I think I largely agree with this list, and want to make a related point, which is that I think it’s better to start with an organizational culture that errs on the side of being too professional, since 1) I think it’s easier to relax a professional culture over time than it is to go in the other direction and 2) the risks of being too professional generally seem smaller than the risks of being insufficiently professional.
While I broadly agree with Rocky’s list I want to push back a little vs. your points:
Re your (2): I’ve found that small entities are in a constant struggle for survival, and must move fast and focus on the most important problems unique to their ability to make a difference in the world. Small-seeming requirements like “new hires have to find their own housing” can easily make the difference between being able to move quickly vs. slowly on some project that makes or breaks the company. I think for new entities the risks of incurring large costs before you have ‘proven yourself’ are quite high.
My experience also disagrees with your (1): As my company has grown, we have had many forces naturally pushing in the direction of “more professional”: new hires tend to be much more worried about blame about doing things too quick-and-dirty rather than incurring costs on the business in order to do things the buttoned-up way; I’ve stepped in more often to accept a risk rather than to prevent one although I certainly do both!
(Side note: as a potential counterpoint to the above, I do note that Alameda/FTX was clearly well below professional standards at >200 employees—my assumption is that Sam/execs were constantly stepping in to keep the culture the way they wanted it. If I learned that somehow most of the 200 employees were pushing in the direction of less professionalism on their own, I would update to agree with you on (1).)
Small-seeming requirements like “new hires have to find their own housing” can easily make the difference between being able to move quickly vs. slowly on some project that makes or breaks the company.
Do you have an example of this? It is surprising to me that maintaining reasonable/standard professional norms could actually sink a company. (Among other things because at a small company, you have limited manpower, and so personnel time devoted to helping someone find housing is presumably coming out of time spent somewhere else—i.e., working on the time-sensitive project.)
1): As my company has grown, we have had many forces naturally pushing in the direction of “more professional”: new hires tend to be much more worried about blame about doing things too quick-and-dirty rather than incurring costs on the business in order to do things the buttoned-up way; I’ve stepped in more often to accept a risk rather than to prevent one although I certainly do both!
I suspect we’re just defining “professional” differently here (or thinking about really different professional contexts), but my experience is pretty strongly informed by having worked in an office pre-COVID, and seeing how profoundly professional culture has eroded, and how hard it has been to build any of that back. I think grad students/academics who have taught undergrads post-COVID have also been struck by this: it seems like norms within education quickly (and understandably!) became quite lax during COVID, but it’s been quite difficult to reverse those changes (i.e., get students to turn stuff in on time, respond to emails, show up to mandatory events, etc). That said, I know that older people have always tended to think that the youth are a bunch of degenerates, so plausibly that’s coloring our perception here, too.
Small-seeming requirements like “new hires have to find their own housing” can easily make the difference between being able to move quickly vs. slowly on some project that makes or breaks the company.
Do you have an example of this? It is surprising to me that maintaining reasonable/standard professional norms could actually sink a company. (Among other things because at a small company, you have limited manpower, and so personnel time devoted to helping someone find housing is presumably coming out of time spent somewhere else—i.e., working on the time-sensitive project.)
I don’t want to speak for Lincoln, but it straightforwardly seems obvious to me that if you need non-Senegalese employees to do a stint in Senegal (already a pretty high ask for some people), providing housing (and other amenities you don’t usually need to provide if your employees are working out of metropolitan areas in their home countries) is more likely to ease the transition. You might believe that the risks are so high that it’s not worth the benefits, but the benefits are definitely real.
Fair enough! I think this discussion is being harmed by ambiguity about the behaviors we’re talking about (this is my fault; my posts have been unclear). I don’t think I’d classify “helping new hires find housing” as violating “standard/reasonable professional norms.”
I’m mainly thinking about the kinds of behaviors EAs engage in that are described in the above post (and my general heuristics about the kinds of practices that are normalized in the EA community). I do think that if you’re asking yourself something like “Should I live with my employee who has less power than me?” or “Should I use drugs with these colleagues?” it is better to err on the side of not doing this kind of stuff, at least at first. If after a year of working with people, you all decide to start smoking weed together, that strikes me as probably pretty innocuous (versus if you had established this kind of culture at the outset).
I think I largely agree with this list, and want to make a related point, which is that I think it’s better to start with an organizational culture that errs on the side of being too professional, since 1) I think it’s easier to relax a professional culture over time than it is to go in the other direction and 2) the risks of being too professional generally seem smaller than the risks of being insufficiently professional.
While I broadly agree with Rocky’s list I want to push back a little vs. your points:
Re your (2): I’ve found that small entities are in a constant struggle for survival, and must move fast and focus on the most important problems unique to their ability to make a difference in the world. Small-seeming requirements like “new hires have to find their own housing” can easily make the difference between being able to move quickly vs. slowly on some project that makes or breaks the company. I think for new entities the risks of incurring large costs before you have ‘proven yourself’ are quite high.
My experience also disagrees with your (1): As my company has grown, we have had many forces naturally pushing in the direction of “more professional”: new hires tend to be much more worried about blame about doing things too quick-and-dirty rather than incurring costs on the business in order to do things the buttoned-up way; I’ve stepped in more often to accept a risk rather than to prevent one although I certainly do both!
(Side note: as a potential counterpoint to the above, I do note that Alameda/FTX was clearly well below professional standards at >200 employees—my assumption is that Sam/execs were constantly stepping in to keep the culture the way they wanted it. If I learned that somehow most of the 200 employees were pushing in the direction of less professionalism on their own, I would update to agree with you on (1).)
Thanks for your perspective on this!
Do you have an example of this? It is surprising to me that maintaining reasonable/standard professional norms could actually sink a company. (Among other things because at a small company, you have limited manpower, and so personnel time devoted to helping someone find housing is presumably coming out of time spent somewhere else—i.e., working on the time-sensitive project.)
I suspect we’re just defining “professional” differently here (or thinking about really different professional contexts), but my experience is pretty strongly informed by having worked in an office pre-COVID, and seeing how profoundly professional culture has eroded, and how hard it has been to build any of that back. I think grad students/academics who have taught undergrads post-COVID have also been struck by this: it seems like norms within education quickly (and understandably!) became quite lax during COVID, but it’s been quite difficult to reverse those changes (i.e., get students to turn stuff in on time, respond to emails, show up to mandatory events, etc). That said, I know that older people have always tended to think that the youth are a bunch of degenerates, so plausibly that’s coloring our perception here, too.
I don’t want to speak for Lincoln, but it straightforwardly seems obvious to me that if you need non-Senegalese employees to do a stint in Senegal (already a pretty high ask for some people), providing housing (and other amenities you don’t usually need to provide if your employees are working out of metropolitan areas in their home countries) is more likely to ease the transition. You might believe that the risks are so high that it’s not worth the benefits, but the benefits are definitely real.
Fair enough! I think this discussion is being harmed by ambiguity about the behaviors we’re talking about (this is my fault; my posts have been unclear). I don’t think I’d classify “helping new hires find housing” as violating “standard/reasonable professional norms.”
I’m mainly thinking about the kinds of behaviors EAs engage in that are described in the above post (and my general heuristics about the kinds of practices that are normalized in the EA community). I do think that if you’re asking yourself something like “Should I live with my employee who has less power than me?” or “Should I use drugs with these colleagues?” it is better to err on the side of not doing this kind of stuff, at least at first. If after a year of working with people, you all decide to start smoking weed together, that strikes me as probably pretty innocuous (versus if you had established this kind of culture at the outset).