Advisors often only have a few pages of context and a single call (sometimes there are follow-ups) to talk about career options. In my experience, this can be pretty insufficient to understand someone’s needs.
I would be worried that they might push people towards something that may not make sense, and two things could happen: 1) the person may feel more pressure to pursue something that’s not a good fit for them 2) if they disagree with the advice given, the may not raise it. For example, they may not feel comfortable raising the issue because of concerns around anonymity and potential career harm, since your advisors are often making valuable connections and sharing potential candidate names with orgs that are hiring.
I know that 80K don’t want people to take their advice so seriously, and numerous posts have been written on this topic. However, I think these efforts won’t necessarily negate 1) and 2) because many 80K advisees may not be as familiar with all of 80K’s content or Forum discourse, and the prospect of valuable connections remains nonetheless.
I personally had a positive experience during a career call, but have heard of a handful of negative experiences second- and third-hand.
[I left 80k ~a month ago, and am writing this in a personal capacity, though I showed a draft of this answer to Michelle (who runs the team) before posting and she agrees it provides an accurate representation. Before I left, I was line-managing the 4 advisors, two of whom I also hired.]
Hey, I wanted to chime in with a couple of thoughts on your followup, and then answer the first question (what mechanisms do we have in place to prevent this). Most of the thoughts on the followup can be summarised by ‘yeah, I think doing advising well is really hard’.
Advisors often only have a few pages of context and a single call (sometimes there are follow-ups) to talk about career options. In my experience, this can be pretty insufficient to understand someone’s needs.
Yep, that’s roughly right. Often it’s less than this! Not everyone takes as much time to fill in the preparation materials as it sounds like you did. One of the things I frequently emphasised when hiring for and training advisors was asking good questions at the start of the call to fill in gaps in their understanding, check it with the advisee, and then quickly arrive at a working model that was good enough to proceed with. Even then, this isn’t always going to be perfect. In my experience, advisors tend to do a pretty good job of linking the takes they give to the reasons they’re giving them (where, roughly speaking, many of those reasons will be aspects of their current understanding of the person they’re advising).
the person may feel more pressure to pursue something that’s not a good fit for them
With obvious caveats about selection effects, many of my advisees expressed that they were positively surprised at me relieving this kind of pressure! In my experience advisors spend a lot more time reassuring people that they can let go of some of the pressure they’re perceiving than the inverse (it was, for example, a recurring theme in the podcast I recently released).
if they disagree with the advice given, the may not raise it. For example, they may not feel comfortable raising the issue because of concerns around anonymity and potential career harm, since your advisors are often making valuable connections and sharing potential candidate names with orgs that are hiring.
This is tricky to respond to. I care a lot that advisees are in fact not at risk of being de-anonymised, slandered, or otherwise harmed in their career ambitions as a result of speaking to us, and I’m happy to say that I believe this is the case. It’s possible, of course, for advisees to believe that they are at risk here, and for that reason or several possible other reasons, to give answers that they think advisors want to hear rather than answers that are an honest reflection of what they think. I think this is usually fairly easy for advisors to pick up on (especially when it’s for reasons of embarrassment/low confidence), at which point the best thing for them to do is provide some reassurance about this.
I do think that, at some point, the burden of responsibility is no longer on the advisor. If someone successfully convinces an advisor they they would really enjoy role A, or really want to work on cause Z, because they think that’s what the advisor wants to hear, or they think that’s what will get them recommended for the best roles, or introduced to the coolest people, or whatever, and the advisor then gives them advice that follows from those things being true, I think that advice is likely to be bad advice for that person, and potentially harmful if they follow it literally. I’m glad that advisors are (as far as I can tell), quite hard to mislead in this way, but I don’t think they should feel guilty if they miss some cases like this.
I know that 80K don’t want people to take their advice so seriously, and numerous posts have been written on this topic. However, I think these efforts won’t necessarily negate 1) and 2) because many 80K advisees may not be as familiar with all of 80K’s content or Forum discourse, and the prospect of valuable connections remains nonetheless.
