It comes down to how you would feel about doing Alice/Chloe’s job.
Some people, like the Nonlinear folks and most of those sympathetic to them, think something like the following:
“Why is she such an ungrateful whiner? She has THE dream job/life. She gets to travel the world with us (which is awesome since we can do anything and this is what we chose to do), living in some insanely cool places with super cool and successful people AND she has a large degree of autonomy over what she does AND we are building her up and like 15% of her job is some menial tasks that we did right before she joined and come on it’s fine. How can you complain about the smallest unpleasant thing when the rest of your life rocks and this is your FIRST job out of college when this lifestyle is reserved for multimillionaires? She gets to live the life of a multimillionaire and is surrounded by cool EA people”
Others look at Alice/Chloe’s life and think something like the following:
“Wow, that really sucks to have to follow these people around all the time, doing whatever they want to do, living away from the comfort of your own home. She thought she was going to do operations work for a cool longtermist startup that was expanding but instead, she’s always on the clock, paid very little, and being told that getting to travel alongside them and live like them is a PERK! Run away from these people as fast as possible! How is anyone defending these rich, entitled, exploiters? Of course, she would exaggerate some things, it felt like that!”
Look at Lukas’ comment again and how they each describe a certain experience in St. Barth’s.
From Emerson/Nonlinear’s perspective, they didn’t bring someone on to do some stuff 9-5. They brought someone on to be one of them which includes doing stuff for a couple of hours whenever they pop up and this is just what it’s like to be in a faster pace startup (how Nonlinear describes themself and how Emerson has always lived and how he built his previous companies). It was in the job description. She’s going on this trip too after all and someone has to call the places to organize. Alright, she’s whining again so I’ll just take over, whatever.
From Chloe’s perspective, she’s been following these people around for the past month and always seeing them and wants a break from them and it’s finally her supposed day off so she wants it off but they randomly decide to do a day excursion. Well, that sucks. Now she is forced to spend the day with them AND do stupid planning tasks trying to convince some random guy to let her plan this last minute just because Emerson wants to. She then tells Kat that she doesn’t want to have to work on her weekends.
Look at Erica’s comment. If you think this is like being a remote travelling nanny who should be getting paid extra for the travel but you are getting paid less, it sucks. If you think this is joining some cool remote/travelling charity startup, this is awesome.
This also explains why some people (as Kat would say, 19⁄21 people) who joined Nonlinear under this arrangement had a great time. They got to live a cool life, with a lot of freedom, in cool places. To them, this was a great experience. They got to pocket $12k/year into savings and live like a king.
Essentially, what I think happened is there was a really bad fit (and there are some bad incentives that are also at play here that will take too long to go into with regards to selecting a candidate) and different expectations between the parties. Nonlinear wanted to start adding people to their crew and expanding their team who travelled the world and worked on AI safety and wanting people to slot right into how they do things; taking spontaneous vacations, living in exotic places where it’s always sunny, getting shit done regardless of who’s job it is etc. Alice/Chloe might have thought they wanted it but didn’t know and so they tried it out and they definitely didn’t like it but didn’t feel they could quit (Whether this was true or not. Remember that while they could probably leave whenever, they might not have felt like they could for reasons that are hard to explain).
What should have happened here? Hard to say. I think a gradual ramping up to this is super necessary and hiring people (from Nonlinear’s perspective: adding people to the team) after a couple of interviews that you had never really spent a lot of time with or lived with before is ill-advised. A 1/2-week work trial seems especially necessary here. But Alice/Chloe also needed to be doing some constant introspection from day 1 if they wanted to stay here.
I 100% agree with you that people should be allowed to enter mutually beneficial trades, even when those same trades would be terrible for most people if they entered them. This is really important; there are so many important things we can’t accomplish if every job needs to be safe for the lowest common denominator. And “allowed” includes “allowed to be imperfect at identifying who is a good fit, which means some people will get hurt”. I think the burden on people is somewhat higher when they’re deliberately recruiting people with less life experience, but you still can’t expect perfection.
My guess is Chloe and Alice were unusually fragile, and unusually bad at leaving (and I believed this before Kat’s post). You should expect that almost everywhere, regardless of quality: the people having the worst time are the ones who are unusually sensitive and unusually bad at exiting situations they don’t like. But it seems pretty inevitable that Nonlinear’s recruiting strategy at the time would attract these types (to their credit, they seem to have realized they can’t get the risk acceptably low, and stopped that recruiting).
Why do I think they were near-destined to recruit people like Alice and Chloe?
