My basic takeaway from all of this is not who is right/wrong so much as that EA professional organisations should act more like professional organisations. While it may be temporarily less enjoyable I would expect overall the organisations with things like HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries to be significantly more effective contributors to EA
I’m less interested in “debating whether a person in a villa in a tropical paradise got a vegan burger delivered fast enough” or “whether it’s appropriate for your boss to ask you to pick up their ADHD medication from a Mexican pharmacy” or “if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”? Than in interrogating whether EA wouldn’t be better off with more “boring” organisations led by adults with significant professional experience managing others, where the big company drama is the quality of coffee machine in the office canteen.
I think it’s valuable to have social experiments. However, I do think the social experiment of living and working with your employees while traveling has now been experimented with and the results are “it’s very risky”. I’ve been doing it with Emerson and Drew for years now and it’s been fine, but I think we have a really good dynamic and it’s hard to replicate.
As for HR professionals, we had only 3 full-time people at the time, so that would have been too early/small for us to have one.
For safeguarding policies, Chloe was working on creating those. But yeah, she was our first full-time employee where we could even have policies, so it was understandable not to have them yet.
For regular working hours, we did. Chloe only ever worked once on a weekend and never again (she said she didn’t like it, and we set up a policy to never do it again).
For offices in a normal city, I don’t think that should matter much. Rethink Priorities is fully remote last I checked and in all sorts of cities and it’s fine.
As for work/life boundaries, I think the biggest thing was to no live with employees, which we are no longer doing. It’s worked in the past for me but I think it’s just too risky.
While it may be temporarily less enjoyable I would expect overall the organisations with things like HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries to be significantly more effective contributors to EA
Strong disagree here. I don’t think people realize how cumbersome this type of stuff can be, especially for small organizations and how important it is to not just work during regular working hours in normal offices. HR professionals usually only exists for organizations with >20 people. I don’t know anyone who is highly effective and gets everything done between 9 and 5 from Mon-Fri.
Than in interrogating whether EA wouldn’t be better off with more “boring” organisations led by adults with significant professional experience managing others, where the big company drama is the quality of coffee machine in the office canteen.
Really? Those are the companies/organizations that are just surviving off inertia and usually die in 5-50 years accomplishing/changing nothing in the mean time but continuing to churn out some widgets, eventually to be replaced by a new company doing it better.
Churning out widgets is accomplishing something if the product is useful or brings pleasure. The implication otherwise feels snobby to me. And the point of EA is to accomplish stuff, not to be at the cutting edge of innovation (though obviously those two goals are related.)
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all large organizations led by experienced managers, and to the best of my knowledge all three have “HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries”.
I don’t know anyone who is highly effective and gets everything done between 9 and 5 from Mon-Fri.
I think you probably do, or at least know of them, but might not know how they work. Many people at some of the EA charities I’ve worked at/interned for had pretty regular hours and did/do impressive work. Some did/do work a lot more than most people or had irregular hours, of course.
Yeah, so I basically clock eight hours a day, of time. I’m very regimented, I always clock eight hours a day.
(...)
So basically, I have incredibly constant hours week to week—and again, this is not something I think works for everyone—but I track my hours week to week. I’ve now done this for about 150 weeks-170 weeks, and my guess would be over like 90% of those weeks, I’ve done somewhere between 40 and 43 hours. And that is just because that’s what I found works.
(...)
And always going to bed at the same time and getting up at the same time is critical. So yeah, that’s definitely big for me. Not working in the evenings is big. Nor working at my home or anything. Being like, totally off when I’m off, is also really big. So, basically, I never do work after 7:20PM, there’s basically no time when I break that rule. Those are critical.
Many EAs also have kids, and work relatively regular hours to accommodate that.
When you have to fit everything into regular hours, you can find ways to make those hours more productive and focused, e.g. being more strict about avoiding distractions.
