(speaking for myself) My reasoning for disagreeing is mostly prosaic. People keep telling me hiring senior ops people is hard, and trying to get longtermist alignment on top of that is ~impossible, but when Rethink Priorities actually tried to do such hiring, the process has mostly been a lot smoother than I expected (note that I’m only indirectly involved in the ops hiring).
So I just kind of assume that people are talking about different roles/skillsets when they claim there are such large bottlenecks in ops talent. This exchange between Abraham Rowe (Rethink’s COO) and other commentators may be instructive for differing standards for what skillsets that senior ops work entails.
To be clear there are times where amazing ops skills (really, executive/entrepreneurship abilities) can be somewhat of a bottleneck for my work, e.g. finding a top-notch civilizational refuges CEO. But in those cases most of the problems you list are clearly not applicable (the refuges CEO is not expected to play second-fiddle to anyone).
(speaking for myself) My reasoning for disagreeing is mostly prosaic. People keep telling me hiring senior ops people is hard, and trying to get longtermist alignment on top of that is ~impossible, but when Rethink Priorities actually tried to do such hiring, the process has mostly been a lot smoother than I expected (note that I’m only indirectly involved in the ops hiring).
So I just kind of assume that people are talking about different roles/skillsets when they claim there are such large bottlenecks in ops talent. This exchange between Abraham Rowe (Rethink’s COO) and other commentators may be instructive for differing standards for what skillsets that senior ops work entails.
To be clear there are times where amazing ops skills (really, executive/entrepreneurship abilities) can be somewhat of a bottleneck for my work, e.g. finding a top-notch civilizational refuges CEO. But in those cases most of the problems you list are clearly not applicable (the refuges CEO is not expected to play second-fiddle to anyone).
Thanks for that response—interesting to hear others aren’t struggling! Would be cool if you / your org shared more about this.