If you don’t value travel, the job paid poorly (in money). Valuing travel isn’t that weird, but even if you do your tastes are unlikely to perfectly overlap with the core Nonlinear team, so apply some discount for that. This attracts people with little work experience, who will be worse at advocating for themselves.
The job additionally paid in mentoring and social access. Mentoring can be immensely valuable, easily worth giving up tens of thousands of dollars… but if you feature it that prominently, you’re going to attract people who value it more, and a disproportionate number of those are inexperienced, emotionally adrift, or oversensitive to authority figures.
Similarly, there are a small number of people for whom social access can be extremely valuable, and giving up money to get it is a great trade. But it also attracts people looking for social validation, who are going to be more vulnerable.
So dismissing the complaints because Alice and Chloe were “too sensitive” feels a bit like bringing a canary into your coal mine and then dismissing its death. You’re right that the canary is more sensitive than people, but there is still a problem.
100% agree that there are some very bad incentives at play to make it very likely that people who aren’t good fits join this type of arrangement and I agree that Nonlinear shouldn’t be “let off the hook” so to speak. I think there should have been some precautionary things in place from the get go. Lots more things
It sounds like you think that the other 19 employees of nonlinear had the same arrangement (travel with them and be paid $12k/year). I doubt this is true. Probably many of the 19 are being remotely employed.
They got to pocket $12k/year into savings and live like a king.
Many people spend money besides rent+food+travel, so this sounds exaggerated.
I can’t speak about the other interns, but I remotely interned at Nonlinear for free because of the potential to contribute/upskill/open up new opportunities. I was working 4 days/week at a programming job and 1-2 days/week at Nonlinear. My internship helped give me the confidence to organise the Sydney AI Safety Fellowship, which was the first thing I organised in terms of my AI Safety movement building.
My current understanding is that almost all employees who participated in this arrangement had a pretty bad time, but I am not confident of this. I am pretty confident it was >50% though (not counting Kat, Emerson or Drew, who were in positions of authority and so we should expect their experience to be quite different).
Thanks for highlighting this crux. I’m not going to say that organisations in the community shouldn’t do things like this again, but everyone needs to be aware that “Here be Dragons”.
Reading Lukas_Gloor’s comment (and to a lesser extent, this still helpful one from Erica_Edelman) made me realize what I think is the big disagreement between people and why they are talking past each other.
It comes down to how you would feel about doing Alice/Chloe’s job.
Some people, like the Nonlinear folks and most of those sympathetic to them, think something like the following:
“Why is she such an ungrateful whiner? She has THE dream job/life. She gets to travel the world with us (which is awesome since we can do anything and this is what we chose to do), living in some insanely cool places with super cool and successful people AND she has a large degree of autonomy over what she does AND we are building her up and like 15% of her job is some menial tasks that we did right before she joined and come on it’s fine. How can you complain about the smallest unpleasant thing when the rest of your life rocks and this is your FIRST job out of college when this lifestyle is reserved for multimillionaires? She gets to live the life of a multimillionaire and is surrounded by cool EA people”
Others look at Alice/Chloe’s life and think something like the following:
“Wow, that really sucks to have to follow these people around all the time, doing whatever they want to do, living away from the comfort of your own home. She thought she was going to do operations work for a cool longtermist startup that was expanding but instead, she’s always on the clock, paid very little, and being told that getting to travel alongside them and live like them is a PERK! Run away from these people as fast as possible! How is anyone defending these rich, entitled, exploiters? Of course, she would exaggerate some things, it felt like that!”
Look at Lukas’ comment again and how they each describe a certain experience in St. Barth’s.
From Emerson/Nonlinear’s perspective, they didn’t bring someone on to do some stuff 9-5. They brought someone on to be one of them which includes doing stuff for a couple of hours whenever they pop up and this is just what it’s like to be in a faster pace startup (how Nonlinear describes themself and how Emerson has always lived and how he built his previous companies). It was in the job description. She’s going on this trip too after all and someone has to call the places to organize. Alright, she’s whining again so I’ll just take over, whatever.
From Chloe’s perspective, she’s been following these people around for the past month and always seeing them and wants a break from them and it’s finally her supposed day off so she wants it off but they randomly decide to do a day excursion. Well, that sucks. Now she is forced to spend the day with them AND do stupid planning tasks trying to convince some random guy to let her plan this last minute just because Emerson wants to. She then tells Kat that she doesn’t want to have to work on her weekends.
Look at Erica’s comment. If you think this is like being a remote travelling nanny who should be getting paid extra for the travel but you are getting paid less, it sucks. If you think this is joining some cool remote/travelling charity startup, this is awesome.
