I think all of these have costs, and those costs should be recognized. But sometimes the benefits are worth it, banning the practice would make things worse, and the actually helpful thing is to come up with better solutions.
E.g. > [don’t have] “Work trials” that require interruption of regular employment to complete, such that those currently employed full-time must leave their existing job to be considered for a prospective job
The fact that people need to, at best, spend all their vacation days on work trials, and maybe take huge risks with their livelihood, is bad. A good friend of mine was badly burned on this, and I think less of the organization for it. OTOH, work trials are really informative. If we removed work trials I expect that: EA jobs become even more of a club (because they have references hirers personally know), jobs are performed worse (because the hiring decision was made with less information), many people get fired shortly after starting, and more emphasis on unpaid work (as an alternate source of information).
No one is doing disruptive work trials to be mean, they’re a solution to the fact that interviews aren’t very informative. Could they be better implemented? Probably. Are there much better solutions out there? I hope so. But if you just take this option away I suspect things get worse.
to use a harder one: I agree co-workers dating has a lot of potential complications, and power differentials make it worse. But the counterfactual isn’t necessarily “everyone gets jobs as good or better, with no negative consequences.”. It’s things like
I have a friend who has provided hundreds of hours of labor towards EA causes, unpaid. The lack of payment isn’t due to lack of value- worse projects in her subfield get funded all the time. But her partner works at a major grantmaker, and she’s not very assertive, and so it never happens.
You can blame this on her being unassertive, but protecting unassertive people is a major point of these rules.
I think all of these have costs, and those costs should be recognized. But sometimes the benefits are worth it, banning the practice would make things worse, and the actually helpful thing is to come up with better solutions.
E.g.
> [don’t have] “Work trials” that require interruption of regular employment to complete, such that those currently employed full-time must leave their existing job to be considered for a prospective job
The fact that people need to, at best, spend all their vacation days on work trials, and maybe take huge risks with their livelihood, is bad. A good friend of mine was badly burned on this, and I think less of the organization for it. OTOH, work trials are really informative. If we removed work trials I expect that: EA jobs become even more of a club (because they have references hirers personally know), jobs are performed worse (because the hiring decision was made with less information), many people get fired shortly after starting, and more emphasis on unpaid work (as an alternate source of information).
No one is doing disruptive work trials to be mean, they’re a solution to the fact that interviews aren’t very informative. Could they be better implemented? Probably. Are there much better solutions out there? I hope so. But if you just take this option away I suspect things get worse.
to use a harder one: I agree co-workers dating has a lot of potential complications, and power differentials make it worse. But the counterfactual isn’t necessarily “everyone gets jobs as good or better, with no negative consequences.”. It’s things like
I have a friend who has provided hundreds of hours of labor towards EA causes, unpaid. The lack of payment isn’t due to lack of value- worse projects in her subfield get funded all the time. But her partner works at a major grantmaker, and she’s not very assertive, and so it never happens.
You can blame this on her being unassertive, but protecting unassertive people is a major point of these rules.