I think the problem of “EA leadership doesn’t consider it important to hire experienced people even for people who are leading a project (who in turn don’t consider it important to hire experienced people)” is a root cause problem for a lot of somewhat negative things going on in EA (which is nobody’s fault, but could be useful to improve, I think).
I regret that I have but one strong upvote to give this comment. I think this is a huge problem among EA orgs, to the extent that my impression is that moderate incompetence has basically been the norm at many of them.
It obviously seems like a good idea to try and improve the resources we’ve got, but I desperately wish EA orgs would spend more effort trying to attract real experience. <Management talent + management experience> is always going to outperform <management talent>.
Why do you think people think it’s unimportant (rather than, e.g., important but very difficult to achieve due to the age skew issue mentioned in the post)?
A funded, reputable, [important in my opinion] EA org that I helped a bit with hiring an engineer for a [in my opinion] key role had, on their first draft, something like “we’d be happy to hire a top graduate from a coding bootcamp”
I spoke to 2-3 senior product managers looking for their way into EA, while at the same time..:
(almost?) no EA org is hiring product people
In my opinion, many EA orgs could use serious help from senior product people
(Please don’t write here if you can guess what orgs I’m talking about, I left them anonymous on purpose)
From these examples I infer the orgs are not even trying. It’s not that they’re trying and failing due to, for example, an age skew in the community.
I also have theories for why this would be the case, but most of my opinion comes from my observations.
I have somewhat of a problem writing such examples publicly since I’m afraid to imply that specific people are not good enough at their job, which I really don’t want to do. (And so this problem remains hidden from most of the community, which I think is a shame)
Maybe you (Ben, the author) could figure out, for the people/positions where you think it would be better to have someone with a lot of experience, how the hiring process looked. Did they try [reasonably in your opinion] reaching out to very senior people?
Yeah, lot of the issues in EA are things I recognise from other fields that disproportionately hire academic high achievers straight out of college, who don’t have much real world experience, and who overestimate the value of native intelligence over experience. But conveying the importance of that difference is difficult as, ironically, its something you mostly learn from experience.
I think the problem of “EA leadership doesn’t consider it important to hire experienced people even for people who are leading a project (who in turn don’t consider it important to hire experienced people)” is a root cause problem for a lot of somewhat negative things going on in EA (which is nobody’s fault, but could be useful to improve, I think).
I regret that I have but one strong upvote to give this comment. I think this is a huge problem among EA orgs, to the extent that my impression is that moderate incompetence has basically been the norm at many of them.
It obviously seems like a good idea to try and improve the resources we’ve got, but I desperately wish EA orgs would spend more effort trying to attract real experience. <Management talent + management experience> is always going to outperform <management talent>.
Why do you think people think it’s unimportant (rather than, e.g., important but very difficult to achieve due to the age skew issue mentioned in the post)?
Examples:
A funded, reputable, [important in my opinion] EA org that I helped a bit with hiring an engineer for a [in my opinion] key role had, on their first draft, something like “we’d be happy to hire a top graduate from a coding bootcamp”
I spoke to 2-3 senior product managers looking for their way into EA, while at the same time..:
(almost?) no EA org is hiring product people
In my opinion, many EA orgs could use serious help from senior product people
(Please don’t write here if you can guess what orgs I’m talking about, I left them anonymous on purpose)
From these examples I infer the orgs are not even trying. It’s not that they’re trying and failing due to, for example, an age skew in the community.
I also have theories for why this would be the case, but most of my opinion comes from my observations.
I have somewhat of a problem writing such examples publicly since I’m afraid to imply that specific people are not good enough at their job, which I really don’t want to do. (And so this problem remains hidden from most of the community, which I think is a shame)
Maybe you (Ben, the author) could figure out, for the people/positions where you think it would be better to have someone with a lot of experience, how the hiring process looked. Did they try [reasonably in your opinion] reaching out to very senior people?
Yeah, lot of the issues in EA are things I recognise from other fields that disproportionately hire academic high achievers straight out of college, who don’t have much real world experience, and who overestimate the value of native intelligence over experience. But conveying the importance of that difference is difficult as, ironically, its something you mostly learn from experience.