Yeah, I think it sounds like people are saying that there is a lack of executive-level talent, which makes sense and seems reasonable—if EA is growing, there are going to be more Executive-y jobs than people with that experience in EA already, so if value-alignment is critical, this will be an issue.
But, I guess to me, it seems odd to use “ops” to mostly refer to high-level roles at organizations / entrepreneurial opportunities, which aren’t the vast majority of jobs that might traditionally be called ops jobs. I definitely don’t think founding an organization is called Ops outside this context. Maybe the bottleneck is something more like founders/executives at EA orgs?
I think my experience is that finding really high quality junior ops folks like you describe is not that difficult (especially if we’re willing to do some training), and that might hinge more on the remote factors I mentioned before, but I guess I totally buy that finding founders/execs is much harder.
I do think that ops skills matter for founding things, but also just having the foresight to hire ops-minded people early on is a pretty equivalent substitution. E.g. if I was running something like CE, I probably wouldn’t look for ops related skills (but also I say all this as a person who founded an organization and is ops-inclined, so maybe my life experience speaks to something else?)
Yeah, I think it sounds like people are saying that there is a lack of executive-level talent, which makes sense and seems reasonable—if EA is growing, there are going to be more Executive-y jobs than people with that experience in EA already, so if value-alignment is critical, this will be an issue.
But, I guess to me, it seems odd to use “ops” to mostly refer to high-level roles at organizations / entrepreneurial opportunities, which aren’t the vast majority of jobs that might traditionally be called ops jobs. I definitely don’t think founding an organization is called Ops outside this context. Maybe the bottleneck is something more like founders/executives at EA orgs?
I think my experience is that finding really high quality junior ops folks like you describe is not that difficult (especially if we’re willing to do some training), and that might hinge more on the remote factors I mentioned before, but I guess I totally buy that finding founders/execs is much harder.
I do think that ops skills matter for founding things, but also just having the foresight to hire ops-minded people early on is a pretty equivalent substitution. E.g. if I was running something like CE, I probably wouldn’t look for ops related skills (but also I say all this as a person who founded an organization and is ops-inclined, so maybe my life experience speaks to something else?)