I read the book a while back and I enjoyed it. It was kind of fun to get some juicy details about bad things inside Facebook. My main takeaway was something along the lines of “a fish rots from the head.” Leaders of an organization set priorities, direction, culture (to a great extent), and this books served as sort of a case study of leadership that has a fairly narrow focus. Poor social skills and poor common sense, entitlement, and the general idea that you get everything you want all stood out to me. The levels of sycophancy and self-interest were a bit surprising, but not terribly so.
Trying to apply ideas from this book to an EA context involves a bit of contortion, but in a sense I think that I’m not too concerned. The culture/values of EA tend to have a very different focus than Facebook did/does, and the leaders of the organizations often[1] tend to have better common sense than what was displayed in Careless People. I would find it hard to imagine most senior leaders at EA orgs throwing fits because of a McDonald’s meal or aggressively pushing for the promotion of their personal projects using company resources. If anything, the book left me thinking that EA orgs will probably avoid many of the issues described in Careless People due to the focus on ethics and morality.
This is certainly not always true, and the level of common sense or general knowledge is noticeably lower than I would like. I’ve seen many people with very little or very narrow life experience ask about or propose things that I found silly or poorly considered. But my impression is that this is an eye-catching minority, and it is much more common for organizations to have leadership teams are more mature.
I read the book a while back and I enjoyed it. It was kind of fun to get some juicy details about bad things inside Facebook. My main takeaway was something along the lines of “a fish rots from the head.” Leaders of an organization set priorities, direction, culture (to a great extent), and this books served as sort of a case study of leadership that has a fairly narrow focus. Poor social skills and poor common sense, entitlement, and the general idea that you get everything you want all stood out to me. The levels of sycophancy and self-interest were a bit surprising, but not terribly so.
Trying to apply ideas from this book to an EA context involves a bit of contortion, but in a sense I think that I’m not too concerned. The culture/values of EA tend to have a very different focus than Facebook did/does, and the leaders of the organizations often[1] tend to have better common sense than what was displayed in Careless People. I would find it hard to imagine most senior leaders at EA orgs throwing fits because of a McDonald’s meal or aggressively pushing for the promotion of their personal projects using company resources. If anything, the book left me thinking that EA orgs will probably avoid many of the issues described in Careless People due to the focus on ethics and morality.
This is certainly not always true, and the level of common sense or general knowledge is noticeably lower than I would like. I’ve seen many people with very little or very narrow life experience ask about or propose things that I found silly or poorly considered. But my impression is that this is an eye-catching minority, and it is much more common for organizations to have leadership teams are more mature.