Director of Operations at Forethought. I also do operations consulting for a few EA orgs, am a trustee of EA UK, and co-run the EA Operations Slack workspace. I previously led operations at the Center on Long-Term Risk, and before that did similar work in a for-profit tech startup. I studied first physics and then medieval history/âlanguages at university. Based in Gloucestershire, UK.
Amrit Sidhu-Brar đ¸
Karma: 400
For another perspective: personally I feel like the most important aspect of âgood ops writingâ is something like âmaking it really easy for the other person to do exactly the thing they need to do and get the info they need, even if theyâre just quickly skimming[1]â. Iâm thinking of things like:
Good use of formatting, e.g. bold, bullet points, etc; so that someone whoâs skimming it at a glance will easily identify the parts relevant to them or where they need to engage further.
The opposite of this: important facts being hidden in the middle of long plain blocks of text, meaning people will only notice them if theyâre reading carefully
General clarity, e.g. wording and sentence structure not being confusing
For messages: clearly identifying what actions are required vs. optional; or if the message is just an FYI with no action needed
Having anticipated questions the reader will have and provided what theyâd want. But also balancing this with not making the action-relevant parts too long.
- ^
I donât think this is only important because of readers who are busy /â not very engaged. I think even for a really engaged reader, itâs useful to be able to identify the most relevant parts at a glance before going deep.
Thanks, Eli! This seems great to me and Iâm glad to have things like this out there.
I wanted to provide another perspective on a couple of points.(For context, Iâve recruited for a junior ops role once, and for a senior ops role once. Unsure how much the below applies to other hiring managers.)
On writing skills and quality of work tests:
I agree that people probably underrate how important writing skills are for success in an ops role. However, that said, when recruiting I only pay attention to writing quality in some contexts, mainly because there are times when Iâm more interested in candidates being able to spend their time/âeffort on other parts of the application, or on minimising time.
In application form answers, I usually donât pay attention to the writing quality ~at all, since I expect candidates will vary a lot in how much time they had available to do the form, and at the first stage I much prefer a sketchy application to no application at all. (Iâll usually include a note in the form to say that.)
In work tests, Iâve usually tried to indicate cases where writing or polished-ness is something Iâm looking at or not.
E.g. in a recent senior ops hiring test, I had a strategy task which was to sketch out a plan for a major organisational decision. I was most interested in testing good judgement â like seeing how candidates generate and prioritise relevant considerations for a complex decision like this â and didnât want them to spend time making the writing pretty rather than producing more/âbetter content. So I said something about how Iâm interested in the content and clarity-to-me over style and polish.
Whereas for test components that, e.g. to write an email, message or policy; then I definitely will be looking at the writing quality and polishedness.
(That said, I do agree that spending 10-20% of time checking seems widely good.)
On quality of application materials, I agree that a CV/âLinkedIn etc. that clearly aims at the role requirements is likely to be strongest; however Iâd also add that a non-personalised CV is a lot better than no application at all! At stage 1 ensuring that as many good people apply as possible is one of my top goals.
On unclearly relevant experience, one tangential point. Here is an extract from the generalised feedback I sent to applicants rejected at stage 1 of my junior ops hiring round in 2022.[1]
Among very early-career candidates, e.g. those just out of university, the strongest candidates were those who could show some signal of their operations ability. For example, organisational work for student projects/âsocieties or local charities, or personal-life things like setting up a task management system, organising a group trip or helping a friend with a visa application.
Relatedly, among people with work experience that is not closely related to this role, at times I felt it would be beneficial for them to put less emphasis on their most impressive but less related experience, and more emphasis on their most relevant experience, even if it seems less impressive. There was a group of candidates with substantial experience in roles such as communications, consulting or people management, whose application concentrated on how that experience transfers to this role.[2] If these candidates had more directly relevant, but less impressive experience, such as those I mentioned for recent graduates in the previous point, I think they would have benefited from mentioning it, even if it was a long time ago.
(This role was more about fairly ânitty grittyâ logistics, finance, HR, things like that; rather than e.g. a lot of project management or comms where Iâd probably weight broader kinds of experience higher.)
- ^
I.e. a document outlining the most common reasons I did/âdidnât advance people to the second stage; I didnât give personalised feedback at this stage. (I planned to give personalised feedback for later stages, but unfortunately didnât get around to it. If youâre one of the applicants from this 2022 hiring round who asked for feedback but I didnât get back to, my apologies for that.)
- ^
To be clear I do think broader experience adds something! But it only speaks to certain parts of what Iâm looking for.
