Error
Unrecognized LW server error:
Field "fmCrosspost" of type "CrosspostOutput" must have a selection of subfields. Did you mean "fmCrosspost { ... }"?Unrecognized LW server error:
Field "fmCrosspost" of type "CrosspostOutput" must have a selection of subfields. Did you mean "fmCrosspost { ... }"?
Thanks for sharing this! I think that it is tough that the experiences you list are shared by many other people with ops experience. I also think that something I’ve witnessed at a lot of organizations is that growth can be somewhat stumbling—e.g. new non-ops staff are added until ops is overwhelmed, and only then are ops staff added.
To mildly shamelessly plug my own employer, Rethink Priorities has been really focusing on offsetting some of these challenges, including doing things like:
Having a pay system that doesn’t discount ops work—ops staff are paid the same as other staff at the same title level
Really emphasizing working at most 40 hours / week, and making it clear to people that if they are working more than 40 hours / week, it means we are understaffed and need to address something
Investing in ops expansions prior to other expansions, so we have the bandwidth to grow, and slack in our operations in general
Giving people a high amount of autonomy in their roles
Focusing on providing professional development opportunities
So far, these have gone really well—we’ve had no turnover on our operations team, and the team consistently reports being quite happy in their roles. We are also hiring for a bunch of operations roles right now (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/of9qrfb5HQfwgj3Le/rethink-priorities-operations-team-is-expanding-we-re-hiring).
Thanks for sharing! I agree that ops can be demanding - although I’m able to switch to “emergency mode” pretty well, it still leaves me feeling drained and exhausted.
I think it’s more than just deadlines or missed calls that makes ops challenging, here are just a few:
Constant task switching because you have to check emails and messages to respond quickly to time sensitive things, or chase people on your team for information you need
Not always feeling like you’ve accomplished a lot because you worked on 5 different small things in the day, and made incremental progress on each (many ops projects naturally span 1-3 weeks and there isnt’ a good way to speed them up)
Things that help make this better for me
Good work culture—I feel appreciated and valued by my team
Learning—I’m learning a lot of skills that will be useful in any future project I try to do
Autonomy: I enjoy having ownership and autonomy over my domains.
Yes, the context/task switching! Very under-explored in my post and can make things difficult.
Great to hear you have things that off-set the stress.
Having seen overworked operations staff in several organisations throughout my career, reducing stress and having a healthy culture seem to be key improvement factors regardless of organisation size. (This goes for many roles.) If you consistently can’t accomplish everything you need to accomplish in 8 hrs/day – given a full-time situation – you are clearly understaffed and this should be resolved ASAP. There are many other stress reducers, such as many weeks of paid vacation per year, great salaries, clear areas of responsibility, structured interviews on the work environment (not the same as performance reviews!) etc.
It seems like many “normal” organisations are under the delusion that they need to operate under the, literally, military conditions you describe. This “get it done yesterday” mentality can kill the morale in any organisation and especially operations people will take the hit, because they are expected to tie all the bits together. What you describe as “never really quite off-the-clock” is super-dangerous and leads to burnout.
If you have worked in different organisations with vastly different cultures on these issues, it seems wild that any organisation wouldn’t prioritise the well-being of their employees, when it so obviously also improves the quality of the work.
A common excuse is that some roles or types of work “are just like that” but when people doing that work start talking to others doing it elsewhere it often turns out not to be the case. It’s a matter of culture. I know this from experience in software engineering – one company I worked at had a “no death marches” rule to explicitly counteract a common unhealthy bit of culture at many software companies.
“structured interviews on the work environment”
I’d be interested in hearing more about this. Any links or documents that you could share to point me in the right direction?
I can’t think of any specific links or such but I can tell you more: I may not go so far as to say it’s the norm in Sweden, but it’s definitely common to have an annual “utvecklingssamtal” (personal development discussion) and it’s often combined with salary negotiations. Personally, I think these two discussions should be separate.
Good organisations use this opportunity to gather a lot more knowledge than what is related to performance. In particular, it can be a way to have an open-ended discussion about the work environment and what improvements can be made. For example, improvements in the physical environment (it’s too cold, too dark, chairs and desks are annoying etc.) or improvements in mental environment (Monday meetings are too long, people ping on Slack too often, my colleague is always late for meetings etc.)
