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?
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?