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.
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.