(I’m one of the founders of Wave.) Thanks for mentioning us!
We have indeed found it tricky to hire engineers. Our EA pedigree makes it easier though, since lots of people want to make an impact with their career; as does being a full distributed team so we can hire people from anywhere in the world. We’re exclusively hiring via our networks right now and the EA community has been quite helpful for us. Most of the engineers we’ve hired had heard of EA before joining, although I think not all. I don’t think many of them identify as explicitly EA (though a few do, myself included).
When we’ve rejected engineering candidates from the EA community, it’s been mainly for technical reasons (not enough experience or velocity doing the things we do), followed by cultural homogeneity risk. To expand on the latter risk: we often reject people who seem “too EA” because we are afraid of importing too much cultural baggage from an existing community—it would feel outgroupish if you didn’t know much about EA but there were all these EA memes flying around the slack channel. So far we’ve mostly avoided that.
That said, I don’t think anyone should self-exclude from our hiring process for being too EA; we can decide that for ourselves. Get in touch if you might be interested.
(I’m one of the founders of Wave.) Thanks for mentioning us!
We have indeed found it tricky to hire engineers. Our EA pedigree makes it easier though, since lots of people want to make an impact with their career; as does being a full distributed team so we can hire people from anywhere in the world. We’re exclusively hiring via our networks right now and the EA community has been quite helpful for us. Most of the engineers we’ve hired had heard of EA before joining, although I think not all. I don’t think many of them identify as explicitly EA (though a few do, myself included).
When we’ve rejected engineering candidates from the EA community, it’s been mainly for technical reasons (not enough experience or velocity doing the things we do), followed by cultural homogeneity risk. To expand on the latter risk: we often reject people who seem “too EA” because we are afraid of importing too much cultural baggage from an existing community—it would feel outgroupish if you didn’t know much about EA but there were all these EA memes flying around the slack channel. So far we’ve mostly avoided that.
That said, I don’t think anyone should self-exclude from our hiring process for being too EA; we can decide that for ourselves. Get in touch if you might be interested.