Thanks for writing this post ! It resonated and I feel like I’ve fallen into a similar mindset before.
It reminds me of a point made here: “like, will we wish in 5 years that EAs had more outside professional experience to bring domain knowledge and legitimacy to EA projects rather than a resume full of EA things?”
When reading the post, this felt especially true and unfortunate: “They get the reputation as someone who can “get shit done” but in practice, they’re usually solving ops bottlenecks at the cost of building harder-to-acquire skills.”
It encourages young people to stay within the EA bubble, instead of leaving, acquiring diverse skill-sets, and getting feedback from the real world. This also exacerbates talent bottlenecks further down the funnel once the community lacks expertise in specific fields/career paths.
Young, hapless EA here: this is very, very true. Multiple times recently I’ve been in the process of looking for “EA jobs” or describing to someone my intention of finding one, and realized “what does ‘EA job’ actually mean? Do I really need my job to be something advertised on 80,000 Hours or something people talk about on LW for me to feel like I’m making a difference in ways I care about?”
Another suggestion would be for people hiring young people to fight fires and do other projects to be clear about what skills they’d be learning from it and the downsides. I’ve found it helpful in the past when someone has pointed out that although they think it would be really impactful for me to help them out with a particular project, they weren’t sure if I would develop the skills from it they thought I wanted to learn compared to my alternatives.
When I first got involved in the community-building bubble, it was very difficult for me to say no to things because everything felt impactful and the people suggesting I do things / help with particular things were friends and mentors I wanted to prove myself to.
Strongly upvoted, and think this is a great post with advice I hope people take seriously.
A minor critique of this part - “but in practice, they’re usually solving ops bottlenecks at the cost of building harder-to-acquire skills” -- I worry people will take this to mean that solving ops bottlenecks is something easily done by most young EAs without much career capital. This hasn’t been my experience. I think solving ops bottlenecks effectively is really hard, and is in fact one of the things I wish more young EAs would build skills in doing by going into work outside of EA with lots of mentorship and feedback loops.
Quick question I think a lot of young EA’s have—what does the process of upskilling outside of EA look like? And where is the support within EA or young people to upskill?
Thanks for writing this post ! It resonated and I feel like I’ve fallen into a similar mindset before.
It reminds me of a point made here: “like, will we wish in 5 years that EAs had more outside professional experience to bring domain knowledge and legitimacy to EA projects rather than a resume full of EA things?”
When reading the post, this felt especially true and unfortunate: “They get the reputation as someone who can “get shit done” but in practice, they’re usually solving ops bottlenecks at the cost of building harder-to-acquire skills.”
Young, hapless EA here: this is very, very true. Multiple times recently I’ve been in the process of looking for “EA jobs” or describing to someone my intention of finding one, and realized “what does ‘EA job’ actually mean? Do I really need my job to be something advertised on 80,000 Hours or something people talk about on LW for me to feel like I’m making a difference in ways I care about?”
I love this post.
Another suggestion would be for people hiring young people to fight fires and do other projects to be clear about what skills they’d be learning from it and the downsides. I’ve found it helpful in the past when someone has pointed out that although they think it would be really impactful for me to help them out with a particular project, they weren’t sure if I would develop the skills from it they thought I wanted to learn compared to my alternatives.
When I first got involved in the community-building bubble, it was very difficult for me to say no to things because everything felt impactful and the people suggesting I do things / help with particular things were friends and mentors I wanted to prove myself to.
Strongly upvoted, and think this is a great post with advice I hope people take seriously.
A minor critique of this part - “but in practice, they’re usually solving ops bottlenecks at the cost of building harder-to-acquire skills” -- I worry people will take this to mean that solving ops bottlenecks is something easily done by most young EAs without much career capital. This hasn’t been my experience. I think solving ops bottlenecks effectively is really hard, and is in fact one of the things I wish more young EAs would build skills in doing by going into work outside of EA with lots of mentorship and feedback loops.
Any chance you’d like to create a custom filter on the 80k job board for jobs that you’d recommend for this profile of people? I can help!
Okay!
(Seems very possible there’ll be a “reasons” sections too, that anyone can reply to, if that would help)
Quick question I think a lot of young EA’s have—what does the process of upskilling outside of EA look like? And where is the support within EA or young people to upskill?
From less than a week ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PPeiDDD7PgQA35RgF/apply-for-economics-phd-application-mentorship-and-support