I skimmed your post, and felt it added a lot of value to mine as it highlighted a big difference between ‘ops roles’ in an operation—i.e. keeping the show on the road—Vs. projects—i.e. starting up a new show and running it at the same time. Very different skillsets again, because of difference levels of uncertainty; one more about optimising, one more about figuring out what the hell do we do?
I think the ops skillset I set out is much more project-oriented, so would welcome more of your critque of hiring approaches from a more ops-y less project-y perspective.
My thoughts aren’t really well-formed on this so you should take all this with a grain of salt. These are just my own perspectives rather than some kind of a well-researched argument.
If I recall correctly (and I might be misremembering this) the main difference between operations and projects is that operations are ongoing and projects have specific end dates. I view them as very similar; a handful of skillsets are distinct, but there is massive overlap.
My current view is that an aspect of the hiring difficulty in EA isn’t so much ops-y versus project-y; it is more so an organization that knows what they will be doing versus an organization that doesn’t know what they will be doing.
I can easily imagine a more established team (even a smallish organization with less than 50 people) hiring a project manager and doing it well if they have a clear idea of what kinds of projects they will be doing. I think the difficulty of hiring that many small organizations have is that they don’t have a clear idea of what projects the new hire would be doing. They have vague ideas, but even those vague ideas aren’t very reliable because things might shift.
To make it more concrete, if my team is distributing bednets, or sending engineers to rural India to design wells, or even researching AI safety, we have a pretty clear idea of what a new hire would be doing and what skills are helpful. But if my team is trying to figure out how to do the most good in CAUSE_AREA, or how to have the most impact at the intersection of longtermism and TOPIC, or even trying to figure out how to best nudge young people into impactful careers, then both our future projects and our future operations are really nebulous. Once the “figuring out” stage is done[1] then hiring will be a lot easier because you have a more concrete idea regarding what the task is.
In reality I guess it is never really done, but for purposes of simplicity we can imagine a stage at which a lot of stuff has been figured our decently confidently and figuring things out isn’t as big of a focus anymore.
Glad to hear.
I skimmed your post, and felt it added a lot of value to mine as it highlighted a big difference between ‘ops roles’ in an operation—i.e. keeping the show on the road—Vs. projects—i.e. starting up a new show and running it at the same time. Very different skillsets again, because of difference levels of uncertainty; one more about optimising, one more about figuring out what the hell do we do?
I think the ops skillset I set out is much more project-oriented, so would welcome more of your critque of hiring approaches from a more ops-y less project-y perspective.
My thoughts aren’t really well-formed on this so you should take all this with a grain of salt. These are just my own perspectives rather than some kind of a well-researched argument.
If I recall correctly (and I might be misremembering this) the main difference between operations and projects is that operations are ongoing and projects have specific end dates. I view them as very similar; a handful of skillsets are distinct, but there is massive overlap.
My current view is that an aspect of the hiring difficulty in EA isn’t so much ops-y versus project-y; it is more so an organization that knows what they will be doing versus an organization that doesn’t know what they will be doing.
I can easily imagine a more established team (even a smallish organization with less than 50 people) hiring a project manager and doing it well if they have a clear idea of what kinds of projects they will be doing. I think the difficulty of hiring that many small organizations have is that they don’t have a clear idea of what projects the new hire would be doing. They have vague ideas, but even those vague ideas aren’t very reliable because things might shift.
To make it more concrete, if my team is distributing bednets, or sending engineers to rural India to design wells, or even researching AI safety, we have a pretty clear idea of what a new hire would be doing and what skills are helpful. But if my team is trying to figure out how to do the most good in CAUSE_AREA, or how to have the most impact at the intersection of longtermism and TOPIC, or even trying to figure out how to best nudge young people into impactful careers, then both our future projects and our future operations are really nebulous. Once the “figuring out” stage is done[1] then hiring will be a lot easier because you have a more concrete idea regarding what the task is.
In reality I guess it is never really done, but for purposes of simplicity we can imagine a stage at which a lot of stuff has been figured our decently confidently and figuring things out isn’t as big of a focus anymore.