a necessary requirement, but the explanation isn’t that we are recruiting from a different pool I guess).
Maybe there was a bigger bottleneck in ~2018 and EA has grown a lot since or reached people with more ops skills since?
We spend a lot of time resources on recruiting, and advertise our jobs really widely, so maybe we are reaching a lot more potential candidates than some other organizations were?
Management bottlenecks are probably our biggest current people-related constraint on growth (funding is a bigger constraint).
We’ve worked a lot on addressing this over the summer, partially by having a huge internship program, and getting a lot of current staff management experience (while also working with awesome interns on cool projects!) and sending anyone who wants it through basic management training.
My impression is that we’ve gotten many more qualified applications in recent manager hiring pools.
Bypassing bottlenecks
In general, I think we haven’t experienced these as much as other groups (at least so far)
We tend to hire ops staff prior to growth, as opposed to hiring them when we need them to take on work immediately (e.g. we hire ops staff when things are fine, but we plan to grow in a few months, so the infrastructure can be in place for expansion, as opposed to hiring ops staff when the current ops staff has too much on their plate, or something).
We do a ton of prep to ensure that we are careful while scaling, thinking about how processes would scale, etc.
The above mentioned intern program really stress-tested a lot of processes (we doubled in size for 3 months), and has been really helpful for addressing issues that come with scaling.
Downsides to hiring quickly
I’d say that we’ve seen a mild amount to the downsides to growing in general, though it hasn’t necessarily been related to speed of hiring—e.g. mildly more siloing of people, people not sure what other people are working on, etc. and we’ve been taking a lot of steps to try to mitigate this, especially as we get larger.
Here’s some parts of my personal take (which overlaps with what Abraham said):
I think we ourselves feel a bit unsure “why we’re special”, i.e. why it seems there aren’t very many other EA-aligned orgs scaling this rapidly & gracefully.
But my guess is that some of the main factors are:
We want to scale rapidly & gracefully
Some orgs have a more niche purpose that doesn’t really require scaling, or may be led by people who are more skilled and excited about their object-level work than about org strategy, scaling, management, etc.
RP thinks strategically about how to scale rapidly & gracefully, including thinking ahead about what RP will need later and what might break by default
Three of the examples I often give are ones Abraham mentioned:
Realising RP will be be management capacity constrained, and that it would therefore be valuable to give our researchers management experience (so they can see how much they like it & get better at it), and that this pushes in favour of running a large internship with 1-1 management of the interns
(This definitely wasn’t the only motivation for running the internship, but I think it was one of the main ones, though that’s partly guessing/vague memory.)
Realising also that maybe RP should offer researchers management training
Expanding ops capacity before it’s desperately urgently obviously needed
RP also just actually does the obvious things, including learning and implementing standard best practices for management, running an org, etc.
And that all seems to me pretty replicable!
OTOH, I do think the people at RP are also great, and it’s often the case that people who are good at something underestimate how hard it is, so maybe this is less replicable than I think. But I’d guess that smart, sensible, altruistic, ambitious people with access to good advisors could have a decent chance at making their org more like that or starting a new org like that, and that this could be quite valuable in expectation.
(If anyone feels like maybe they’re such a person and maybe they should do that, please feel free to reach out for advice, feedback on plans, pointers to relevant resources & people! I and various other people at RP would be excited to help it be the case that there are more EA-aligned orgs scaling rapidly & gracefully.
Some evidence of that is that I have in fact spent probably ~10 hours of my free time over the last few months helping someone work towards possibly setting up an RP-like org, and expect to continue helping them for at least several months. Though that was an unusual case, and I’d usually just quickly offer my highest-value input.)
I have private information (e.g. from senior people at Rethink Priorities and former colleagues) that suggests operations ability at RP is unusually high. They say that Abraham Rowe, COO, is unusually good.
The reason why this comment is useful is that:
This high operations ability might be hard to observe from the inside, if you are that person (Rowe) who is really good. Also, high ability operations people may be attracted to a place where things run well and operations is respected. There may be other founder effects from Rowe. This might add nuance to Rowe’s comment.
