I find these kind of post with structured line of your reasoning very impactful and I would recommend people here to share it with other people in management roles that may skip this post.
I encountered a lot of examples of organizations doing optimally for themselves when not internalizing this concept. This is especially tricky when outsourcing can give you benefit in the short-term, but is negative in the long-term. I often found this to be case in groups that outsource some legal counseling, people operations, marketing or fundraising.
It’s more about just spending money to hire people, but not only and lists things that can be outsourced:
Generally, we’d say that it’s easier to “trade money for capacity” when:
The work we need done – and the expectations around what constitutes good work – is clearly and explicitly defined.
The work we need done is similar enough to work that is done elsewhere that we can, relatively easily, look at someone’s resume and credentials and assess their likelihood of being able to do it.
People who found this post useful may found the link helpful.
2. On core competencies
You write:
If we are able to outsource everything which is not a core competency, this raises the obvious question of what our core competencies are.
In particular: I think there’s a temptation to say something like “CEA’s core competency is in understanding EA’s, not writing code, therefore we can outsource the code writing bits.”
I think this temptation to declare something not one’s core competency comes from some kind of bias that groups have. It makes people not want to do things that are not natural for organization’s ethos. It reminds me a bit of points made by Paul Graham in Do things that don’t scale that engineers want to code not to run their sales which he thinks is a wrong approach:
you can’t avoid doing sales by hiring someone to do it for you. You have to do sales yourself initially. Later you can hire a real salesperson to replace you.
So IT companies want to code, advocacy groups want to campaign and effective altruism would probably want to reason how to do the most good. In my group we he had this when we started as investigative group, but fortunately realized quickly it wasn’t working as intended.
I generally think it’s dangerous to go path of outsourcing / buying capacity if an organization wants to be successful, so I think it would be good to have a heuristic that you should not outsource anything by default and then understand properly the cases where it’s fine to outsource. Yet, I think the reverse is the default when I talk to some groups (although usually not from the EA space).
Thanks for writing this Ben.
I find these kind of post with structured line of your reasoning very impactful and I would recommend people here to share it with other people in management roles that may skip this post.
I encountered a lot of examples of organizations doing optimally for themselves when not internalizing this concept. This is especially tricky when outsourcing can give you benefit in the short-term, but is negative in the long-term. I often found this to be case in groups that outsource some legal counseling, people operations, marketing or fundraising.
Two more points.
1. On trading money for work
There is similar point made by Holden Karnofsky in 2013 for GiveWell—We can’t (simply) buy capacity.
It’s more about just spending money to hire people, but not only and lists things that can be outsourced:
People who found this post useful may found the link helpful.
2. On core competencies
You write:
I think this temptation to declare something not one’s core competency comes from some kind of bias that groups have. It makes people not want to do things that are not natural for organization’s ethos. It reminds me a bit of points made by Paul Graham in Do things that don’t scale that engineers want to code not to run their sales which he thinks is a wrong approach:
So IT companies want to code, advocacy groups want to campaign and effective altruism would probably want to reason how to do the most good. In my group we he had this when we started as investigative group, but fortunately realized quickly it wasn’t working as intended.
I generally think it’s dangerous to go path of outsourcing / buying capacity if an organization wants to be successful, so I think it would be good to have a heuristic that you should not outsource anything by default and then understand properly the cases where it’s fine to outsource. Yet, I think the reverse is the default when I talk to some groups (although usually not from the EA space).