These are great thoughts, thanks! We definitely have different perceptions, but I really appreciate this perspective.
One crux may be what CarolineJ points to in her comment: “ops” captures a continuum of skillsets, some of which seem much rarer and more urgently needed than others. I am not sure what roles you were hiring for at your orgs, but I agree with CarolineJ that we especially need those with “chief of staff”-type skills. Examples that come to mind are Zach Robinson (Chief of Staff at Open Philanthropy) and Bill Zito (co-founder and COO at Redwood Research).
With that said, my impression is that even inexperienced but superb junior PMs are extremely valuable and not easy to find. Here, by “superb,” I mean to gesture at the kind of skills described by Tara Mac Auley in her 80K podcast. I’ll quote her at length:
So, one of the first jobs I actually had was working at a fast food restaurant called Oporto which is sort of like Nandos, it’s a chicken shop. And I just started working there as a cook in the kitchen and I think that was a really great experience for me because it’s a really fast-paced environment where you’re put under a lot of pressure to do a whole range of different tasks really quickly and they were all things that I had never done before. And I really loved being thrown into a systems-based environment where there were checklists everywhere and you were told how long each of these different tasks should take.
And I think I got to learn a lot from that. It just kind of felt like a game, like I could optimize all of the different motions that I took and the order in which I did of all of the tasks to try and tick off everything in that checklist, find things that were missing from the checklist that should be added or tweak it in little ways to make my work more effective and to make it go smoother for everyone who worked there.
I did that for a little while and at one point, I brought a stopwatch to work and then I timed myself for all of the tasks that I did commonly and timed lots of other people and I compared how long it took me to do it one way versus lots of different ways and kind of did that over a couple of days until I found the most efficient way to do all of the tasks that I had to do at that organization. So then, I got promoted to manager of the shop and then ended up working with a lot of new franchisees to train their staff and build new systems to run these chicken shops really effectively.
So, one thing I did there was to come up with a predictive ordering system based on really hilarious things like the weather forecast for the day to try and predict what things people would order and how much stock we needed to have so that we could fulfill all the customer orders and how many staff we needed to have on shift at all the different times so that the shop would be more profitable. And by implementing that system, we were able to cut staff cost by 30% and make a lot of stores that were failing profitable again. [Bolding added.]
Robert Wiblin: How old were you at this point?
Tara Mac Aulay: When I was doing that, I was about 15 or probably 16.
Obviously there’s only one Tara Mac Auley, but (as she discusses later in the podcast) ops skills can be learned and honed. I’d be surprised if there were multiple people of 16-year-old Tara’s caliber applying to any given EA ops position—in fact my impression is that anyone with this level of ops talent tends to be rapidly promoted to top positions in EA orgs. I think highly talented EAs who think they could be excellent at ops should very strongly consider this career path, even if they could also be very good in, say, top policy roles. But right now, I think they would not feel encouraged to do so by the community (and I think 80K’s Priority Paths have a big impact on this).
Identifying talent for projects that haven’t been started seems like a fundamentally different bottleneck that operations for existing projects.
This does seem like another crux. The recent Forum post on Concrete Biosecurity Projects offers some example projects which would likely benefit from highly entrepreneurial ops talent, and it’s part of what led me to post my question.
Maybe I also think ops skills and founder skills are closer together than you do, partly because a lot of the people I think of as excellent at ops also seem like they would be excellent founders (or at least co-founders/early employees).
Thanks a bunch for the answer :) We may just have a difference of perception here, but I hope this at least clarifies a bit the bottleneck I had in mind. Would love to hear if any of this sounds off to you, and if any others who have experience with ops hiring want to chime in with their own impressions.
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?)
I appreciate the comments of @abrahamrowe on this as well as the discussion.
Just mentioning here that the Personal Assistant / Chief of Staff really is a continuum, where you could have Junior PM to COO-level people, as highlighted in this article.
Looking at other comments here, it seems like more people share your thought. I think maybe the remote/non-remote line is still important. But given that other ops people perceive a bottleneck, I added a note to my answer that I don’t think it’s really accurate.
These are great thoughts, thanks! We definitely have different perceptions, but I really appreciate this perspective.
One crux may be what CarolineJ points to in her comment: “ops” captures a continuum of skillsets, some of which seem much rarer and more urgently needed than others. I am not sure what roles you were hiring for at your orgs, but I agree with CarolineJ that we especially need those with “chief of staff”-type skills. Examples that come to mind are Zach Robinson (Chief of Staff at Open Philanthropy) and Bill Zito (co-founder and COO at Redwood Research).
With that said, my impression is that even inexperienced but superb junior PMs are extremely valuable and not easy to find. Here, by “superb,” I mean to gesture at the kind of skills described by Tara Mac Auley in her 80K podcast. I’ll quote her at length:
Obviously there’s only one Tara Mac Auley, but (as she discusses later in the podcast) ops skills can be learned and honed. I’d be surprised if there were multiple people of 16-year-old Tara’s caliber applying to any given EA ops position—in fact my impression is that anyone with this level of ops talent tends to be rapidly promoted to top positions in EA orgs. I think highly talented EAs who think they could be excellent at ops should very strongly consider this career path, even if they could also be very good in, say, top policy roles. But right now, I think they would not feel encouraged to do so by the community (and I think 80K’s Priority Paths have a big impact on this).
This does seem like another crux. The recent Forum post on Concrete Biosecurity Projects offers some example projects which would likely benefit from highly entrepreneurial ops talent, and it’s part of what led me to post my question.
Maybe I also think ops skills and founder skills are closer together than you do, partly because a lot of the people I think of as excellent at ops also seem like they would be excellent founders (or at least co-founders/early employees).
Thanks a bunch for the answer :) We may just have a difference of perception here, but I hope this at least clarifies a bit the bottleneck I had in mind. Would love to hear if any of this sounds off to you, and if any others who have experience with ops hiring want to chime in with their own impressions.
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?)
I appreciate the comments of @abrahamrowe on this as well as the discussion.
Just mentioning here that the Personal Assistant / Chief of Staff really is a continuum, where you could have Junior PM to COO-level people, as highlighted in this article.
I guess if you start setting the standards that high, maybe that would lead to far too many jobs becoming a priority path.
Looking at other comments here, it seems like more people share your thought. I think maybe the remote/non-remote line is still important. But given that other ops people perceive a bottleneck, I added a note to my answer that I don’t think it’s really accurate.