It seems possible operations talent was (is) limited or undervalued in EA. Maybe RP’s success is related to operations ability (allows management to focus, increases org-wide happiness and confidence).
I appreciate it, but I want to emphasize that I think a lot of this boils down to careful planning and prep in advance, a really solid ops team all around, and a structure that lets operations operate a bit separately from research, so Peter and Marcus can really focus on scaling the research side of the organization / think about research impact a lot. I do agree that overall RP has been largely operationally successful, and that’s probably helped us maintain a high quality of output as we grow.
I also think a huge part of RP’s success has been Peter, Marcus, and other folks on the team being highly skilled at identifying low-hanging fruit in the EA research space, and just going out and doing that research.
To the extent that you think good operations can emerge out of replicable processes rather than singularly talented ops managers, do you think it would be useful to write a longer article about how RP does operations? (Or perhaps you’ve already written this and I missed it)
I definitely think that we are very lucky to have Abraham working with us. I think another thing is that there are at least three people (Abraham, Marcus, me, and probably other people too if given the chance) each capable of founding and running an organization all focused instead on making just one organization really great and big.
I definitely think having Abraham be able to fully handle operations allows Marcus and me to focus nearly entirely on driving our research quality, which is a good thing. Marcus and I also have clear subfocuses (Marcus does animals and global health / development, whereas I focus on longtermism, surveys, and EA movement building) which allow us to further focus our time specifically on making things great.
This comment sounds like it’s partly implying “RP seems to have recently overcome these bottlenecks. How? Does that imply the bottlenecks are in general smaller now than they were then?” I think the situation is more like “The bottlenecks were there back then and still are now. RP was doing unusually well at overcoming the bottlenecks then and still is now.”
The rest of this comment says a bit more on that front, but doesn’t really directly answer your question. I do have some thoughts that are more like direct answers, but other people at RP are better placed to comment so I’ll wait till they do so and then maybe add a couple things.
(Note that I focus mostly on longtermism and EA meta; maybe I’d say different things if I focused more on other cause areas.)
In late 2020, I was given three quite exciting job offers, and ultimately chose to go with a combo of the offer from RP and the offer from FHI, with Plan A being to then leave FHI after ~1 year to be a full-time RP employee. (I was upfront with everyone about this plan. I can explain the reasoning more if people are interested.)
The single biggest reason I prioritised RP was that I believe the following three things:
“EA indeed seems most constrained by things like ‘management capacity’ and ‘org capacity’ (see e.g. the various things linked to from scalably using labor).
I seem well-suited to eventually helping address that via things like doing research management.
RP seems unusually good at bypassing these bottlenecks and scaling fairly rapidly while maintaining high quality standards, and I could help it continue to do so.”
I continue to think that those things were true then and still are now (and so still have the same Plan A & turn down other exciting opportunities).
That said, the picture regarding the bottlenecks is a bit complicated. In brief, I think that:
The EA community overall has made more progress than I expected at increasing things like management capacity, org capacity, available mentorship, ability to scalably use labor, etc. E.g., various research training programs have sprung up, RP has grown substantially, and some other orgs/teams have been created or grown.
But the community also gained a lot more “seriously interested” people and a lot more funding.
So overall the bottlenecks are still strong in that it still seems quite high-leverage to find better ways of scalably using labor (especially “junior” labor) and money. But it also feels worth recognising that substantial progress has been made and so a bunch more good stuff is being done; there being a given bottleneck is not in itself exactly a bad thing (since it’ll basically always be true that something is the main bottleneck), but more a clue about what kind of activities will tend to be most impactful on the current margin.
A couple of years it seemed like the conventional wisdom was that there were serious ops/management/something bottlenecks in converting money into direct work. But now you’ve hired a lot of people in a short time. How did you manage to bypass those bottlenecks and have there been any downsides to hiring so quickly?
