a) Has anyone ever thought about this question in detail?
I haven’t thought about this in detail but I have a weakly held view that senior people should do more mentoring
(without wanting to imply that I’m a “senior EA”) I’ve thought about it / am generally inclined to think about it more carefully for me personally, I think last time I did I basically thought I’d like to do more mentoring and was bottlenecked on not having anyone to mentor (but not sure that I currently think I should do more mentoring)
b) What factors would such a decision depend on? Intuitively, the senior’s ability to mentor and the urgency of the problem play a role but there is surely more.
For myself I might try to do a fermi, maybe something like (just for illustration, extremely rough and not thought through, etc): career capital for me (maybe made concrete with “how many hours of productive time am I willing to sacrifice for the expected career capital”) + career capital for mentee (maybe “by how many days do I accelerate their career progression x how much impact will they have compared to me”) - time cost for me
I will say I think some people enjoy mentoring (and similar things) way more than others, and this probably matters a lot. Maybe in the above fermi you can apply a factor to the time cost to convert it from “actual clock time” to “counterfactual difference in time spent on other productive things” or whatever
Maybe another factor is how disruptive it is for you to add (say) another meeting per month to your diary. E.g. if you usually have around 2 meetings per week and otherwise can focus on research, maybe adding more meetings is very costly.
c) Are there options to combine mentorship and direct work, i.e. can senior people reliably outsource simple tasks to their mentees?
I think outsourcing simple tasks is surprisingly hard. But maybe a good version of this looks something like having an RA/PA (and maybe senior people should have more RAs/PAs).
a) Has anyone ever thought about this question in detail?
I haven’t thought about this in detail but I have a weakly held view that senior people should do more mentoring
(without wanting to imply that I’m a “senior EA”) I’ve thought about it / am generally inclined to think about it more carefully for me personally, I think last time I did I basically thought I’d like to do more mentoring and was bottlenecked on not having anyone to mentor (but not sure that I currently think I should do more mentoring)
b) What factors would such a decision depend on? Intuitively, the senior’s ability to mentor and the urgency of the problem play a role but there is surely more.
For myself I might try to do a fermi, maybe something like (just for illustration, extremely rough and not thought through, etc): career capital for me (maybe made concrete with “how many hours of productive time am I willing to sacrifice for the expected career capital”) + career capital for mentee (maybe “by how many days do I accelerate their career progression x how much impact will they have compared to me”) - time cost for me
I will say I think some people enjoy mentoring (and similar things) way more than others, and this probably matters a lot. Maybe in the above fermi you can apply a factor to the time cost to convert it from “actual clock time” to “counterfactual difference in time spent on other productive things” or whatever
Maybe another factor is how disruptive it is for you to add (say) another meeting per month to your diary. E.g. if you usually have around 2 meetings per week and otherwise can focus on research, maybe adding more meetings is very costly.
c) Are there options to combine mentorship and direct work, i.e. can senior people reliably outsource simple tasks to their mentees?
I think outsourcing simple tasks is surprisingly hard. But maybe a good version of this looks something like having an RA/PA (and maybe senior people should have more RAs/PAs).