My impression is that the relative degree of ops bottleneck might have become worse recently (after easing a bit by early 2020), so we’ll consider updating that blurb again. To double check this, we would ideally run another survey of org leaders about skill needs, and there’s some chance that happens in the next year.
Another reason why we dropped it is just because ‘work at EA orgs’ is already a priority path, and this is a subpath of that, and I’m not sure we should list both the broader path and subpath within the priority paths list (e.g. I also think ‘research roles at EA orgs’ is a big bottleneck but don’t want to break that out as a separate category).
Thanks for this! I really appreciate how carefully 80K thinks these questions through and have updated toward this bottleneck having gotten worse fairly recently, as you suggest. With that said, if there was an ops bottleneck in 2018 and 2019 as reflected in previous surveys of skill needs, and if the ops bottleneck is back as of now, I wonder whether early 2020 was more the exception than the rule.
To double check this, we would ideally run another survey of org leaders about skill needs, and there’s some chance that happens in the next year.
I don’t want to rush your process. At the same time, because I perceive this as fairly urgent bottleneck (as seems to be at least somewhat confirmed in comments by CarolineJ, Scronfinkle, and Anya Hunt), I’ll just note that I hope that survey does in fact happen this year. I doubt I can be helpful with this, but feel free to DM me if I could be—for example, I can think of at least one person who might be happy to run the survey this year and would likely do a good job.
Another reason why we dropped it is just because ‘work at EA orgs’ is already a priority path, and this is a subpath of that, and I’m not sure we should list both the broader path and subpath within the priority paths list (e.g. I also think ‘research roles at EA orgs’ is a big bottleneck but don’t want to break that out as a separate category).
Again, I appreciate that you all are extremely thoughtful about these decisions. I will offer, from my outside perspective, that it seems like the Priority Paths already do a great job of conveying the value of research skills (e.g. 5⁄9 of the Priority Paths have the word “research” in the title), whereas they don’t currently convey the value of operations skills. I’m not sure whether adding ops back to the Priority Paths is the best way to address this, or if there’s another better option, such as simply removing the blurb about how ops skills are less needed now. But I think right now a reader of 80K would likely get the impression that ops skills are much less urgently needed than they are (see for example Eli Kaufman’s comment on this post).
Hey there,
My impression is that the relative degree of ops bottleneck might have become worse recently (after easing a bit by early 2020), so we’ll consider updating that blurb again. To double check this, we would ideally run another survey of org leaders about skill needs, and there’s some chance that happens in the next year.
Another reason why we dropped it is just because ‘work at EA orgs’ is already a priority path, and this is a subpath of that, and I’m not sure we should list both the broader path and subpath within the priority paths list (e.g. I also think ‘research roles at EA orgs’ is a big bottleneck but don’t want to break that out as a separate category).
Thanks for this! I really appreciate how carefully 80K thinks these questions through and have updated toward this bottleneck having gotten worse fairly recently, as you suggest. With that said, if there was an ops bottleneck in 2018 and 2019 as reflected in previous surveys of skill needs, and if the ops bottleneck is back as of now, I wonder whether early 2020 was more the exception than the rule.
I don’t want to rush your process. At the same time, because I perceive this as fairly urgent bottleneck (as seems to be at least somewhat confirmed in comments by CarolineJ, Scronfinkle, and Anya Hunt), I’ll just note that I hope that survey does in fact happen this year. I doubt I can be helpful with this, but feel free to DM me if I could be—for example, I can think of at least one person who might be happy to run the survey this year and would likely do a good job.
Again, I appreciate that you all are extremely thoughtful about these decisions. I will offer, from my outside perspective, that it seems like the Priority Paths already do a great job of conveying the value of research skills (e.g. 5⁄9 of the Priority Paths have the word “research” in the title), whereas they don’t currently convey the value of operations skills. I’m not sure whether adding ops back to the Priority Paths is the best way to address this, or if there’s another better option, such as simply removing the blurb about how ops skills are less needed now. But I think right now a reader of 80K would likely get the impression that ops skills are much less urgently needed than they are (see for example Eli Kaufman’s comment on this post).