So there are a bunch of questions in this, but I can answer some of the ops related one:
We haven’t had ops talent bottlenecks. We’ve had incredibly competitive operations hiring rounds (e.g. in our most recent hiring round, ~200 applications, of which ~150 were qualified at least on paper), and I’d guess that 80%+ of our finalists are at least familiar with EA (which I don’t think is a necessary requirement, but the explanation isn’t that we are recruiting from a different pool I guess).
Maybe there was a bigger bottleneck in ~2018 and EA has grown a lot since or reached people with more ops skills since?
We spend a lot of time resources on recruiting, and advertise our jobs really widely, so maybe we are reaching a lot more potential candidates than some other organizations were?
Management bottlenecks are probably our biggest current people-related constraint on growth (funding is a bigger constraint).
We’ve worked a lot on addressing this over the summer, partially by having a huge internship program, and getting a lot of current staff management experience (while also working with awesome interns on cool projects!) and sending anyone who wants it through basic management training.
My impression is that we’ve gotten many more qualified applications in recent manager hiring pools.
Bypassing bottlenecks
In general, I think we haven’t experienced these as much as other groups (at least so far)
We tend to hire ops staff prior to growth, as opposed to hiring them when we need them to take on work immediately (e.g. we hire ops staff when things are fine, but we plan to grow in a few months, so the infrastructure can be in place for expansion, as opposed to hiring ops staff when the current ops staff has too much on their plate, or something).
We do a ton of prep to ensure that we are careful while scaling, thinking about how processes would scale, etc.
The above mentioned intern program really stress-tested a lot of processes (we doubled in size for 3 months), and has been really helpful for addressing issues that come with scaling.
Downsides to hiring quickly
I’d say that we’ve seen a mild amount to the downsides to growing in general, though it hasn’t necessarily been related to speed of hiring—e.g. mildly more siloing of people, people not sure what other people are working on, etc. and we’ve been taking a lot of steps to try to mitigate this, especially as we get larger.
Here’s some parts of my personal take (which overlaps with what Abraham said):
I think we ourselves feel a bit unsure “why we’re special”, i.e. why it seems there aren’t very many other EA-aligned orgs scaling this rapidly & gracefully.
But my guess is that some of the main factors are:
We want to scale rapidly & gracefully
Some orgs have a more niche purpose that doesn’t really require scaling, or may be led by people who are more skilled and excited about their object-level work than about org strategy, scaling, management, etc.
RP thinks strategically about how to scale rapidly & gracefully, including thinking ahead about what RP will need later and what might break by default
Three of the examples I often give are ones Abraham mentioned:
Realising RP will be be management capacity constrained, and that it would therefore be valuable to give our researchers management experience (so they can see how much they like it & get better at it), and that this pushes in favour of running a large internship with 1-1 management of the interns
(This definitely wasn’t the only motivation for running the internship, but I think it was one of the main ones, though that’s partly guessing/vague memory.)
Realising also that maybe RP should offer researchers management training
Expanding ops capacity before it’s desperately urgently obviously needed
RP also just actually does the obvious things, including learning and implementing standard best practices for management, running an org, etc.
And that all seems to me pretty replicable!
OTOH, I do think the people at RP are also great, and it’s often the case that people who are good at something underestimate how hard it is, so maybe this is less replicable than I think. But I’d guess that smart, sensible, altruistic, ambitious people with access to good advisors could have a decent chance at making their org more like that or starting a new org like that, and that this could be quite valuable in expectation.
(If anyone feels like maybe they’re such a person and maybe they should do that, please feel free to reach out for advice, feedback on plans, pointers to relevant resources & people! I and various other people at RP would be excited to help it be the case that there are more EA-aligned orgs scaling rapidly & gracefully.
Some evidence of that is that I have in fact spent probably ~10 hours of my free time over the last few months helping someone work towards possibly setting up an RP-like org, and expect to continue helping them for at least several months. Though that was an unusual case, and I’d usually just quickly offer my highest-value input.)
I have private information (e.g. from senior people at Rethink Priorities and former colleagues) that suggests operations ability at RP is unusually high. They say that Abraham Rowe, COO, is unusually good.
