My manager Alex linked to this post as “someone else’s perspective on what working with [Alex] is like”, and I realised I didn’t say very much about working with Alex in particular. So I thought I’d briefly discuss it here. (This is all pretty stream of consciousness. I checked with Alex before posting this, and he was fine with me posting it and didn’t suggest any edits.)
For context, I’ve worked on the AI governance and policy team at OP for about 1.5 years now, and Alex has been my manager since I joined.
I worked closely with Alex on the evals RFP, where he gave in-depth feedback on the scope, framing, and writing the RFP. I’m also now working closely with him on frontier safety frameworks-related work (as mentioned in the job description).
In general, the grantmaking areas we focus on are very similar, and I’ve had periods of being more like a “thought partner” or co-grantmaker on complex, large grants with Alex, and periods where we’ve worked on separate projects (but where he spends a few hours a week managing me).
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed working with Alex. I think he’s easily the best manager I’ve ever had,[1] and while part of this is downstream of us having similar working patterns and strengths and weaknesses, I think the majority is due to him (a) having a lot of experience in managing and managing-esque roles, (b) caring a lot about management and actively thinking about how to improve, and (c) being a very strong manager in general, to many different kinds of people. Also, he’s just a lot of fun to work with!
Some upsides of working with Alex:
I think he exemplifies lots of professional values I care a lot about – especially ownership/focus/scope-sensitivity, reasoning transparency, calibration, and co-operativeness.[2]
He moves fast, and he’s pretty relentlessly focused on doing high impact work.
I’ve found him to be extremely low ego and (so far as I can tell) basically ~entirely interested in doing what seems best to him, rather than optimising for prestige/pay/an easy life.
I’ve found him to be very invested in helping his reports (and more generally, his colleagues) as much as possible. Concretely, I think the combination of him having great reasoning transparency and low ego means he’s often articulating his mental models, pointing out cruxes, and making it very easy to disagree with him. I think this has improved my thinking a lot, and also helped me feel more permission to articulate my takes, be wrong and make mistakes, etc.
I realise this is a hard take to evaluate from the outside, but I think he generally has good judgement and good takes. I think my own thinking has improved from discussions with him, and he frequently gives advice which makes me think, “man, I wish I could generate this level of quality advice so consistently myself.”
Some downsides:
He works a lot. If you interpret this kind of thing as an implicit bid for you, too, to work a lot, and if you’re not interested in doing that, you might then find working closely with him somewhat stressful. (Though I think he’s aware of this and tries pretty hard to shield his reports from this – specifically, I’ve not felt pressure from Alex to work more, and he’s been very on my case to drop work/postpone things/cancel when I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.)
Relative to other people in similar positions, he’s less organised/systematic. (Though I think this at the level of “not a strength, but fine for operating at this level”. And this is part of the reason we’re hiring an associate PO!)
Given the whole “moving fast” and “having good takes” thing, I can imagine people perhaps thinking he’s more confident in his takes than he actually is, or feeling some awkwardness around pushing back, in case they delay things. (This hasn’t been my experience, and instead I’ve found Alex really pushing me to form my own views and explicitly checking whether I’m nodding along/want more time to consider whether I actually agree, but I can imagine this happening to people who find disagreement hard and don’t discuss this with Alex.)
I think the way he works is somewhat closer to “spikiness”, finding it easy to sprint and get loads done if it’s on urgent and important work he’s interested in, and finding it harder to do less urgent or motivating work, than other people. (Though again, I think this is much less pronounced relative to the picture you probably have in your head from that sentence, and probably describes “how Alex would work by default” better than it describes “how Alex actually works now”.)
I personally like this a lot, it fits how I orient to work (and I’ve gotten very helpful advice on how to manage this tendency when it’s counterproductive and get myself closer to smooth, predictable productivity), but some people might not naturally get on with it.
Again, my impression is that we’re hiring in part to help smooth this out more, so I’m not sure how much to weigh this.
One other related comment: from doing some parts of this role with Alex, I think this role might be a lot more intrinsically interesting and exciting than the job description might imply. I’ve found co-working on frontier safety frameworks with him, scoping out the field, finding new gaps for orgs, etc, one of my favourite projects at OP – so if you like that kind of work, I think you’d enjoy this role a lot.
Similarly, if you’re not at all interested in doing strategy work yourself, but obsessed with processes and facilitating getting stuff done, and want to move fast and optimise and potentially unlock some really valuable work, then I think you’d be an excellent fit for the APO role, and you’d enjoy it a lot. (There’s scope for the role to lean more in either of those directions, depending on skills and interest.)
One reason to discount this take is that I haven’t had very many managers. That being said, as well as being one of the best managers I’ve ever had, my understanding is that the other people Alex manages similarly feel that he’s a very good manager. (And to some degree, you can validate this by looking at their performance so far in their work.)
My manager Alex linked to this post as “someone else’s perspective on what working with [Alex] is like”, and I realised I didn’t say very much about working with Alex in particular. So I thought I’d briefly discuss it here. (This is all pretty stream of consciousness. I checked with Alex before posting this, and he was fine with me posting it and didn’t suggest any edits.)
