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 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).