In fact, all of the top 7 most sought-after skills were related to management or communications.
“Leadership / strategy” and “government and policy expertise” are emphatically not management or communications. There’s quite a lot of effort on building a talent pipeline for “government and policy expertise”. There isn’t one for “leadership / strategy” but I think that’s mostly because no one knows how to do it well (broadly speaking, not just limited to EA).
If you want to view things through the lens of status (imo often a mistake), I think “leadership / strategy” is probably the highest status role in the safety community, and “government and policy expertise” is pretty high as well. I do agree that management / communications are not as high status as the chart would suggest they should be, though I suspect this is mostly due to tech folks consistently underestimating the value of these fields.
Applicant A started out wanting to be a researcher. They did MATS before becoming an AI Safety researcher. By gaining enough research experience they were promoted to a research manager.
Applicant B always wanted to be a manager. They got an MBA from a competitive business school and worked their way into becoming a people manager in a tech company. Midway through their career they discover AI Safety and decide they want to make a career transition.
If I were hiring for a manager and somehow had to choose between only these two applicants with only this information, I would choose applicant A. (Though of course the actual answer is to find better applicants and/or get more information about them.)
I can always train applicant A to be an adequate people manager (and have done so in the past). I can’t train applicant B to have enough technical understanding to make good prioritization decisions.
(Relatedly, at tech companies, the people managers often have technical degrees, not MBAs.)
in many employers’ eyes they would not look as value aligned as someone who did MATS, something which is part of a researcher’s career path anyway.
I’ve done a lot of hiring, and I suppose I do look for “value alignment” in the sense of “are you going to have the team’s mission as a priority”, but in practice I have a hard time imagining how any candidate who actually was mission aligned could somehow fail to demonstrate it. My bar is not high and I care way more about other factors. (And in fact I’ve hired multiple people who looked less “EA-value aligned” than either applicants A or B, I can think of four off the top of my head.)
It’s possible that other EA hiring cares more about this, but I’d weakly guess that this is a mostly-incorrect community-perpetuated belief.
(There is another effect which does advantage e.g. MATS—we understand what MATS is, and what excellence at it looks like. Of the four people I thought of above, I think we plausibly would have passed over 2-3 of them in a nearby world where the person reviewing their resume didn’t realize what made them stand out.)
For what it’s worth from my time as a civil servant, I agree:
You can train a technical person to have leadership skills. It’s difficult, but it’s doable. It involves a lot of throwing them at escalating levels of leadership opportunities (starting really really small if necessary) and making sure they get and respond to relevant feedback about their performance. This is something that can be done in the normal course of working at an organisation.
You cannot train a non-technical leader to have technical skills. 90% of the population don’t have a maths A-level (or equivalent qualification), and people often find the process of learning maths inherently distressing. At least half the time the response I get when telling people I am a mathematics researcher is people bringing up their anxiety-ridden GCSE school days. There is nothing that can possibly be done to fix this from an organisation’s perspective other than telling them to go and study something they hate for five years full-time in the hope they somehow stick with it, which organisations cannot support.
So from the view of a talent pipeline aiming for technical leaders in your field or community, it makes sense to recruit technical and teach leadership. There are occasionally people who jump the opposite way, and it’s great to be on the lookout for them and have something they can do. But initially it’s going to look very much like either the introductory outreach course in your field or the maths A-level curriculum, both of which are catered for outside of a specialised programme. And my experience is the kind of people who do MBAs don’t stick with this kind of stuff because they find it hard, boring, anxiety-inducing, and not prestigious enough.
I did maths teaching for non-technical people learning technical skills at an EA org once. I teach maths at university level with great feedback, so I don’t think the issue is me. They messed up the basics (as expected), but were totally unable to reflect on why they’d messed up in a way suitable for learning, and all dropped out. I’d need a serious example of such a talent pipeline actually working before I’d do such a thing again.
in many employers’ eyes they would not look as value aligned as someone who did MATS, something which is part of a researcher’s career path anyway.
