I think, realistically, EA hasn’t bottlenecked by talent for a long time—at least not in a raw numbers sense
My thoughts, linked to what Conor said, are that many orgs (even with funds) don’t hire more because they aren’t confident in their ability to manage them or scale internal functions quickly, which is a downstream issue of some epistemic issues in EA hiring.
In essence, the types of people EA orgs say they need (experienced managers, senior leaders etc) struggle to get into EA roles because many EA orgs place disproportionate weight upon EA (or cause specific) credentials over non EA experience—to the extent that candidates with a couple years in EA type roles can end up outcompeting people with a good deal more experience in higher responsibility non-EA positions.
Projects like HIP are doing their very best to address this, but the issue at its core (at least to me) seems to stem from the thinking around hiring.
*Seems I’m being down voted on this one, my thoughts are drawn from a lot of convos with mid career folks from HIP, but I’m open to counterarguments and alternative explanations
Seems to me that a lot of EA experience could actually be a negative, if it worsens organizational groupthink.
Number one is, we hire for capability and learning ability before we hire for expertise. We actually would rather hire smart, curious people than people who are deep, deep experts in one area or another… somebody who’s been doing the same thing forever will typically just replicate what they’ve seen before. You need a mix, but we skew heavily towards people who are kind of open to new ideas and creative.
In general EA orgs seem really overconfident to me about the quality of their candidate evaluation metrics. How many of these metrics have proven external validity? Seems kinda pointless to put a ton of effort into optimizing a metric, if you don’t even know if it corresponds to what you actually want...
I find myself wondering if EAs have been doing the same thing forever and they typically just replicate what they’ve seen before 😁
Just a note that in 2013, Google’s headcount was a little less than 50,000 people, so we are talking about a completely different scale from any EA or EA-adjacent organization. When you are hiring at scale, you can afford to take more risks on any given hire.
I think, realistically, EA hasn’t bottlenecked by talent for a long time—at least not in a raw numbers sense
My thoughts, linked to what Conor said, are that many orgs (even with funds) don’t hire more because they aren’t confident in their ability to manage them or scale internal functions quickly, which is a downstream issue of some epistemic issues in EA hiring.
In essence, the types of people EA orgs say they need (experienced managers, senior leaders etc) struggle to get into EA roles because many EA orgs place disproportionate weight upon EA (or cause specific) credentials over non EA experience—to the extent that candidates with a couple years in EA type roles can end up outcompeting people with a good deal more experience in higher responsibility non-EA positions.
Projects like HIP are doing their very best to address this, but the issue at its core (at least to me) seems to stem from the thinking around hiring.
*Seems I’m being down voted on this one, my thoughts are drawn from a lot of convos with mid career folks from HIP, but I’m open to counterarguments and alternative explanations
Seems to me that a lot of EA experience could actually be a negative, if it worsens organizational groupthink.
Google VP of people operations in 2013
In general EA orgs seem really overconfident to me about the quality of their candidate evaluation metrics. How many of these metrics have proven external validity? Seems kinda pointless to put a ton of effort into optimizing a metric, if you don’t even know if it corresponds to what you actually want...
I find myself wondering if EAs have been doing the same thing forever and they typically just replicate what they’ve seen before 😁
Just a note that in 2013, Google’s headcount was a little less than 50,000 people, so we are talking about a completely different scale from any EA or EA-adjacent organization. When you are hiring at scale, you can afford to take more risks on any given hire.