lukeprog
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Roughly how much time per month/year does each of the fund managers currently expect to spend on investigating, discussing, and deciding on grant opportunities?
I disagree about the strength of evidence for CBT-I effectiveness.
Somebody asked the following question:
I understand that OP’s preference is to have promising candidates attend an in-person work trial rather than do an additional remote work test; would this preference still stand if the candidate in question has to obtain a US work visa sponsorship in order to attend the in-person trial?
Our reply is: Yes, that preference stands regardless of current work authorization status, though of course in some cases there won’t be any way for us to help an applicant get US work authorization, depending on their situation.
Responding to your second formulation of the question, the answer is “more the latter than the former.” We intend to invest heavily in training and mentoring new hires, and we hope that research analysts will end up being long-term core contributors at Open Phil — as research analysts, as grant investigators, and as high-level managers, among other roles — or, in some cases, in important roles that require similar skills outside Open Phil.
Unfortunately the likelihood is still pretty unclear to us at this point, and the available options vary a fair bit by applicant, depending on which country they’re from, whether they recently graduated from undergrad or graduate school, and other factors.
Quick replies to each:
1a. Our goals for 2018 are laid out in the post you linked to.
1b. The expectation is based mostly on the fact that we gave well over $100 million last year, and we’re devoting similar time and effort to grantmaking in 2018.
2a. Open Phil is still a fairly new organization, and I don’t think many know much about us yet. Probably we are best known in the effective altruism community, where we seem to have a strong reputation.
2b. Does it matter for our reputation, do you mean? I’m not sure. I’m not aware of us having received critiques about that.
Completion of an honours or masters program provides us with a bit more evidence about an applicant’s capabilities than an undergraduate degree does, but both are less informative to us than the applicant’s performance on the various work samples that are part of our application process.
Because our roles are so “generalist,” there are few domains that are especially relevant, though microeconomics and statistics are two unusually broadly relevant fields. In general, we find that those with a STEM background do especially well at the kind of work we do, but a STEM background is not required. A couple other things that are likely helpful for getting and excelling in an Open Phil research analyst role are calibration training and practice making Fermi estimates.
Possibly. If a research analyst excels at the job after being hired, and seems likely to continue excel even while remote, we’d certainly consider it.
Here’s a question I received via email, which I’ll answer here so others can benefit from the answer.
QUESTION
Would you be able to give examples of how the research has been used for decision making around giving money/grants?
ANSWER
Sure, here are a few examples:
Our research on the history of philanthropy helped us decide to be more ambitious: “we are more interested in working on daunting problems over long periods of time after learning about some of philanthropy’s past contributions.” This has increased the amount of attention and funding we’ve spent on daunting challenges that will likely require investment over many years to achieve the impacts we hope for.
Our shallow investigations into several different global catastrophic risks enabled us to choose initial priorities in that category. Most importantly, we launched grantmaking focus areas in “biosecurity and pandemic preparedness” and “potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.” Across those two focus areas we’ve since made more than $80 million in grants.
Our research on moral patienthood persuaded us to begin making grants related to fish welfare. Since then, we’ve made more than $6 million in fish welfare grants.
Yes, you may submit a writing sample by sending it to jobs@openphilanthropy.org, as FirstName.LastName.Sample (e.g. John.Smith.Sample.doc or John.Smith.Sample.pdf). If you’d like to submit a letter of recommendation, please include it as a page of your résumé.
Please keep in mind that writing samples and letters of recommendation are entirely optional, so if you don’t already have them handy, I don’t recommend spending time pulling them together. Our application process puts much more weight on work test performance anyway.
What kind of conformity are you asking about? Certainly, some degree of alignment with our mission and values is important to us, and so is talent and “fit” for the work. Our team members are encouraged to focus on optimizing for Open Phil’s mission, even when it means pushing back on their manager.
Because applicants are working through our application process at different speeds, we’re still learning what portion of applicants are invited forward at each stage. We are also adjusting the process as we go along. As of today, our application process looks like this:
Initial submission of application + résumé.
2-question timed test.
A “conversation notes” work test. (compensated via honorarium)
A brief call, to explain the rest of our process and answer the applicant’s questions.
An “internal grant write-up” work test. (compensated via honorarium)
To some degree we are still determining next steps after #5, and they depend somewhat on the applicant’s availability and preferences, and that’s the main thing we discuss with applicants at step #4, on an individual basis.
Yes, we recently removed a 2-question timed test from the job ad page. We wanted to lower the cost of submitting an initial application, and also we want to filter some applications before we request that applicants take the timed test. However, we are still using this timed test in an early part of our application process, and we still think it is diagnostic of who will be a good fit for our research analyst positions.
(I work for Open Phil.)
It’s hard to say. To me the cultures seem very similar, but my personal access to GiveWell culture is limited since I work for Open Phil. Perhaps to other people the cultures seems importantly different, but I can’t predict what those perceived differences would be.
(I work for Open Phil.)
This is tough to answer in general; see my reply to a similar question here. Probably best to discuss this on an individual basis if/when an applicant reaches the interview stage of our application process.
(I work for Open Phil.)
For salaried positions there is no “contract length”; employment at Open Philanthropy is at-will, just as it is with most California employers.
This one was announced here.
(I work for Open Phil.)
We’d encourage someone like that to apply, and flag in their application that they currently would plan to leave after a couple years to go to graduate school. Depending on their fit for the work, we might be excited to consider their application anyway, or we might not.
Roughly how much time per month/year does each of the fund managers currently expect to spend on investigating, discussing, and deciding on grant opportunities?