Yeah, I also found this sentence somewhat surprising. I likely care more about value alignment more than you, but I expect that the main way for people to signal this is by participating in multiple activities over time rather than by engaging in any particular program. I do agree with the OP’s larger point though: that it is easier for researchers to demonstrate value alignment given that there are more programs to participate in. I also acknowledge that there are circumstances where it might be valuable to be able to signal value alignment with relatively few words.
“Leadership / strategy” and “government and policy expertise” are emphatically not management or communications. There’s quite a lot of effort on building a talent pipeline for “government and policy expertise”. There isn’t one for “leadership / strategy” but I think that’s mostly because no one knows how to do it well (broadly speaking, not just limited to EA).
If you want to view things through the lens of status (imo often a mistake), I think “leadership / strategy” is probably the highest status role in the safety community, and “government and policy expertise” is pretty high as well. I do agree that management / communications are not as high status as the chart would suggest they should be, though I suspect this is mostly due to tech folks consistently underestimating the value of these fields.
If I were hiring for a manager and somehow had to choose between only these two applicants with only this information, I would choose applicant A. (Though of course the actual answer is to find better applicants and/or get more information about them.)
I can always train applicant A to be an adequate people manager (and have done so in the past). I can’t train applicant B to have enough technical understanding to make good prioritization decisions.
(Relatedly, at tech companies, the people managers often have technical degrees, not MBAs.)
I’ve done a lot of hiring, and I suppose I do look for “value alignment” in the sense of “are you going to have the team’s mission as a priority”, but in practice I have a hard time imagining how any candidate who actually was mission aligned could somehow fail to demonstrate it. My bar is not high and I care way more about other factors. (And in fact I’ve hired multiple people who looked less “EA-value aligned” than either applicants A or B, I can think of four off the top of my head.)
It’s possible that other EA hiring cares more about this, but I’d weakly guess that this is a mostly-incorrect community-perpetuated belief.
(There is another effect which does advantage e.g. MATS—we understand what MATS is, and what excellence at it looks like. Of the four people I thought of above, I think we plausibly would have passed over 2-3 of them in a nearby world where the person reviewing their resume didn’t realize what made them stand out.)
Thanks for this! You’ve changed my mind
For what it’s worth from my time as a civil servant, I agree:
You can train a technical person to have leadership skills. It’s difficult, but it’s doable. It involves a lot of throwing them at escalating levels of leadership opportunities (starting really really small if necessary) and making sure they get and respond to relevant feedback about their performance. This is something that can be done in the normal course of working at an organisation.
You cannot train a non-technical leader to have technical skills. 90% of the population don’t have a maths A-level (or equivalent qualification), and people often find the process of learning maths inherently distressing. At least half the time the response I get when telling people I am a mathematics researcher is people bringing up their anxiety-ridden GCSE school days. There is nothing that can possibly be done to fix this from an organisation’s perspective other than telling them to go and study something they hate for five years full-time in the hope they somehow stick with it, which organisations cannot support.
So from the view of a talent pipeline aiming for technical leaders in your field or community, it makes sense to recruit technical and teach leadership. There are occasionally people who jump the opposite way, and it’s great to be on the lookout for them and have something they can do. But initially it’s going to look very much like either the introductory outreach course in your field or the maths A-level curriculum, both of which are catered for outside of a specialised programme. And my experience is the kind of people who do MBAs don’t stick with this kind of stuff because they find it hard, boring, anxiety-inducing, and not prestigious enough.
I did maths teaching for non-technical people learning technical skills at an EA org once. I teach maths at university level with great feedback, so I don’t think the issue is me. They messed up the basics (as expected), but were totally unable to reflect on why they’d messed up in a way suitable for learning, and all dropped out. I’d need a serious example of such a talent pipeline actually working before I’d do such a thing again.
Yeah, I also found this sentence somewhat surprising. I likely care more about value alignment more than you, but I expect that the main way for people to signal this is by participating in multiple activities over time rather than by engaging in any particular program. I do agree with the OP’s larger point though: that it is easier for researchers to demonstrate value alignment given that there are more programs to participate in. I also acknowledge that there are circumstances where it might be valuable to be able to signal value alignment with relatively few words.