This also explains why some people (as Kat would say, 19⁄21 people) who joined Nonlinear under this arrangement had a great time. They got to live a cool life, with a lot of freedom, in cool places. To them, this was a great experience. They got to pocket $12k/year into savings and live like a king.
Essentially, what I think happened is there was a really bad fit (and there are some bad incentives that are also at play here that will take too long to go into with regards to selecting a candidate) and different expectations between the parties. Nonlinear wanted to start adding people to their crew and expanding their team who travelled the world and worked on AI safety and wanting people to slot right into how they do things; taking spontaneous vacations, living in exotic places where it’s always sunny, getting shit done regardless of who’s job it is etc. Alice/Chloe might have thought they wanted it but didn’t know and so they tried it out and they definitely didn’t like it but didn’t feel they could quit (Whether this was true or not. Remember that while they could probably leave whenever, they might not have felt like they could for reasons that are hard to explain).
What should have happened here? Hard to say. I think a gradual ramping up to this is super necessary and hiring people (from Nonlinear’s perspective: adding people to the team) after a couple of interviews that you had never really spent a lot of time with or lived with before is ill-advised. A 1/2-week work trial seems especially necessary here. But Alice/Chloe also needed to be doing some constant introspection from day 1 if they wanted to stay here.
I 100% agree with you that people should be allowed to enter mutually beneficial trades, even when those same trades would be terrible for most people if they entered them. This is really important; there are so many important things we can’t accomplish if every job needs to be safe for the lowest common denominator. And “allowed” includes “allowed to be imperfect at identifying who is a good fit, which means some people will get hurt”. I think the burden on people is somewhat higher when they’re deliberately recruiting people with less life experience, but you still can’t expect perfection.
My guess is Chloe and Alice were unusually fragile, and unusually bad at leaving (and I believed this before Kat’s post). You should expect that almost everywhere, regardless of quality: the people having the worst time are the ones who are unusually sensitive and unusually bad at exiting situations they don’t like. But it seems pretty inevitable that Nonlinear’s recruiting strategy at the time would attract these types (to their credit, they seem to have realized they can’t get the risk acceptably low, and stopped that recruiting).
Why do I think they were near-destined to recruit people like Alice and Chloe?
If you don’t value travel, the job paid poorly (in money). Valuing travel isn’t that weird, but even if you do your tastes are unlikely to perfectly overlap with the core Nonlinear team, so apply some discount for that. This attracts people with little work experience, who will be worse at advocating for themselves.
The job additionally paid in mentoring and social access. Mentoring can be immensely valuable, easily worth giving up tens of thousands of dollars… but if you feature it that prominently, you’re going to attract people who value it more, and a disproportionate number of those are inexperienced, emotionally adrift, or oversensitive to authority figures.
Similarly, there are a small number of people for whom social access can be extremely valuable, and giving up money to get it is a great trade. But it also attracts people looking for social validation, who are going to be more vulnerable.
So dismissing the complaints because Alice and Chloe were “too sensitive” feels a bit like bringing a canary into your coal mine and then dismissing its death. You’re right that the canary is more sensitive than people, but there is still a problem.
100% agree that there are some very bad incentives at play to make it very likely that people who aren’t good fits join this type of arrangement and I agree that Nonlinear shouldn’t be “let off the hook” so to speak. I think there should have been some precautionary things in place from the get go. Lots more things
It sounds like you think that the other 19 employees of nonlinear had the same arrangement (travel with them and be paid $12k/year). I doubt this is true. Probably many of the 19 are being remotely employed.
Many people spend money besides rent+food+travel, so this sounds exaggerated.
Yeah I believe they were the only in person employees—so 0⁄2 not 19⁄21
I can’t speak about the other interns, but I remotely interned at Nonlinear for free because of the potential to contribute/upskill/open up new opportunities. I was working 4 days/week at a programming job and 1-2 days/week at Nonlinear. My internship helped give me the confidence to organise the Sydney AI Safety Fellowship, which was the first thing I organised in terms of my AI Safety movement building.
It looks like they are bought phones, laptops, SIM cards, productivity tools, etc.
I know of only two people who worked at Nonlinear. They were both in person. Both had good experiences.
My current understanding is that almost all employees who participated in this arrangement had a pretty bad time, but I am not confident of this. I am pretty confident it was >50% though (not counting Kat, Emerson or Drew, who were in positions of authority and so we should expect their experience to be quite different).
Thanks for highlighting this crux. I’m not going to say that organisations in the community shouldn’t do things like this again, but everyone needs to be aware that “Here be Dragons”.