Late to the party, but this appointment really was an absolutely stunning example of how dysfunctional CEA’s internal processes are. You invite hundreds of applications, do screening interviews with over 50, get 20 serious applicants who all do work trials, do in-depth reference checks, and at the end of it you hire the most insidery of insidery insider candidates who any reasonably well-informed person would have fingered as the obvious candidate from the outset. I can only imagine that the people running this process either valued the time of the other applicants at approximately zero, or felt that they had to conduct this bureaucratic charade to appease some set of external stakeholders: neither option is especially edifying. Somehow you get neither the speed and efficiency advantages of trust-based nepotistic hiring, nor the respectability and cognitive diversity benefits of going through the painful process of hiring at least “EA-adjacent” external professional management. Zach is no doubt a perfectly reasonable choice for the role, and of course I wish him well, but this process is a dream case study in how not to do hiring.
Late to the party, but this appointment really was an absolutely stunning example of how dysfunctional CEA’s internal processes are. You invite hundreds of applications, do screening interviews with over 50, get 20 serious applicants who all do work trials, do in-depth reference checks, and at the end of it you hire the most insidery of insidery insider candidates who any reasonably well-informed person would have fingered as the obvious candidate from the outset. I can only imagine that the people running this process either valued the time of the other applicants at approximately zero, or felt that they had to conduct this bureaucratic charade to appease some set of external stakeholders: neither option is especially edifying. Somehow you get neither the speed and efficiency advantages of trust-based nepotistic hiring, nor the respectability and cognitive diversity benefits of going through the painful process of hiring at least “EA-adjacent” external professional management. Zach is no doubt a perfectly reasonable choice for the role, and of course I wish him well, but this process is a dream case study in how not to do hiring.