Usually, you would fill out some form with prepared questions beforehand and try to standardise this to use over several years to get a sense of improvements made, i.e. asking the exact same questions every year and to everyone. In other words, combine an open-ended part with a very structured part.
If it would help you a lot more than the above, I could probably dig up some old such documents from previous employers, although I would have to paraphrase them rather than share them directly due to privacy and/or intellectual property reasons.
The Navy has “command climate” surveys that are mostly “independent” of the current officers-in-charge. A poor showing on such a survey resulted in the removal of a captain I know ;).
That helpful, thanks for providing the context. No need to dig through old documents; I think I have a rough idea of it now.
“when operations work goes well, people take it for granted; when there’s a mistake, it’s obvious and everyone is annoyed”
I don’t have much to contribute with this comment, other than to emphasize the often understated importance of the above concept. Similar to plumbing or bank transfers or internet access or any of a dozen other examples, maintaining a system and preventing mistakes is often ignored/neglected when people think of valuable work.
I hadn’t thought it those terms before. Thanks for this post!
This was such a good post. It was great getting accounts of your experiences in both software and in the military.
Markus gives a thoughtful comment on your experiences in depth. I think just want to echo what he says.
Here are some low quality opinions/thoughts (I’m just some random dude on the internet):
My guess, based on a hopefully reasonable reading of your writing, is that your instincts are right and your bad experiences are probably due to dysfunction from bad management and this is unfair.
In the private sector when bad management happens, good talent can just go elsewhere. In the case of the military, maybe something pathological can happen, where people are locked into roles, and this leads to mistreatment.
Some of the things you mentioned, like sudden high priority calls with a flag officer and operations around the clock, do happen and aren’t avoidable in good, high functioning organizations. In many successful organizations, personal assistants or operations staff do put up with this. But these people are paid very well, like, well into the six figures.
Good ops/assistant talent is rarer than it seems and is really respected in good orgs. This kind of talent is usually given a lot of “space”, “agency”, trust and respect.
Good organizations don’t see operations or execution as a side show, and I think you’re really on the nose with your post, which was really valuable.
You may find it interesting that in the military being a flag officer’s assistant is a very high prestige gig and reserved for top performers. But there isn’t an “executive assistant” career track so a person does this role for 2-3 years then rotates back to day-to-day operations.
For a given rank, compensation does not vary between roles in the military so perhaps the “clout” associated with being an assistant makes up for this.
Same thing with being a law clerk in the field of law.
Yes, this is really interesting.
I really don’t know much about either domain, but by mentioning law clerks, maybe you’re suggesting that the flag officer assistant role serves as a special tour/marker of status that is awarded for especially promising officers.
This seems fascinating because these particular institutions work well in the US (probably), so understanding them seems useful to apply them to other domains. Also these paths might govern and control who ends up in these important positions (admirals, generals, judges).
If you have more thoughts about these institutions, incentives, operations, it would be great to read!
The solution that seems best, easy and obvious:
EA orgs and funders can develop norms for much higher pay standards, e.g. double or more for these operations or assistant roles, than roles that historically have been in larger supply and also often get a lot of “compensating differentials” (clout, visibility).
I think this post is excellent for a number of reasons:
discusses something underexplored on EA Forum (day-to-day operations)
raises perspectives from outside the EA lens (military)
raises why this post might be wrong*
*Perhaps there should be more elaborating this second point of different types of ops. I would guess that research EA organizations may have less ‘reactive’ operations requirements. Though I think working at an ‘in the field’ organization would be closer to the experience you describe. Of note is that research organizations may have more ‘in the field’ elements (planning events, meetings, logistics), but I would expect there is less non-systematized logistics—less chance for human error.
I would love to see another post about your experience of operations within the navy, any key lessons learned or advice you could give from what I would imagine is a unique and effective work environment.
Hah perhaps I’ll get around to it. In this post, I wrote very, very briefly about some other observations, particularly around standards and talent acquisition.
The Navy/military is very unique because you can go long periods of time of sleeping at work. For months up to nearly a year, you’ll be sleeping in the same space as you work. You’re with your coworkers 24⁄7, working 7 days a week.
Perhaps I think too fondly of this. But if you are going after an opportunity worth billions of dollars (“earning to give” ;) ) or working directly to save millions/billions of (future) lives, isn’t that fervor actually rational? After all, there are professionals in the military that work with such mania to prevent nuclear war.