For context, I’ve worked on the AI governance and policy team at OP for about 1.5 years now, and Alex has been my manager since I joined.
I worked closely with Alex on the evals RFP, where he gave in-depth feedback on the scope, framing, and writing the RFP. I’m also now working closely with him on frontier safety frameworks-related work (as mentioned in the job description).
In general, the grantmaking areas we focus on are very similar, and I’ve had periods of being more like a “thought partner” or co-grantmaker on complex, large grants with Alex, and periods where we’ve worked on separate projects (but where he spends a few hours a week managing me).
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed working with Alex. I think he’s easily the best manager I’ve ever had,[1] and while part of this is downstream of us having similar working patterns and strengths and weaknesses, I think the majority is due to him (a) having a lot of experience in managing and managing-esque roles, (b) caring a lot about management and actively thinking about how to improve, and (c) being a very strong manager in general, to many different kinds of people. Also, he’s just a lot of fun to work with!
Some upsides of working with Alex:
I think he exemplifies lots of professional values I care a lot about – especially ownership/focus/scope-sensitivity, reasoning transparency, calibration, and co-operativeness.[2]
He moves fast, and he’s pretty relentlessly focused on doing high impact work.
I’ve found him to be extremely low ego and (so far as I can tell) basically ~entirely interested in doing what seems best to him, rather than optimising for prestige/pay/an easy life.
I’ve found him to be very invested in helping his reports (and more generally, his colleagues) as much as possible. Concretely, I think the combination of him having great reasoning transparency and low ego means he’s often articulating his mental models, pointing out cruxes, and making it very easy to disagree with him. I think this has improved my thinking a lot, and also helped me feel more permission to articulate my takes, be wrong and make mistakes, etc.
I realise this is a hard take to evaluate from the outside, but I think he generally has good judgement and good takes. I think my own thinking has improved from discussions with him, and he frequently gives advice which makes me think, “man, I wish I could generate this level of quality advice so consistently myself.”
Some downsides:
He works a lot. If you interpret this kind of thing as an implicit bid for you, too, to work a lot, and if you’re not interested in doing that, you might then find working closely with him somewhat stressful. (Though I think he’s aware of this and tries pretty hard to shield his reports from this – specifically, I’ve not felt pressure from Alex to work more, and he’s been very on my case to drop work/postpone things/cancel when I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.)
Relative to other people in similar positions, he’s less organised/systematic. (Though I think this at the level of “not a strength, but fine for operating at this level”. And this is part of the reason we’re hiring an associate PO!)
Given the whole “moving fast” and “having good takes” thing, I can imagine people perhaps thinking he’s more confident in his takes than he actually is, or feeling some awkwardness around pushing back, in case they delay things. (This hasn’t been my experience, and instead I’ve found Alex really pushing me to form my own views and explicitly checking whether I’m nodding along/want more time to consider whether I actually agree, but I can imagine this happening to people who find disagreement hard and don’t discuss this with Alex.)
I think the way he works is somewhat closer to “spikiness”, finding it easy to sprint and get loads done if it’s on urgent and important work he’s interested in, and finding it harder to do less urgent or motivating work, than other people. (Though again, I think this is much less pronounced relative to the picture you probably have in your head from that sentence, and probably describes “how Alex would work by default” better than it describes “how Alex actually works now”.)
I personally like this a lot, it fits how I orient to work (and I’ve gotten very helpful advice on how to manage this tendency when it’s counterproductive and get myself closer to smooth, predictable productivity), but some people might not naturally get on with it.
Again, my impression is that we’re hiring in part to help smooth this out more, so I’m not sure how much to weigh this.
One other related comment: from doing some parts of this role with Alex, I think this role might be a lot more intrinsically interesting and exciting than the job description might imply. I’ve found co-working on frontier safety frameworks with him, scoping out the field, finding new gaps for orgs, etc, one of my favourite projects at OP – so if you like that kind of work, I think you’d enjoy this role a lot.
Similarly, if you’re not at all interested in doing strategy work yourself, but obsessed with processes and facilitating getting stuff done, and want to move fast and optimise and potentially unlock some really valuable work, then I think you’d be an excellent fit for the APO role, and you’d enjoy it a lot. (There’s scope for the role to lean more in either of those directions, depending on skills and interest.)
Here’s the JD, for some more details: Senior Generalist Roles on our Global Catastrophic Risks Team | Open Philanthropy
One reason to discount this take is that I haven’t had very many managers. That being said, as well as being one of the best managers I’ve ever had, my understanding is that the other people Alex manages similarly feel that he’s a very good manager. (And to some degree, you can validate this by looking at their performance so far in their work.)
I’m not sure where these things are articulated (other than in my head). Maybe some reference points are https://www.openphilanthropy.org/operating-values/, some hybrid of EA is three radical ideas I want to protect, Staring into the abyss as a core life skill | benkuhn.net, Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net (especially taste), and Four (and a half) Frames for Thinking About Ownership (re: scope sensitivity/impact mindset/ownership/focus). I don’t have a go-to articulation of “being low ego/easy to work with/collaborative by default”.