Agreed; but Iâd also add that I think in any role, the default assumption is that if youâre selected for the job, youâre likely to be at least somewhat better than the next best candidate. Applying for the job is a great way to find this out, and if youâre uncertain about the counterfactual, you can also be open with the team about this and ask them how much they prefer you to the next best candidate â Iâve done this before and got replies that I think are honest and open. (Though some care is needed with this reasoning: if everyone did this, theyâd just end up down at the best candidate who doesnât think to ask this.)
But yeah agree that the gap between you and the next best candidate is likely to be bigger for a less conventionally-appealing project.(Additional musing this made me think of: thereâs also the consideration that the next-best candidate also has a counterfactual, and if theyâre aligned will probably themselves end up doing something else impactful if they donât take this job. A bit of a rabbit hole, but I think can still be useful: e.g. you could consider whether you seem more or less dedicated to a high-impact career than the typical applicant for the job. Or could ask the hiring manager whether they had promising community-external candidates, and whether they think you being aligned adds a lot to how well youâll do in the role.)
Fully agree. And a flip side of this: reading this list also seems very valuable for people looking to recruit for early-stage projects. Putting yourself on the more reassuring side of as many of these points as is achievable is likely to aid recruitment, and reduce risks around staff retention, satisfaction and public image.
Some of the points wonât be possible in every situation (e.g. things that cost a lot when youâre tight on funding); but others are likely achievable for everyone, e.g. clarifying expectations around the items on this list, having a written agreement (even if informal) detailing what each side is committing to.
Just wanted to echo this point about reducing work hours! In cases where this option is available + financially viable, I think it can be very worth considering. I did this a few years ago when I was in a non-impact-driven job, reducing my work schedule permanently from full-time to 4.5 days per week then later 3.5. I used the other time for small volunteering and consulting opportunities in EA (though finding them involved some luck), which I think really helped me towards eventually moving into a permanent direct work role later.
The Center on Long-term Risk, looking for an Operations Associate /â Operations Manager, to work with me on supporting and improving our operational infrastructure in areas such as đ HR, đ¸ accounting, or đŞ office management đĄ The application deadline is 11th September. CLR is a research charity based in London, with the goal to address worst-case risks from the development and deployment of advanced AI systems.
â You can see more details and apply on our website here.
In this role youâd be joining a small (~2.5-person) operations team, so your work will be varied and youâll get to take on responsibility quickly in a wide variety of areas. CLR is in a position to provide mentorship, and youâll be able to get to know existing operational systems in context in a well-functioning organisation, as you take on responsibility for managing them.
This role would be equally suited for a recent graduate looking to gain operations experience in operations quickly, or for candidates whoâve done some operations work before. No specific experience or qualifications are required.
đł We prefer candidates whoâll work fully in-person in our London office. Part- or fully-remote considered. đ Weâre open to full-time and part-time candidates, with a preference for closer to full-time.
Feel free to drop me a message if you have any questions!
makes me apprehensive of taking up a âseatâ that could have been taken by someone whoâd have worked 80 hour weeks and vastly outperformed me.
As a fellow non-dedicate, I like to discuss expectations around working hours in the âany questionsâ section of an interview anyway, since personally I wouldnât want to accept a job where they expect a lot more than a 40-hour week from me. That way, they also get this info about me to use in their decision, so I know if they make me an offer they think Iâm the best candidate, having considered these factors. I think being open like this is probably the best way to treat this area of uncertainty (rather than not applying), since the employer will have the better overview of other candidates.
(EDIT: To be clear, I donât think itâs necessary to raise this at this stage: the employer seems unlikely to assume that applicants will work more than a standard working week by default, since many people donât do that. And I donât think it makes sense for the burden to be on people who will only work a standard working week to raise that in the recruitment process. I just mean that if youâre concerned about the effect of accepting a job where youâll perform less well because of sticking to standard hours, I think discussing it with the employer before accepting is a good way to handle that.)
might my non-dedicate status mean I end up being a net-negative addition to the team?
I think that having people with clear work/âlife split around can also be helpful. Partly since it helps make the culture more welcoming to other such people and, as Ozymandias argues, being open to non-dedicates is often helpful. But I also think the added diversity of perspectives can be helpful for everyone: for example it could help dedicates have a better work/âlife balance, in cases where theyâre too far towards the âworkâ end on pure-impact grounds. For example, they might not naturally think of ideas for work/âlife boundaries that, after theyâre raised, they would endorse on impact grounds. (I donât think itâs clearly always better to add more non-dedicates to a work environment or anything, but I think there are considerations in both directions.)
(Views my own, not my employerâs.)
Yeah it seems accurate that the need for operations folk is significantly less than in 2018. That said, Iâve seen plenty of operations job postings in the last year or so, and it looks like e.g. CEA and OpenPhil currently have roles on the 80k job board. Combining that with the fact that EA organisations seem to generally be growing, it seems like thereâs still a need for more ops people in EA orgs overall. I guess the harder question is similar to your second one, namely whether such roles are currently easily filled with the in-EA people already aiming for them or with non-EA applicants, vs. whether thereâd be a benefit to more EAs (with a particular amount or type of experience) doing so. I donât have much of an answer to this, unfortunately.
