I agree that it’s downstream of this, but strongly agree with ideopunk that mission alignment is a reasonable requirement to have.* A (perhaps the) major cause of organizations becoming dysfunctional as they grow is that people within the organization act in ways that are good for them, but bad for the organization overall—for example, fudging numbers to make themselves look more successful, ask for more headcount when they don’t really need it, doing things that are short-term good but long-term bad (with the assumption that they’ll have moved on before the bad stuff kicks in), etc. (cf. the book Moral Mazes.) Hiring mission-aligned people is one of the best ways to provide a check on that type of behavior.
*I think some orgs maybe should be more open to hiring people who are aligned with the org’s particular mission but not part of the EA community—eg that’s Wave’s main hiring demographic—but for orgs with more “hardcore EA” missions, it’s not clear how much that expands their applicant pool.
In fortune 500 companies, rarely you find people that are exceptional on the get go. Most of them that have succeeded were allowed to grow themselves within parameterized environments of multidisciplinary scope so they can have the room to combine ideas.
Can EA develop the EA/ longtermist attitude in exceptionally talented people? I believe digging this question brutally can point every EA founder /Directorship role on how to deal with developing management talent..
I agree that it’s downstream of this, but strongly agree with ideopunk that mission alignment is a reasonable requirement to have.* A (perhaps the) major cause of organizations becoming dysfunctional as they grow is that people within the organization act in ways that are good for them, but bad for the organization overall—for example, fudging numbers to make themselves look more successful, ask for more headcount when they don’t really need it, doing things that are short-term good but long-term bad (with the assumption that they’ll have moved on before the bad stuff kicks in), etc. (cf. the book Moral Mazes.) Hiring mission-aligned people is one of the best ways to provide a check on that type of behavior.
*I think some orgs maybe should be more open to hiring people who are aligned with the org’s particular mission but not part of the EA community—eg that’s Wave’s main hiring demographic—but for orgs with more “hardcore EA” missions, it’s not clear how much that expands their applicant pool.
In fortune 500 companies, rarely you find people that are exceptional on the get go. Most of them that have succeeded were allowed to grow themselves within parameterized environments of multidisciplinary scope so they can have the room to combine ideas.
Can EA develop the EA/ longtermist attitude in exceptionally talented people? I believe digging this question brutally can point every EA founder /Directorship role on how to deal with developing management talent..