There might be a slight miscommunication here. Several of the posts (and my recent podcast interview) talking about how people shouldn’t take 80k’s advice so seriously are, I think, not really pointing at a situation where people get on a 1on1 call and then take the advisor’s word as gospel, but more at things like reading a website that’s aimed at a really broad audience, and trying to follow it to the letter despite it very clearly being the case that no single piece of advice applies equally to everyone. The sort of advice people get on calls is much more frequently a suggestion of next steps/tests/hypotheses to investigate/things to read than “ok here is your career path for the next 10 years”, along with the reasoning behind those suggestions. I don’t want to uncritically recommend deferring to anyone on important life decisions, but on the current margin I don’t think I’d advocate for advisees taking that kind of advice, expressed with appropriate nuance, less seriously.
OK, but what specific things are in place to catch potential harm?
There are a few things that I think are protective here, some of which I’ll list below, though this list isn’t exhaustive.
Internal quality assurance of calls
The overwhelming majority of calls we have are recorded (with permission), and many of these are shared for feedback with other staff at the organisation (also with permission). To give some idea of scale, I checked some notes and estimated that (including trials, and sitting in on calls with new advisors or triallists) I gave substantive feedback on over 100 calls, the majority of which were in the last year. I was on the high end for the team, though everyone in 80k is able to give feedback, not only advisors.
I would expect anyone listening to a call in this capacity to flag, as a priority, anything that seemed like and advisor saying something harmful, be that because it was false, displayed an inappropriate level of confidence, or because it was insensitive.
My overall impression is that this happens extremely rarely, and that the bar for giving feedback about this kind of concern was (correctly) extremely low. I’m personally grateful, for example, for some feedback a colleague gave me about how my tone might have been perceived as ‘teacher-y’ on one call I did, and another case where someone flagged that they thought the advisee might have felt intimidated by the start of the conversation. In both cases, as far as I can remember, the colleague in question thought that the advisee probably hadn’t interpreted the situation in the way they were flagging, but that it was worth being careful in future. I mention this not to indicate that I never made mistakes on calls, but instead to illustrate why I think it’s unlikely that feedback would miss significant amounts of potentially harmful advice.
Advisee feedback mechanisms
There are multiple opportunities for people we’ve advised to give feedback about all aspects of the process, including specific prompts about the quality of advice they received on the call, any introductions we made, and any potential harms.
Some of these opportunities include the option for the advisee to remain anonymous, and we’re careful about accidentally collecting de-anonymising information, though no system is foolproof. As one example, we don’t give an option to remain anonymous in the feedback form we send immediately after the call (as depending on how many other calls were happening at the time, someone filling it in straight away might be easy to notice), but we do give this option in later follow-up surveys (where the timing won’t reveal identity).
In user feedback, the most common reason given by people who said 1on1 caused them harm is that they were rejected from advising and felt bad/demotivated about that. The absolute numbers here are very low, but there’s an obvious caveat about non-response bias.
On specific investigations/examples
I worked with community health on some ways of preventing harm being done by people advisers made introductions to (including, in some cases, stopping introductions)
I spent more than 5 but less than 10 hours, on two occasions, investigating concerns that had been raised to me about (current or former) advisors, and feel satisfied in both cases that our response was appropriate i.e. that there was not an ongoing risk of harm following the investigation.
Despite my personal bar for taking concerns of this sort seriously being pretty low compared to my guess at the community average (likely because I developed a lot of my intuitions for how to manage such situations during my previous career as a teacher), there were few enough incidents meriting any kind of investigation that I think giving any more details than the above would not be worth the (small) risk of deanonymising those involved. I take promises of confidentiality really seriously (as I hope would be expected for someone in the position advisors have).
Thanks for this in-depth response, it makes me feel more confident in the processes for the period of time when you were at 80K.
However, since you have left the team, it would be helpful to know which of these practices your successor will keep in place and how much they will change—for example, since you mentioned you were on the high end for giving feedback on calls, for example.
My understanding of many meta EA orgs is that individuals have a fair amount of autonomy. This definitely has its upsides, but it also means that practices can change (substantially) between managers.
I wouldn’t expect the attitude of the team to have shifted much in my absence. I learned a huge amount from Michelle, who’s still leading the team, especially about management. To the extent you were impressed with my answers, I think she should take a large amount of the credit.
