Somewhat controversial personal opinion: when thinking about this space, my null hypothesis is talented people are actually abundant, and the bottleneck is on the side of EA organizations and possibly in culture.
Reasons could be various: for example, I can imagine
organizations are ops bottlenecked, and hiring is another ops task
historically, founder’s effect & difficulty of finding/identifying ops people if you have very different mindset
homophily&trust networks based hiring
misaligned filtering (potentially great ops people being filtered early on criteria like not having CVs impressive in the right way, in a later stage people with the most impressive CVs actually not being good fit, or not that interested in ops)
I think what really filters down the number of candidates significantly is that most organizations want to fill ops-roles with people who are able to do their job very autonomously. This means that a premium is put on something like value-alignment and good judgment. These two factors significantly narrows down the talent pool.
I’m curious how do you think this is evaluated in practice. I’d expect this to map mostly to homophily&trust networks based hiring and risk-aversion on the org side. So my hypothesis is the pool is not narrowed down by value-alignment and good judgment per se, but by difficulties in signalling these qualities.
Interesting, do you think there are ways to practice or increase value-alignment/good judgment? For example by doing an internship at the organisation in question? Or having a practice period either at the organisation, or through a training programme organised by someone else?
Is there a reason you came to have this opinion in the first place? The reasons you gave could work as explanations if “talented people are abundant” is true, but what actually makes you believe that in the first place?
It’s hard for me to figure out whether I believe the same thing or not; when I look at the totality of my non-EA work experience, in many different fields where “ops”-type skills were required, I think I’d lean toward “ops talent is not as abundant as I once thought”, but all I can back that up with is a series of anecdotes. (Many freelance tutors are not well-organized despite being in a job that strongly rewards ops talent, many businesspeople in high-profile positions use clunky filing systems and zero productivity tools, many hospital IT people are poor communicators… all of these are examples of ops skill being useful, but not present.)
I think this hypothesis is similar to the points made by 80k in their post on why although EA orgs really value their previous hires, especially in operations, there is still a large talent gap. It seems like part of the constraint has to do with the organisations’ ability hire new people. We’re also really interested in finding ways to reduce the constraint on EA orgs by seeing how we can reduce organisational costs through, for example, contributing to the filtering process or providing strong signals about a person. This is something we want to explore in the next posts in the series.
Do you have ideas to address and perhaps reduce the organisational constraints?
Somewhat controversial personal opinion: when thinking about this space, my null hypothesis is talented people are actually abundant, and the bottleneck is on the side of EA organizations and possibly in culture.
Reasons could be various: for example, I can imagine
organizations are ops bottlenecked, and hiring is another ops task
historically, founder’s effect & difficulty of finding/identifying ops people if you have very different mindset
homophily&trust networks based hiring
misaligned filtering (potentially great ops people being filtered early on criteria like not having CVs impressive in the right way, in a later stage people with the most impressive CVs actually not being good fit, or not that interested in ops)
prestige
risk-aversion on org side
I think what really filters down the number of candidates significantly is that most organizations want to fill ops-roles with people who are able to do their job very autonomously. This means that a premium is put on something like value-alignment and good judgment. These two factors significantly narrows down the talent pool.
I’m curious how do you think this is evaluated in practice. I’d expect this to map mostly to homophily&trust networks based hiring and risk-aversion on the org side. So my hypothesis is the pool is not narrowed down by value-alignment and good judgment per se, but by difficulties in signalling these qualities.
Interesting, do you think there are ways to practice or increase value-alignment/good judgment? For example by doing an internship at the organisation in question? Or having a practice period either at the organisation, or through a training programme organised by someone else?
+1 to this hypothesis
Many high-functioning orgs outside of EA have intense ops needs, and are able to successfully hire & maintain large teams to address these needs.
Is there a reason you came to have this opinion in the first place? The reasons you gave could work as explanations if “talented people are abundant” is true, but what actually makes you believe that in the first place?
It’s hard for me to figure out whether I believe the same thing or not; when I look at the totality of my non-EA work experience, in many different fields where “ops”-type skills were required, I think I’d lean toward “ops talent is not as abundant as I once thought”, but all I can back that up with is a series of anecdotes. (Many freelance tutors are not well-organized despite being in a job that strongly rewards ops talent, many businesspeople in high-profile positions use clunky filing systems and zero productivity tools, many hospital IT people are poor communicators… all of these are examples of ops skill being useful, but not present.)
I think this hypothesis is similar to the points made by 80k in their post on why although EA orgs really value their previous hires, especially in operations, there is still a large talent gap. It seems like part of the constraint has to do with the organisations’ ability hire new people. We’re also really interested in finding ways to reduce the constraint on EA orgs by seeing how we can reduce organisational costs through, for example, contributing to the filtering process or providing strong signals about a person. This is something we want to explore in the next posts in the series.
Do you have ideas to address and perhaps reduce the organisational constraints?