The reason why this comment is useful is that:
This high operations ability might be hard to observe from the inside, if you are that person (Rowe) who is really good. Also, high ability operations people may be attracted to a place where things run well and operations is respected. There may be other founder effects from Rowe. This might add nuance to Rowe’s comment.
It seems possible operations talent was (is) limited or undervalued in EA. Maybe RP’s success is related to operations ability (allows management to focus, increases org-wide happiness and confidence).
I appreciate it, but I want to emphasize that I think a lot of this boils down to careful planning and prep in advance, a really solid ops team all around, and a structure that lets operations operate a bit separately from research, so Peter and Marcus can really focus on scaling the research side of the organization / think about research impact a lot. I do agree that overall RP has been largely operationally successful, and that’s probably helped us maintain a high quality of output as we grow.
I also think a huge part of RP’s success has been Peter, Marcus, and other folks on the team being highly skilled at identifying low-hanging fruit in the EA research space, and just going out and doing that research.
To the extent that you think good operations can emerge out of replicable processes rather than singularly talented ops managers, do you think it would be useful to write a longer article about how RP does operations? (Or perhaps you’ve already written this and I missed it)
This potentially sounds useful, and I can definitely write about it at some point (though no promises on when just due to time constraints right now).
I definitely think that we are very lucky to have Abraham working with us. I think another thing is that there are at least three people (Abraham, Marcus, me, and probably other people too if given the chance) each capable of founding and running an organization all focused instead on making just one organization really great and big.
I definitely think having Abraham be able to fully handle operations allows Marcus and me to focus nearly entirely on driving our research quality, which is a good thing. Marcus and I also have clear subfocuses (Marcus does animals and global health / development, whereas I focus on longtermism, surveys, and EA movement building) which allow us to further focus our time specifically on making things great.
This comment sounds like it’s partly implying “RP seems to have recently overcome these bottlenecks. How? Does that imply the bottlenecks are in general smaller now than they were then?” I think the situation is more like “The bottlenecks were there back then and still are now. RP was doing unusually well at overcoming the bottlenecks then and still is now.”
The rest of this comment says a bit more on that front, but doesn’t really directly answer your question. I do have some thoughts that are more like direct answers, but other people at RP are better placed to comment so I’ll wait till they do so and then maybe add a couple things.
(Note that I focus mostly on longtermism and EA meta; maybe I’d say different things if I focused more on other cause areas.)
In late 2020, I was given three quite exciting job offers, and ultimately chose to go with a combo of the offer from RP and the offer from FHI, with Plan A being to then leave FHI after ~1 year to be a full-time RP employee. (I was upfront with everyone about this plan. I can explain the reasoning more if people are interested.)
The single biggest reason I prioritised RP was that I believe the following three things:
“EA indeed seems most constrained by things like ‘management capacity’ and ‘org capacity’ (see e.g. the various things linked to from scalably using labor).
I seem well-suited to eventually helping address that via things like doing research management.
RP seems unusually good at bypassing these bottlenecks and scaling fairly rapidly while maintaining high quality standards, and I could help it continue to do so.”
I continue to think that those things were true then and still are now (and so still have the same Plan A & turn down other exciting opportunities).
That said, the picture regarding the bottlenecks is a bit complicated. In brief, I think that:
The EA community overall has made more progress than I expected at increasing things like management capacity, org capacity, available mentorship, ability to scalably use labor, etc. E.g., various research training programs have sprung up, RP has grown substantially, and some other orgs/teams have been created or grown.
But the community also gained a lot more “seriously interested” people and a lot more funding.
So overall the bottlenecks are still strong in that it still seems quite high-leverage to find better ways of scalably using labor (especially “junior” labor) and money. But it also feels worth recognising that substantial progress has been made and so a bunch more good stuff is being done; there being a given bottleneck is not in itself exactly a bad thing (since it’ll basically always be true that something is the main bottleneck), but more a clue about what kind of activities will tend to be most impactful on the current margin.