On feedback specifically, I’ve retained a small (voluntary) advisory role at 80k, and continue to give feedback as part of that, though I also think that the advisors have been deliberately giving more to each other.
The work I mentioned on how we make introductions to others and track the effects of those, including collaborating with CH, was passed on to someone else a couple of months before I left, and in my view the robustness of those processes has improved substantially as a result.
Context:
Advisors often only have a few pages of context and a single call (sometimes there are follow-ups) to talk about career options. In my experience, this can be pretty insufficient to understand someone’s needs.
I would be worried that they might push people towards something that may not make sense, and two things could happen:
1) the person may feel more pressure to pursue something that’s not a good fit for them
2) if they disagree with the advice given, the may not raise it. For example, they may not feel comfortable raising the issue because of concerns around anonymity and potential career harm, since your advisors are often making valuable connections and sharing potential candidate names with orgs that are hiring.
I know that 80K don’t want people to take their advice so seriously, and numerous posts have been written on this topic. However, I think these efforts won’t necessarily negate 1) and 2) because many 80K advisees may not be as familiar with all of 80K’s content or Forum discourse, and the prospect of valuable connections remains nonetheless.
I personally had a positive experience during a career call, but have heard of a handful of negative experiences second- and third-hand.
[I left 80k ~a month ago, and am writing this in a personal capacity, though I showed a draft of this answer to Michelle (who runs the team) before posting and she agrees it provides an accurate representation. Before I left, I was line-managing the 4 advisors, two of whom I also hired.]
Hey, I wanted to chime in with a couple of thoughts on your followup, and then answer the first question (what mechanisms do we have in place to prevent this). Most of the thoughts on the followup can be summarised by ‘yeah, I think doing advising well is really hard’.
Yep, that’s roughly right. Often it’s less than this! Not everyone takes as much time to fill in the preparation materials as it sounds like you did. One of the things I frequently emphasised when hiring for and training advisors was asking good questions at the start of the call to fill in gaps in their understanding, check it with the advisee, and then quickly arrive at a working model that was good enough to proceed with. Even then, this isn’t always going to be perfect. In my experience, advisors tend to do a pretty good job of linking the takes they give to the reasons they’re giving them (where, roughly speaking, many of those reasons will be aspects of their current understanding of the person they’re advising).
With obvious caveats about selection effects, many of my advisees expressed that they were positively surprised at me relieving this kind of pressure! In my experience advisors spend a lot more time reassuring people that they can let go of some of the pressure they’re perceiving than the inverse (it was, for example, a recurring theme in the podcast I recently released).
This is tricky to respond to. I care a lot that advisees are in fact not at risk of being de-anonymised, slandered, or otherwise harmed in their career ambitions as a result of speaking to us, and I’m happy to say that I believe this is the case. It’s possible, of course, for advisees to believe that they are at risk here, and for that reason or several possible other reasons, to give answers that they think advisors want to hear rather than answers that are an honest reflection of what they think. I think this is usually fairly easy for advisors to pick up on (especially when it’s for reasons of embarrassment/low confidence), at which point the best thing for them to do is provide some reassurance about this.
I do think that, at some point, the burden of responsibility is no longer on the advisor. If someone successfully convinces an advisor they they would really enjoy role A, or really want to work on cause Z, because they think that’s what the advisor wants to hear, or they think that’s what will get them recommended for the best roles, or introduced to the coolest people, or whatever, and the advisor then gives them advice that follows from those things being true, I think that advice is likely to be bad advice for that person, and potentially harmful if they follow it literally. I’m glad that advisors are (as far as I can tell), quite hard to mislead in this way, but I don’t think they should feel guilty if they miss some cases like this.
There might be a slight miscommunication here. Several of the posts (and my recent podcast interview) talking about how people shouldn’t take 80k’s advice so seriously are, I think, not really pointing at a situation where people get on a 1on1 call and then take the advisor’s word as gospel, but more at things like reading a website that’s aimed at a really broad audience, and trying to follow it to the letter despite it very clearly being the case that no single piece of advice applies equally to everyone. The sort of advice people get on calls is much more frequently a suggestion of next steps/tests/hypotheses to investigate/things to read than “ok here is your career path for the next 10 years”, along with the reasoning behind those suggestions. I don’t want to uncritically recommend deferring to anyone on important life decisions, but on the current margin I don’t think I’d advocate for advisees taking that kind of advice, expressed with appropriate nuance, less seriously.
