For the EA Dev community (my main focus), my theory of victory is something like:
Early career:
Devs go to fun jobs with mentorship where they learn a ton and make lots of money
They quit when the job stops being that
Late stage:
Apply to EA orgs a lot
EA orgs
Treat devs well, including writing good transparent hiring posts, paying enough money, and so on
As a result
EA orgs find it easy to hire over qualified people, including managers for those people
The EA community finds it easy to set up and run amazing software projects
We no more have orgs doing manual annoying work
Now EA is known as a place with unusually good software, since we don’t have principle-agent problems and similar things
For example, we have the best job board in the world, the best donation platforms (maybe we already do?), the best forum that facilitates good complicated discussions (when the world’s social media mostly failed at that), and so on
x-risk projects that could use the help of software developers don’t even count that as a hard part. “EA has ~25% developers [or whatever], of course that part is easy”, they say, forgetting what the situation was at 2022
For the EA Dev community (my main focus), my theory of victory is something like:
Early career:
Devs go to fun jobs with mentorship where they learn a ton and make lots of money
They quit when the job stops being that
Late stage:
Apply to EA orgs a lot
EA orgs
Treat devs well, including writing good transparent hiring posts, paying enough money, and so on
As a result
EA orgs find it easy to hire over qualified people, including managers for those people
The EA community finds it easy to set up and run amazing software projects
We no more have orgs doing manual annoying work
Now EA is known as a place with unusually good software, since we don’t have principle-agent problems and similar things
For example, we have the best job board in the world, the best donation platforms (maybe we already do?), the best forum that facilitates good complicated discussions (when the world’s social media mostly failed at that), and so on
x-risk projects that could use the help of software developers don’t even count that as a hard part. “EA has ~25% developers [or whatever], of course that part is easy”, they say, forgetting what the situation was at 2022