80K has a deep network of contacts who send them jobs, and has a staff member who spends many hours/week keeping their job board up to date. I think it would be very difficult to find enough volunteers to replicate that effort on the wiki (especially for things that change as quickly as job openings). If I could find that many dedicated volunteers, I’d prefer to have them work on things that an org with 80K’s resources isn’t already doing.
The EA Job Postings Facebook group has 10,000 members and has existed for many years. It gets something like one new posting per day (maybe a bit more?), and the average posting gets maybe five likes (the Facebook equivalent of an upvote).
I think it would take considerable effort for the Forum to get the same kind of awareness for “jobs” functionality, and even that level of awareness wouldn’t necessarily come close to what 80K provides (I suspect the average person would find 80K’s job board much more useful than that Facebook group). There are features we could build to improve on the Facebook group, but that’s time that developers aren’t spending on other features; likewise, moderating job postings to make sure they actually fit on the Forum takes time that moderators aren’t spending elsewhere.
I’m not saying that the Forum couldn’t provide a reasonable job board eventually — maybe we will! — it just seems like a low priority compared to a variety of things where we have no “competition” (for example, improving the articles on the wiki and creating useful features for listing and categorizing other things). You’ve made a lot of suggestions on this thread: work on one of those suggestions trades off against work on others.
I think you may share an instinct of mine — to say “oh, this doesn’t seem hard to program” — but working for several years with the programmers behind the Forum has taught me that my instincts in this area are not reliable.
Allow the submission, search and ranks of jobs.
There is no reason why the EA forum shouldn’t become an even more effective jobs board than 80k.
80K has a deep network of contacts who send them jobs, and has a staff member who spends many hours/week keeping their job board up to date. I think it would be very difficult to find enough volunteers to replicate that effort on the wiki (especially for things that change as quickly as job openings). If I could find that many dedicated volunteers, I’d prefer to have them work on things that an org with 80K’s resources isn’t already doing.
I think if you give people the option to submit jobs, either they’ll use it or they won’t. If they do then it will be a useful resource for EA.
I think that the off moments of 1000s of eas could be at least comparable to 80k’s network tbh.
I think my prior is that people like random crowdsourcing more than you think.
The EA Job Postings Facebook group has 10,000 members and has existed for many years. It gets something like one new posting per day (maybe a bit more?), and the average posting gets maybe five likes (the Facebook equivalent of an upvote).
I think it would take considerable effort for the Forum to get the same kind of awareness for “jobs” functionality, and even that level of awareness wouldn’t necessarily come close to what 80K provides (I suspect the average person would find 80K’s job board much more useful than that Facebook group). There are features we could build to improve on the Facebook group, but that’s time that developers aren’t spending on other features; likewise, moderating job postings to make sure they actually fit on the Forum takes time that moderators aren’t spending elsewhere.
I’m not saying that the Forum couldn’t provide a reasonable job board eventually — maybe we will! — it just seems like a low priority compared to a variety of things where we have no “competition” (for example, improving the articles on the wiki and creating useful features for listing and categorizing other things). You’ve made a lot of suggestions on this thread: work on one of those suggestions trades off against work on others.
I think you may share an instinct of mine — to say “oh, this doesn’t seem hard to program” — but working for several years with the programmers behind the Forum has taught me that my instincts in this area are not reliable.