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.
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.