One random thought on this is that different kinds of operations experience might can be important as well as different amounts of experience. I have the impression that EA orgs are getting large enough that operations roles can get fairly specialised in some places. For example, Iâm not certain, but I think Iâve seen roles for people focussing on automation, for a Salesforce admin, for junior accounts people. I could imagine that for these roles, experience in the right specific thing might be an advantage, even if the experience isnât that long. (Though I wouldnât take that too strongly.) Something pointing in the other direction would be that, for more specific roles, value-alignment may be less important and so it may be easier to recruit from outside EA.
+1 to Martinâs suggestion of reaching out to EA orgs and asking whether they need any short-term/âcontractor (or possibly volunteer) work doing.
Orgs will rarely run full hiring rounds for these, but my impression is that a fair amount of this kind of work exists. (Not saying that I think this strategy is anywhere near certain to work, but I would recommend it.) I never managed to make myself proactively ask people for roles like these, but the roles in this category that I got (which I think happened to me through chance really) mostly ended up being really useful for skill-building.
For point #2, one speculative thing that comes to mind is the legal and governance structure of an incorporated organisation, i.e. being incorporated, and having a board â whether a board of directors/âtrustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation and whom the team ultimately report to, or an advisory board.
I know that plenty of larger EA groups, particularly national ones, have these kinds of things already, and I wonder whether it would be beneficial for more large EA groups to do so. (I donât know what the answer to this question is.) Possible advantages that I can think of of such a setup:
If you can find board members who are knowledgeable about the area â like maybe some EA community-building funder, or a leader of a larger EA group or something â their input might be great for strategy.
Running the legal entityâs operations could be good skill-building for the organisers, e.g. if any of them want to work in operations or entrepreneurship.
It might be better for longevity and stability of the group â the board would always be responsible for the organisation, so if a dedicated group leadership team moved on before finding good successors, it would be the boardâs job to try again later.
If there are paid organisers, they could be on payroll, which might be nicer experience for them than being paid directly by the funder. If the group ever wanted to rent property, it could do so in its own name.
Particularly if itâs a charitable structure, having a legal entity might help with outreach due image reasons, particularly if targeting professionals rather han students.
If a charitable structure, it might help get more funding, or funding from more diverse sources.
DIsadvantages I can think of include the effort and administrative complexity (which for a charity, might be very high), the time cost to the board members, the financial cost (e.g. incorporation fees, insurance etc, maybe legal advice or professional fees depending how much you did yourself), and maybe worse consequences if things go wrong (like forgetting to do some legal filing or doing your accounting wrong or something). I also have no idea whether groups that are student societies are allowed to be incorporated.
Iâll have a go at adding some more ideas for #2. (Similarly to Martin, I donât feel like this is my area of expertise and Iâm sure there are others in the EA community whoâve thought about thisway more than me, but here goes for a try: )
In an organisation that has paid staff one important thing for commitment would be making sure people are compensated well. While volunteers are unpaid and to a large extent doing it for the impact of the role, I wonder whether there are easy-ish ways to optimise the non-money benefits that volunteers are getting out of the role â e.g. skills, connections and so on. I guess one way to do this would be just to pay particular attention to volunteers âas clientsâ when doing the groupâs normal community-building activities. Alternatively, are there benefits that can be provided specifically to volunteers â like maybe connections to more established people doing similar work to the volunteerâs role, or social activities specifically for the volunteer team? (Though those probably arenât low-cost, now that I think about it!)
Martinâs idea of a retreat could be good for the engagement goal too â at EA Cambridge, where Iâm a volunteer, there was a committee retreat one year. To be honest I donât remember what the main goals of the event were, but I think one benefit was helping me feel more engaged/âcommitted in the committee that year.
The other main area I can think of that might help is ensuring that volunteers have plenty of ownership and space to make meaningful decisions and innovate (and that things stay that way as the team grows), both so that people feel a sense of responsibility and are more committed, and just to help the work be interesting. Like, where possible, delegating an area of responsibility, a problem or a sizeable project rather than the implementation of a specific solution; and ensuring that volunteers know what the extent of their freedom to change things is.
Makes sense, thanks!
Thatâs really interesting to read, thanks very much! (Both for this answer and for the whole AMA exercise)
Are lottery winners subject to conflict of interest restrictions similar to EA Funds? E.g. could a winner end up choosing to donate to an organisation they run or work at, or fund themselves or a connected party to do independent work?