I completely agree with this. I’ve seen many worse scenarios play out in other organizations due to unprofessionalism, mostly due to lack of experience and the tendency to bootstrap and work in startup mode. While that approach is helpful in some cases, it causes a lot of dysfunction across many organizations and I’d like to see more efforts put into instituting professional norms within EA organizations. This is only a well publicized event—there are many worse ones that I’ve witnessed that aren’t highlighted here.
But that brings up another point that a few other commenters mentioned—are we creating an environment that:
A) encourages the “move fast and break things” lack of professionalism approach
But then:
B) condemns them for making mistakes
It seems to me that we cannot believe both. Either we supposed the first approach and accept that mistakes will be made, or we do not tolerate mistakes, but then discourage unprofessionalism.
That, it seems to me, is the systemic issue surrounding this particular one.
Phrasings like “if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary” for what is evidently a fully paid, luxurious work & travel experience to top EA hubs including costs covered for a partner, tanks the quality of the comment.
You make it sound like they were offering a McKinsey-like 80 hour gloabl travel slavery. Nonlinear’s offering seems to resemble more a global travel experience for “young silicon-valley EAs” while hustling on a project they find valuable and networking with top EA managers. Regardless of where the exact truth lies, this unreflected strawman characterisation makes it hard to read your comment as well thought through.
On direct response to the takeaway, I think there’s space and need for both, rigid organisations governed by all sorts of boards and unions as well as dynamic social experiment-like orgs trying out new stuff. They probably have different target groups and it seems perfectly desireable to have a world where we got both options.
Phrasings like “if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary” for what is evidently a fully paid, luxurious work & travel experience… tanks the quality of the comment.
Huh? No, that is a succinct and accurate description of a disputed interpretation, and I think Nonlinear’s interpretation is wrong there. They keep saying in their defense that they paid Alice (the equivalent of) $72,000 when they didn’t—it’s really not the same thing at all if 80% of it is comped flights, food, and hotels. At least for me, the amount of cash that would be an equivalent value to Alice’s compensation package is something like $30-40,000.
I’m less interested in “debating whether a person in a villa in a tropical paradise got a vegan burger delivered fast enough” or “whether it’s appropriate for your boss to ask you to pick up their ADHD medication from a Mexican pharmacy” or “if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”? Than in interrogating whether EA wouldn’t be better off with more “boring” organisations
Though the degree of un-professionalism displayed by all parties involved in this saga is startling, I actually think EA has a great mix of “boring” orgs and fast-and-loose startup-y ones. One organization having ridiculous drama like this, once every few years, out of hundreds of EA orgs existing without incident, might be the right level where we’re balancing mistakes vs excessive bureaucracy. (On the other hand, you could argue the FTX disaster was caused by this kind of thing, and that much harm, even once, outweighs the benefits of reduced bureaucracy in a thousand other orgs.)
My basic takeaway from all of this is not who is right/wrong so much as that EA professional organisations should act more like professional organisations. While it may be temporarily less enjoyable I would expect overall the organisations with things like HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries to be significantly more effective contributors to EA
I’m less interested in “debating whether a person in a villa in a tropical paradise got a vegan burger delivered fast enough” or “whether it’s appropriate for your boss to ask you to pick up their ADHD medication from a Mexican pharmacy” or “if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”? Than in interrogating whether EA wouldn’t be better off with more “boring” organisations led by adults with significant professional experience managing others, where the big company drama is the quality of coffee machine in the office canteen.
I think it’s valuable to have social experiments. However, I do think the social experiment of living and working with your employees while traveling has now been experimented with and the results are “it’s very risky”. I’ve been doing it with Emerson and Drew for years now and it’s been fine, but I think we have a really good dynamic and it’s hard to replicate.
As for HR professionals, we had only 3 full-time people at the time, so that would have been too early/small for us to have one.
For safeguarding policies, Chloe was working on creating those. But yeah, she was our first full-time employee where we could even have policies, so it was understandable not to have them yet.
For regular working hours, we did. Chloe only ever worked once on a weekend and never again (she said she didn’t like it, and we set up a policy to never do it again).
For offices in a normal city, I don’t think that should matter much. Rethink Priorities is fully remote last I checked and in all sorts of cities and it’s fine.
