I don’t really think my ops work is particularly impactful, because I think ops staff are relatively easy to hire for compared to other roles. However I have spent a lot of my time in EA doing ops work.
I was RP’s COO for 4 years, overseeing its non-research work (fiscal sponsorship, finance, HR, communications, fundraising, etc), and helping the organization grow from around 10 to over 100 staff within its legal umbrella.
Worked on several advising and consulting projects for animal welfare and AI organizations
I think the advising work is likely the most impactful ops work I’ve done, though I overall don’t know if I think ops is particularly impactful.
I see both Abraham and yourself as strong thinkers with expertise in this area, which makes me curious about the apparent disagreement. Meanwhile, the ‘correct’ answer to the question of an ops role’s impact relative to that of a research role should presumably inform many EAs’ career decisions, which makes the disagreement here pretty consequential. I wonder if getting to the ground truth of the matter is tractable? (I’m not sure how best to operationalize the disagreement / one’s starting point on the matter, but maybe something like “On the current margin, I believe that the ratio of early-career EAs aiming for operations vs. research roles should be [number]:1.”)
(I understand that you and Abraham overlapped for multiple years at the same org—Rethink Priorities—which makes me all the more curious about how you appear to have reached fairly opposite conclusions.)
I think I’m skeptical of my own impact in ops roles, but it seems likely that senior roles are harder to hire for generally, which might generally mean taking one could be more impactful (if you’re good at it).
I think many other “doer” careers that aren’t ops are very impactful in expectation — in particular founding new organizations (if done well or in an important and neglected area). I also think work like being a programs staff member at a non-research org is very much in the “doer” direction, and could be higher impact than ops or many research roles.
Also, I think our views as expressed here aren’t exactly opposite — I think my work in ops has had relatively little impact ex post, but that’s slightly different than thinking ops careers won’t have impact in expectation (though I think I lean fairly heavily in that direction too, just due to the number of qualified candidates for many ops roles).
Overall, I suspect Peter and I don’t disagree a ton (though haven’t talked with him about it) on any of this, and I agree with his overall assertion (more people should consider “doer” careers over research careers), I think I just also think that more people should consider earning to give over any direct work.
Also, Peter hires for tons of research roles, and I hire for tons of ops roles, so maybe this is also just us having siloed perspectives on the spaces we work in?
Is there a proposed/proven way of coordinating on the prioritization?
Without a good feedback loop I can imagine the majority of the people just jump on the same path which could then run into diminishing returns if there isn’t sufficient capacity.
It would be intersting to see at least the number of people at different career stages on a given path. I assume some data should be available from regular surveys. And maybe also some estimates on the capacity of different paths.
And I assume the career coaching services likely have an even more detailed picture including missing talent/skills/experience that they can utilize for more personalized advice.
I don’t know the true answer to this confusion, but I have some rough (untested, and possibly untestable) hypothesis I can share:
It is really hard to estimate counterfactual scenarios. If you are the project manager (or head of people, or finance lead, or COO), it is really hard to have a good sense of how much better you are than the next-best candidate. Performance in general is hard to measure, but trying to estimate performance of a hypothetical other individual that you have never met strikes me as very challenging. Even if we were to survey 100 people in similar roles at other orgs, the context-specific nature of performance implies that we shouldn’t be too confident about predicting how a person should perform at Org A simply from knowing their performance at Org B.
I’m not quite sure how to phrase this, but it might be something like “the impact of operations work has high variance,” or maybe “good operations results in limiting the downside a lot but does relatively little to increase the upside.” Taking a very simplistic example of accounting, if our org has bad accounting them we don’t know how much money we have, we don’t keep track of accounts payable, and have general administrative sloppiness relating to money which makes decision-making hard. If we have very good accounting, then we have clarity about where our funds are flowing, what we own, and what we owe. Those upsides are nice, but they aren’t as impactful (in a positive way) as the downsides are impactful (in a negative way). Phrased in a different way: many operations roles are a cost center rather than a profit center (although this will certainly vary depending on the role and the organization).
It might just be a thing of marginal value, with non-operations roles being more impactful (overall, in general), but we still need more good operations people than we currently have.
I have a lot of uncertainty as to the reality of this, but I’m always interested in reading thoughts from people about these issues.
Quick response—the way that I reconcile this is that these differences were probably just due to context and competence interactions. Maybe you could call it comparative advantage fluctuations over time?
There probably no reasonable claim that advising is generally higher impact than Ops or vice versa. It will depend on the individual and the context. At some times, some people are going to be able to have much higher impact doing ops than advising, and vice versa.
From a personal perspective my advising opportunities very greatly. There are times where most of my impact comes from helping somebody else because I have been put in contact with them and I happen to have useful things to offer. There are also times where the most obviously counteractually impactful thing for me to do is to do research or some sort of operations work to enable other researchers. Both of these activities kind of have lumpy impact distributions because they only occur when certain rare criteria are collectively met.
In this case Abraham may have had much better advising opportunities relative to operations opportunities while this was not true for Peter.
