Personally, I still think it would be very useful to find more talented people and for more people to consider applying to these roles; we just need to bear in mind that these roles require a very unusual skill-set, so people should always have a good back-up plan.
I’m curious what your model of the % value increase in the top hire is when you, say, double current hiring pools. It needs to be high enough to offset the burnt value from people’s investments in those application processes. This is not only expensive for individual applicants in the moment, but also carries the long term risk of demotivating people—and thereby having a counterfactually smaller hiring pool in future years.
EA seems to be already at the point where lots of applicants are frustrated and might value drift, thereby dropping out of the hiring pool. I am not keen on making this situation worse. It might cause permanent harm.
Do you agree there’s a trade-off here? If so, I’m not sure whether our disagreement comes from different assessments of value increases in the top hire or burnt value in the hiring pool.
I just want to note that not every rejected application has been burnt value for me and most have actually been positive, especially in terms of things learned. In the ones I got far it has resulted in more rather than less motivation. In the case I had to do work-related tasks (write research proposal, or execute a sample of typical research) I learned a lot.
On the other hand, increasing the applicants:hired-ratio would mostly increase the proportion of people not getting far in the application process which is where least of the value positive factors are and most of the negative.
Oh I agree people will often learn useful things during application processes. I just think the opportunity cost can be very high, especially when processes take months and people have to wait to figure out whether they got into their top options.
I also think those costs are especially high in the top applicants—they have to invest the most and might learn the most useful things, but they also lose the most due to higher opportunity costs.
And as you said, people who get filtered out early lose less time and other resources on application processes. But they might still feel negatively about it, especially given the messaging. Maybe their equally rejected friends feel just as bad, which in the future could dissuade other friends who might be potential top hires to even try.
Personally, I still think it would be very useful to find more talented people and for more people to consider applying to these roles (Ben)
It needs to be high enough to offset the burnt value from people’s investments in those application processes. (Denise)
In theory, there’s no real conflict between these two statements. Doubling the number of people who would consider applying for a post shouldn’t impose a major cost on those potential applicants. At the same time, we could take steps to make it clearer to potential applicants what exactly the hiring criteria is, so we’re not wasting people’s time.
In fact, I think it would probably be ideal if we increased the number of people who consider applying for each EA job but decreased the number actually applying!
I agree there’s a tradeoff. We’re pretty unsure about how much to encourage people towards these roles at the margin.
We’ve seen cases of people on the other side who said they didn’t apply for these roles since they assumed they were too competitive, but were found later and ended up doing really well. We’ve seen lots of cases of people who ended up getting the job but said they almost didn’t apply for the same reason. I suspect we still miss a lot of great applicants.
To avoid this, we could encourage more people to apply, but that will result in more people getting demotivated when they don’t succeed. Finding the ideal balancing point seems really hard.
I do agree with Khorton below, though, that we should try to find more “win-win” approaches, such as encouraging people to consider and find out if there might be a good role for them, and providing people with clearer criteria.
I’m curious what your model of the % value increase in the top hire is when you, say, double current hiring pools. It needs to be high enough to offset the burnt value from people’s investments in those application processes. This is not only expensive for individual applicants in the moment, but also carries the long term risk of demotivating people—and thereby having a counterfactually smaller hiring pool in future years.
EA seems to be already at the point where lots of applicants are frustrated and might value drift, thereby dropping out of the hiring pool. I am not keen on making this situation worse. It might cause permanent harm.
Do you agree there’s a trade-off here? If so, I’m not sure whether our disagreement comes from different assessments of value increases in the top hire or burnt value in the hiring pool.
I just want to note that not every rejected application has been burnt value for me and most have actually been positive, especially in terms of things learned. In the ones I got far it has resulted in more rather than less motivation. In the case I had to do work-related tasks (write research proposal, or execute a sample of typical research) I learned a lot.
On the other hand, increasing the applicants:hired-ratio would mostly increase the proportion of people not getting far in the application process which is where least of the value positive factors are and most of the negative.
Oh I agree people will often learn useful things during application processes. I just think the opportunity cost can be very high, especially when processes take months and people have to wait to figure out whether they got into their top options. I also think those costs are especially high in the top applicants—they have to invest the most and might learn the most useful things, but they also lose the most due to higher opportunity costs.
And as you said, people who get filtered out early lose less time and other resources on application processes. But they might still feel negatively about it, especially given the messaging. Maybe their equally rejected friends feel just as bad, which in the future could dissuade other friends who might be potential top hires to even try.
In theory, there’s no real conflict between these two statements. Doubling the number of people who would consider applying for a post shouldn’t impose a major cost on those potential applicants. At the same time, we could take steps to make it clearer to potential applicants what exactly the hiring criteria is, so we’re not wasting people’s time.
In fact, I think it would probably be ideal if we increased the number of people who consider applying for each EA job but decreased the number actually applying!
I agree there’s a tradeoff. We’re pretty unsure about how much to encourage people towards these roles at the margin.
We’ve seen cases of people on the other side who said they didn’t apply for these roles since they assumed they were too competitive, but were found later and ended up doing really well. We’ve seen lots of cases of people who ended up getting the job but said they almost didn’t apply for the same reason. I suspect we still miss a lot of great applicants.
To avoid this, we could encourage more people to apply, but that will result in more people getting demotivated when they don’t succeed. Finding the ideal balancing point seems really hard.
I do agree with Khorton below, though, that we should try to find more “win-win” approaches, such as encouraging people to consider and find out if there might be a good role for them, and providing people with clearer criteria.