As for work/life boundaries, I think the biggest thing was to no live with employees, which we are no longer doing. It’s worked in the past for me but I think it’s just too risky.
Was this practice clearly delineated as an experiment to the participants?
Strong disagree here. I don’t think people realize how cumbersome this type of stuff can be, especially for small organizations and how important it is to not just work during regular working hours in normal offices. HR professionals usually only exists for organizations with >20 people. I don’t know anyone who is highly effective and gets everything done between 9 and 5 from Mon-Fri.
Really? Those are the companies/organizations that are just surviving off inertia and usually die in 5-50 years accomplishing/changing nothing in the mean time but continuing to churn out some widgets, eventually to be replaced by a new company doing it better.
Churning out widgets is accomplishing something if the product is useful or brings pleasure. The implication otherwise feels snobby to me. And the point of EA is to accomplish stuff, not to be at the cutting edge of innovation (though obviously those two goals are related.)
Fair. I think EA has grand aspriations though and wants the impact of Apple/Google/Microsoft and not Bob’s Shoe Store
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all large organizations led by experienced managers, and to the best of my knowledge all three have “HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries”.
I think you probably do, or at least know of them, but might not know how they work. Many people at some of the EA charities I’ve worked at/interned for had pretty regular hours and did/do impressive work. Some did/do work a lot more than most people or had irregular hours, of course.
Lewis Bollard said he worked 8 hours/day, and it sounds like they were pretty regular and in-office:
Many EAs also have kids, and work relatively regular hours to accommodate that.
When you have to fit everything into regular hours, you can find ways to make those hours more productive and focused, e.g. being more strict about avoiding distractions.
I completely agree with this. I’ve seen many worse scenarios play out in other organizations due to unprofessionalism, mostly due to lack of experience and the tendency to bootstrap and work in startup mode. While that approach is helpful in some cases, it causes a lot of dysfunction across many organizations and I’d like to see more efforts put into instituting professional norms within EA organizations. This is only a well publicized event—there are many worse ones that I’ve witnessed that aren’t highlighted here. But that brings up another point that a few other commenters mentioned—are we creating an environment that: A) encourages the “move fast and break things” lack of professionalism approach But then: B) condemns them for making mistakes It seems to me that we cannot believe both. Either we supposed the first approach and accept that mistakes will be made, or we do not tolerate mistakes, but then discourage unprofessionalism. That, it seems to me, is the systemic issue surrounding this particular one.
Phrasings like
“if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”
for what is evidently a fully paid, luxurious work & travel experience to top EA hubs including costs covered for a partner, tanks the quality of the comment.
You make it sound like they were offering a McKinsey-like 80 hour gloabl travel slavery. Nonlinear’s offering seems to resemble more a global travel experience for “young silicon-valley EAs” while hustling on a project they find valuable and networking with top EA managers. Regardless of where the exact truth lies, this unreflected strawman characterisation makes it hard to read your comment as well thought through.
On direct response to the takeaway, I think there’s space and need for both, rigid organisations governed by all sorts of boards and unions as well as dynamic social experiment-like orgs trying out new stuff. They probably have different target groups and it seems perfectly desireable to have a world where we got both options.
Huh? No, that is a succinct and accurate description of a disputed interpretation, and I think Nonlinear’s interpretation is wrong there. They keep saying in their defense that they paid Alice (the equivalent of) $72,000 when they didn’t—it’s really not the same thing at all if 80% of it is comped flights, food, and hotels. At least for me, the amount of cash that would be an equivalent value to Alice’s compensation package is something like $30-40,000.
Though the degree of un-professionalism displayed by all parties involved in this saga is startling, I actually think EA has a great mix of “boring” orgs and fast-and-loose startup-y ones. One organization having ridiculous drama like this, once every few years, out of hundreds of EA orgs existing without incident, might be the right level where we’re balancing mistakes vs excessive bureaucracy. (On the other hand, you could argue the FTX disaster was caused by this kind of thing, and that much harm, even once, outweighs the benefits of reduced bureaucracy in a thousand other orgs.)