In November 2018 you said “we want to hire as many people as engineers as possible; this would be dozens if we could, but it’s hard to hire, so we’ll more likely end up hiring more like ten over the next year”. As far as I can tell, MIRI has hired 2 engineers (Edward Kmett and James Payor) since you wrote that comment. Can you comment on the discrepancy? Did hiring turn out to be much more difficult than expected? Are there not enough good engineers looking to be hired? Are there a bunch of engineers who aren’t on the team page/haven’t been announced yet?
(This is true of all my answers but feels particularly relevant for this one: I’m speaking just for myself, not for MIRI as a whole)
We’ve actually made around five engineer hires since then; we’ll announce some of them in a few weeks. So I was off by a factor of two.
Before you read my more detailed thoughts: please don’t read the below and then get put off from applying to MIRI. I think that many people who are in fact good MIRI fits might not realize they’re good fits. If you’re unsure whether it’s worth your time to apply to MIRI, you can email me at buck@intelligence.org and I’ll (eventually) reply telling you whether I think you might plausibly be a fit. Even if it doesn’t go further than that, there is great honor in applying to jobs from which you get rejected, and I feel warmly towards almost everyone I reject.
With that said, here are some of my thoughts on the discrepancy between my prediction and how much we’ve hired:
Since I started doing recruiting work for MIRI in late 2017, I’ve updated towards thinking that we need to be pickier with the technical caliber of engineering hires than I originally thought. I’ve updated towards thinking that we’re working in a domain where relatively small increases in competence translate into relatively large differences in output.
A few reasons for this:
Our work involves dealing a lot with pretty abstract computer science and software engineering considerations; this increases variance in productivity.
We use a lot of crazy abstractions (eg various Haskell stuff) that are good for correctness and productivity for programmers who understand them and bad for people who have more trouble learning and understanding all that stuff.
We have a pretty flat management structure where engineers need to make a lot of judgement calls for themselves about what to work on and how to do it. As a result, it’s more important for people doing programming work to have a good understanding of everything we’re doing and how their work fits into this.
I think it’s plausible that if we increased our management capacity, we’d be able to hire engineers who are great in many ways but who don’t happen to be good in some of the specific ways we require at the moment.
Our recruiting process involves a reasonable amount of lag between meeting people and hiring them, because we often want to get to know people fairly well before offering them a job. So I think it’s plausible that the number of full time offers we make is somewhat of a trailing indicator. Over time I’ve updated towards thinking that it’s worth it to take more time before giving people full time offers, by offering internships or trials, so the number of engineering hires lags more than I expected given the number of candidates I’d met who I was reasonably excited by.
I’ve also updated towards the importance of being selective on culture fit, eg wanting people who I’m more confident will do well in the relatively self-directed MIRI research environment.
A few notes based on this that are relevant to people who might want to work at MIRI:
As I said, our engineering requirements might change in the future, and when that happens I’d like to have a list of people who might be good fits. So please feel free to apply even if you think you’re a bad fit right now.
We think about who to hire on an extremely flexible, case-by-case basis. Eg we hire people who know no Haskell at all.
If you want to be more likely to be a good fit for MIRI, learning Haskell and some dependent type theory is pretty helpful. I think that it might even be worth it to try to get a job programming in Haskell just in case you get really good at it and then MIRI wants to hire you, though I feel slightly awkward to give this advice because I feel like it’s pushing a pretty specific strategy which is very targeted at only a single opportunity. As I said earlier, if you’re considering taking a Haskell job based on this, please feel free to email me to talk about it.
In November 2018 you said “we want to hire as many people as engineers as possible; this would be dozens if we could, but it’s hard to hire, so we’ll more likely end up hiring more like ten over the next year”. As far as I can tell, MIRI has hired 2 engineers (Edward Kmett and James Payor) since you wrote that comment. Can you comment on the discrepancy? Did hiring turn out to be much more difficult than expected? Are there not enough good engineers looking to be hired? Are there a bunch of engineers who aren’t on the team page/haven’t been announced yet?
(This is true of all my answers but feels particularly relevant for this one: I’m speaking just for myself, not for MIRI as a whole)
We’ve actually made around five engineer hires since then; we’ll announce some of them in a few weeks. So I was off by a factor of two.
Before you read my more detailed thoughts: please don’t read the below and then get put off from applying to MIRI. I think that many people who are in fact good MIRI fits might not realize they’re good fits. If you’re unsure whether it’s worth your time to apply to MIRI, you can email me at buck@intelligence.org and I’ll (eventually) reply telling you whether I think you might plausibly be a fit. Even if it doesn’t go further than that, there is great honor in applying to jobs from which you get rejected, and I feel warmly towards almost everyone I reject.
With that said, here are some of my thoughts on the discrepancy between my prediction and how much we’ve hired:
Since I started doing recruiting work for MIRI in late 2017, I’ve updated towards thinking that we need to be pickier with the technical caliber of engineering hires than I originally thought. I’ve updated towards thinking that we’re working in a domain where relatively small increases in competence translate into relatively large differences in output.
A few reasons for this:
Our work involves dealing a lot with pretty abstract computer science and software engineering considerations; this increases variance in productivity.
We use a lot of crazy abstractions (eg various Haskell stuff) that are good for correctness and productivity for programmers who understand them and bad for people who have more trouble learning and understanding all that stuff.
We have a pretty flat management structure where engineers need to make a lot of judgement calls for themselves about what to work on and how to do it. As a result, it’s more important for people doing programming work to have a good understanding of everything we’re doing and how their work fits into this.
I think it’s plausible that if we increased our management capacity, we’d be able to hire engineers who are great in many ways but who don’t happen to be good in some of the specific ways we require at the moment.
Our recruiting process involves a reasonable amount of lag between meeting people and hiring them, because we often want to get to know people fairly well before offering them a job. So I think it’s plausible that the number of full time offers we make is somewhat of a trailing indicator. Over time I’ve updated towards thinking that it’s worth it to take more time before giving people full time offers, by offering internships or trials, so the number of engineering hires lags more than I expected given the number of candidates I’d met who I was reasonably excited by.
I’ve also updated towards the importance of being selective on culture fit, eg wanting people who I’m more confident will do well in the relatively self-directed MIRI research environment.
A few notes based on this that are relevant to people who might want to work at MIRI:
As I said, our engineering requirements might change in the future, and when that happens I’d like to have a list of people who might be good fits. So please feel free to apply even if you think you’re a bad fit right now.
We think about who to hire on an extremely flexible, case-by-case basis. Eg we hire people who know no Haskell at all.
If you want to be more likely to be a good fit for MIRI, learning Haskell and some dependent type theory is pretty helpful. I think that it might even be worth it to try to get a job programming in Haskell just in case you get really good at it and then MIRI wants to hire you, though I feel slightly awkward to give this advice because I feel like it’s pushing a pretty specific strategy which is very targeted at only a single opportunity. As I said earlier, if you’re considering taking a Haskell job based on this, please feel free to email me to talk about it.