For operations roles, and focusing on impact (rather than status), I notice that your view contrasts markedly with @abrahamrowe’s in his recent ‘Reflections on a decade of trying to have an impact’ post:
I see both Abraham and yourself as strong thinkers with expertise in this area, which makes me curious about the apparent disagreement. Meanwhile, the ‘correct’ answer to the question of an ops role’s impact relative to that of a research role should presumably inform many EAs’ career decisions, which makes the disagreement here pretty consequential. I wonder if getting to the ground truth of the matter is tractable? (I’m not sure how best to operationalize the disagreement / one’s starting point on the matter, but maybe something like “On the current margin, I believe that the ratio of early-career EAs aiming for operations vs. research roles should be [number]:1.”)
(I understand that you and Abraham overlapped for multiple years at the same org—Rethink Priorities—which makes me all the more curious about how you appear to have reached fairly opposite conclusions.)
Two caveats on my view:
I think I’m skeptical of my own impact in ops roles, but it seems likely that senior roles are harder to hire for generally, which might generally mean taking one could be more impactful (if you’re good at it).
I think many other “doer” careers that aren’t ops are very impactful in expectation — in particular founding new organizations (if done well or in an important and neglected area). I also think work like being a programs staff member at a non-research org is very much in the “doer” direction, and could be higher impact than ops or many research roles.
Also, I think our views as expressed here aren’t exactly opposite — I think my work in ops has had relatively little impact ex post, but that’s slightly different than thinking ops careers won’t have impact in expectation (though I think I lean fairly heavily in that direction too, just due to the number of qualified candidates for many ops roles).
Overall, I suspect Peter and I don’t disagree a ton (though haven’t talked with him about it) on any of this, and I agree with his overall assertion (more people should consider “doer” careers over research careers), I think I just also think that more people should consider earning to give over any direct work.
Also, Peter hires for tons of research roles, and I hire for tons of ops roles, so maybe this is also just us having siloed perspectives on the spaces we work in?
How does a programs staff role differ from an ops role?
I mean something like directly implementing an intervention vs finance/HR/legal/back office roles, so ops just in the nonprofit sense.
In that case I suspect there’s not disagreement, and you’re just each using ops to mean somewhat different things?
Is there a proposed/proven way of coordinating on the prioritization?
Without a good feedback loop I can imagine the majority of the people just jump on the same path which could then run into diminishing returns if there isn’t sufficient capacity.
It would be intersting to see at least the number of people at different career stages on a given path. I assume some data should be available from regular surveys. And maybe also some estimates on the capacity of different paths.
And I assume the career coaching services likely have an even more detailed picture including missing talent/skills/experience that they can utilize for more personalized advice.
I don’t know the true answer to this confusion, but I have some rough (untested, and possibly untestable) hypothesis I can share:
It is really hard to estimate counterfactual scenarios. If you are the project manager (or head of people, or finance lead, or COO), it is really hard to have a good sense of how much better you are than the next-best candidate. Performance in general is hard to measure, but trying to estimate performance of a hypothetical other individual that you have never met strikes me as very challenging. Even if we were to survey 100 people in similar roles at other orgs, the context-specific nature of performance implies that we shouldn’t be too confident about predicting how a person should perform at Org A simply from knowing their performance at Org B.
I’m not quite sure how to phrase this, but it might be something like “the impact of operations work has high variance,” or maybe “good operations results in limiting the downside a lot but does relatively little to increase the upside.” Taking a very simplistic example of accounting, if our org has bad accounting them we don’t know how much money we have, we don’t keep track of accounts payable, and have general administrative sloppiness relating to money which makes decision-making hard. If we have very good accounting, then we have clarity about where our funds are flowing, what we own, and what we owe. Those upsides are nice, but they aren’t as impactful (in a positive way) as the downsides are impactful (in a negative way). Phrased in a different way: many operations roles are a cost center rather than a profit center (although this will certainly vary depending on the role and the organization).
It might just be a thing of marginal value, with non-operations roles being more impactful (overall, in general), but we still need more good operations people than we currently have.
I have a lot of uncertainty as to the reality of this, but I’m always interested in reading thoughts from people about these issues.
Quick response—the way that I reconcile this is that these differences were probably just due to context and competence interactions. Maybe you could call it comparative advantage fluctuations over time?
There probably no reasonable claim that advising is generally higher impact than Ops or vice versa. It will depend on the individual and the context. At some times, some people are going to be able to have much higher impact doing ops than advising, and vice versa.
From a personal perspective my advising opportunities very greatly. There are times where most of my impact comes from helping somebody else because I have been put in contact with them and I happen to have useful things to offer. There are also times where the most obviously counteractually impactful thing for me to do is to do research or some sort of operations work to enable other researchers. Both of these activities kind of have lumpy impact distributions because they only occur when certain rare criteria are collectively met.
In this case Abraham may have had much better advising opportunities relative to operations opportunities while this was not true for Peter.