OK, but what specific things are in place to catch potential harm?
There are a few things that I think are protective here, some of which I’ll list below, though this list isn’t exhaustive.
Internal quality assurance of calls
The overwhelming majority of calls we have are recorded (with permission), and many of these are shared for feedback with other staff at the organisation (also with permission). To give some idea of scale, I checked some notes and estimated that (including trials, and sitting in on calls with new advisors or triallists) I gave substantive feedback on over 100 calls, the majority of which were in the last year. I was on the high end for the team, though everyone in 80k is able to give feedback, not only advisors.
I would expect anyone listening to a call in this capacity to flag, as a priority, anything that seemed like and advisor saying something harmful, be that because it was false, displayed an inappropriate level of confidence, or because it was insensitive.
My overall impression is that this happens extremely rarely, and that the bar for giving feedback about this kind of concern was (correctly) extremely low. I’m personally grateful, for example, for some feedback a colleague gave me about how my tone might have been perceived as ‘teacher-y’ on one call I did, and another case where someone flagged that they thought the advisee might have felt intimidated by the start of the conversation. In both cases, as far as I can remember, the colleague in question thought that the advisee probably hadn’t interpreted the situation in the way they were flagging, but that it was worth being careful in future. I mention this not to indicate that I never made mistakes on calls, but instead to illustrate why I think it’s unlikely that feedback would miss significant amounts of potentially harmful advice.
Advisee feedback mechanisms
There are multiple opportunities for people we’ve advised to give feedback about all aspects of the process, including specific prompts about the quality of advice they received on the call, any introductions we made, and any potential harms.
Some of these opportunities include the option for the advisee to remain anonymous, and we’re careful about accidentally collecting de-anonymising information, though no system is foolproof. As one example, we don’t give an option to remain anonymous in the feedback form we send immediately after the call (as depending on how many other calls were happening at the time, someone filling it in straight away might be easy to notice), but we do give this option in later follow-up surveys (where the timing won’t reveal identity).
In user feedback, the most common reason given by people who said 1on1 caused them harm is that they were rejected from advising and felt bad/demotivated about that. The absolute numbers here are very low, but there’s an obvious caveat about non-response bias.
On specific investigations/examples
I worked with community health on some ways of preventing harm being done by people advisers made introductions to (including, in some cases, stopping introductions)
I spent more than 5 but less than 10 hours, on two occasions, investigating concerns that had been raised to me about (current or former) advisors, and feel satisfied in both cases that our response was appropriate i.e. that there was not an ongoing risk of harm following the investigation.
Despite my personal bar for taking concerns of this sort seriously being pretty low compared to my guess at the community average (likely because I developed a lot of my intuitions for how to manage such situations during my previous career as a teacher), there were few enough incidents meriting any kind of investigation that I think giving any more details than the above would not be worth the (small) risk of deanonymising those involved. I take promises of confidentiality really seriously (as I hope would be expected for someone in the position advisors have).
Thanks for this in-depth response, it makes me feel more confident in the processes for the period of time when you were at 80K.
However, since you have left the team, it would be helpful to know which of these practices your successor will keep in place and how much they will change—for example, since you mentioned you were on the high end for giving feedback on calls, for example.
My understanding of many meta EA orgs is that individuals have a fair amount of autonomy. This definitely has its upsides, but it also means that practices can change (substantially) between managers.
I wouldn’t expect the attitude of the team to have shifted much in my absence. I learned a huge amount from Michelle, who’s still leading the team, especially about management. To the extent you were impressed with my answers, I think she should take a large amount of the credit.
On feedback specifically, I’ve retained a small (voluntary) advisory role at 80k, and continue to give feedback as part of that, though I also think that the advisors have been deliberately giving more to each other.
The work I mentioned on how we make introductions to others and track the effects of those, including collaborating with CH, was passed on to someone else a couple of months before I left, and in my view the robustness of those processes has improved substantially as a result.