( I am currently undecided as to whether Iâm going to donate to the lottery, but this question isnât a factor in that â just asking out of interest as the question occurred to me, seemed like it might be important, and I donât think I know what I would want the answer to be as a donor, so would be curious to hear the answer!)
A related question: are there categories of things youâd be excited to fund, but havenât received any applications for so far?
Okay, I called CAF to ask about this, as I was interested too. Apparently the Charity Accountâs 4% fee is a one-off at the time of donation, rather than annually recurring. You can hold the money indefinitely after itâs put into the account for no fee. The fee is 4% on the first ÂŁ22.5k donated per year, after that it reduces to 1%. (They linked me to a PDF detailing this here.) So this seems like it could well be worth it, in cases where you have more than a few ÂŁ000 to donate to registered charities, if it would be more efficient to be able to move across tax year boundaries?
They also offer something called a CAF Charitable Trust, which is a fuller-service Donor-Advised Fund (not in fact a charitable trust...). It has a minimum opening balance of ÂŁ10k, and this one (a) does have annual fees, of 1.2% to a minimum of ÂŁ120/âyear, then reducing for very high balances (over ÂŁ100k); and (b) allows investment. Their investment options seem pretty good: their basic service lets you access a range of funds called the âFP CAF investment fundsâ â the link was broken to on their website, but I got the impression there was a reasonable range of them, and the person on the phone said sheâd email me details (Iâll edit when I have them). They also have a âPremier serviceâ for balances over ÂŁ25k, with a higher fee of 1.5%, which lets you invest in any UK-listed fund or ETF that fulfils some requirements (which in practice are apparently usually fine).
They also said that, with either the Charity Account or the Charitable Trust, you can make donations to any UK-registered charity, most overseas registered charities, and sometimes social enterprises (overseas charities and social enterprises have an approval process to go through, which theyâre willing to do for a large enough donation).I think I may open one of these at some point in the next couple of years, will update if I do!
My impression from CAFâs webpage on their Charity Accounts was that the 4% fee was a one-off when you contribute money to the account, rather than an annual fee on the balance. However itâs not very clear and the other interpretation definitely makes sense too. Is anyoneâs knowledge from a source other than the website?
Thanks so much for writing this! I feel like I end up trying to express this idea quite frequently and Iâm really glad for the resource on it. Iâd also love to see talking about our non-altruistic goals and motivations become more normalised within EA, so yes, thanks đ
Personally I identify with the approach youâre expressing very strongly â I find it hard to understand the thought that I might care for my friends only because it ultimately helps me help the world more; I think of them in different categories. But then I know others who find it very alien that I both care a lot about helping the world as much as possible, but am also happy making some decisions for completely non-altruistic reasons. Have others come up against this divide as a problem issue in EA discussions? I feel like at times it is a place where discussions have got stuck.
Iâd be interested in knowing too, as others have asked, how do you (and others) tend to approach weighing things to spend your time on against each other when they are part of different goals? I have various strategies that I try, but they usually boil down to using the non-EA goals as constraints â if there is a choice between a morally effective thing and something else, I usually end up doing the EA thing when I get the answer ânoâ to questions like âwill doing it make me sadâ or âwould I be failing in something I owe to someone elseâ. I donât find that very satisfactory â how do others do it?
Thank you very much for sharing this; I think itâs a really powerful idea and piece of writing!
I feel similarly to you, however I also strongly identify with the opportunity framing myself â I think this is beause Iâve always seen it a little differently to how youâre expressing it:
For me the âexcitementâ in the opportunity framing isnât in finding out that there are people in a very bad situation whom I have an opportunity to help; it comes in finding out that something can be done about problems that I, if in a non-specific sense, already knew about. Before finding out about EA, I (and Iâd imagine many others) already knew that the world has lots of terrible experiences and unhappy people in it, and cared about that, but thinking that there was nothing I could do about it, the only practical response was to ignore it and shut the feelings away. The excitement of EA for me is in finding out that, in fact, you can do something real and measurable to help, without unachievable resources. Iâm not celebrating finding out about the bomb; I already knew about the bomb â Iâve just found out for the first time that thereâs a way out.
I therefore wouldnât see the opportunity framing as having the problem that you identify. (Although I certainly agree that itâs highly distasteful to come anywhere near excitement at how terrible the world is; I have definitely experienced discourse within EA that has made me uncomfortable for feeling like itâs approaching that.) Is this different to how others who identify with the opportunity framing feel? Rereading Excited Altruism and Cheerfully I see that that distinction isnât mentioned, but I suppose Iâd always assumed that that was how others felt?
Hi Rockwell!
Yes, in most relevant senses thatâs correct. Weâre a new team, we think of ourselves as a new project, and Forethought Foundationâs past activities (e.g. its Fellowship programs) and public presence have been wound down. We do have continuity with Forethought Foundation in some ways, mainly legal/âadministrative.