COO Successif, Trustee Effective Ventures UK, and member of the Talos Network board
Co-Director EA Germany 2023⁄24, entrepreneur for over 25 years, member of the EA Munich organizer team since 2020.
Patrick Gruban 🔸
Karma: 2,479
I keep thinking that we have plenty of people involved in EA who are onboard with the general ideas and who want to contribute, but who lack specific skills. Is this a good thing?
It seems there are two ways to solve this: Upskill motivated people or help skilled people stay motivated throughout the career transition. While there are enough resources outside impact areas to help people upskill and more traditional jobs, an impactful talent org can better support the latter.
When people are surprised that you would need motivation to switch jobs without upskilling, I like to point them to Jim Chapman’s post, who went through dozens of applications, rejections, and several programs as an experienced professional. This is a pretty typical journey that we see at Successif as we have written about here. Programs like HIP and the CEA Bootcamp also support this (similar the School for Moral Ambition).
A couple of years ago, almost all programs in this space were for people who still needed upskilling, and I think this led organizations to sometimes hire people who didn’t have the necessary skills and who had to learn on the job. Having experienced professionals join seems better to me for most orgs.
Are there specific skills that you see that regular training programs don’t do well and might be better suited to offer specifically for our ecosystem?
@Yonatan Cale posted a demo last week of an app he’s building in the EAG Bay Area Slack.
I agree and argued in a similar direction in a comment last year.
As an employer, I would not want to rely on an employee taking a below-market salary. Otherwise, I might be incentivised to keep someone on the team even if they are underperforming, undermining the work of other team members. I would want to hire for talent first and leave salary discussion for the last step, to avoid bias.
That being said, there might be good cases for early-stage orgs that might otherwise not be able to hire, or for positions that might open because of the low salary requirements. At Successif, we recommend that job-seekers use informational interviews with potential employers to explore these kinds of new roles.
My short Claude prompt was only intended as a conversation starter, so I’m happy this worked. I’m not considering investing, but if potential investors would like to carry this on and share here, this might be useful.
I agree and would encourage potential investors to take into consideration base rates of startups reaching €1M+ on profits yearly when comparing this to other forms of investments. I spent 5 min prompting Claude to come up with a BOTEC based on this post, which I haven’t checked but could be an entry point to additional research.
The board members of EA Germany are elected by the members (over 100) of the organization. The board is responsible for hiring the director.
What you write aligns with the challenges we see from our advisees, and based on your profile, you may be a good fit for our career advising program if you are open to working on AI Risk reduction.
For people we have helped in our program, we typically see transition timelines of 6-18 months, but just today I talked with someone for whom it took two years. My colleague Moneer wrote about his experiences in getting into a position, which included taking 170 actions (like applications, 1-1s, projects). This can seem like a lot, but it comes down to 3 per week on average over a year.
You don’t have to have an academic background to succeed (I never went to university myself), but regardless of your qualifications, be prepared for it to take time to find a position. In our advising, we emphasize the importance of building networks, conducting informational interviews, and getting more information on how to position oneself as a promising candidate.
That being said, you might be able to have a higher counterfactual impact if you find a position that is not in one of the well-known orgs—I would keep that in mind.
Talent pipelines. There’s no fellowship to train people to go directly into advocacy for AIS, compared to over 10 such efforts aimed at research. We’re training AIS researchers by the 100s, and leaving advocates to figure it out for themselves.
I’m not sure if this is different from what you meant, but we ran the first iteration of our AI Safety Advocacy Fellowship this year with promising results.
It seems 1- 1s are done remotely, which means this could also be done by an international organization. I assume this would allow it to be more cost-effective as you would only need one organization, director, CRM, and training for several people who could do 1-1s for several regions.
Thank you for asking this question! I have the feeling that for some national groups, we might be upholding them based on path dependence, not because they have intentionally selected the right target group. I wrote a recent comment about this, based on my experience at EA Germany.
I’m most excited about national organisations that can reach specific, narrow target groups, as many of the scalable programs would seem more efficient to do on a larger scale.
That being said, a larger organization operating at the continental or international level could still hire contractors to experiment with smaller interventions. This would mean having only one organization with one director, potentially increasing cost-effectiveness while allowing for experimentation with different target groups and markets.
A director of EA Europe could hire a team to organize a conference in the North of the UK, for example, while having an Italian-speaking contractor doing 1- 1s for Italy and organizing group calls for European CBs. As a UK CB, you take away these possibilities as you artificially narrow the focus without much reason.
I would be excited for EA UK to think more broadly in scope, connect with other European national groups, and expand the parameters within which the director would be allowed to operate.
So exciting to see that you are doing the first EAGx in South America (if I’m not mistaken)!
I am sorry that you have to deel with kind of frustration. At Successif we have done double blind work tests for the first round of the hiring interviews for advisor applications and had good results.
On the other hand we recently hired for an operation associate and didn’t do this. I’ve become less excited about written work tests given LLM capabilities and I think work tests can cover only parts of what I’m looking for. I’d rather have people describe what they did before in their application so I can talk with them about the details in the interview.
In this case we hired someone with several years of experience doing the kinds of things we were looking for in a another organization without having been involved in EA. I don’t know how representative that is, but I do nudge organizations to hire for experience before alignment when asked.
I can’t comment on your situation as there is not enough information but if people ask me about operations roles I typically recommend to upskill outside the impact space in organizations which can provide mentorship and good operational procedures—something which is sadly sometimes missing in our space.
In terms of counterfactuals I would suspect that we are sometimes seeing negative values by only hiring within the community and often very small ones for many of the competitive operation positions. For our recent hiring round we received 70 applications in four days before closing the applications. We had many brilliant and purpose driven people apply who were affected by USAID cuts.So what could you do in addition to upskilling? Volunteer roles can be a great way to get into roles which will never be publicly announced. Similarly networking, doing small scale side projects, being around people in organizations and helping them (for example helping the local or national community) can help to stand out.
Sometimes it can also be the most impactful thing to have a solid career, donate a be the person to help others in the community. Imagine a strong hub of people in Rome* doing impactful work together because you were there to consistently support them and fill the gaps in the local space. This could be awesome.
*I don’t know anything about EA in Rome so only speculating
I can see democratic models providing value, but the practical implementation is tricky. I can only speak from my experience in EA Germany, where member engagement in national-level strategy and participation in the national community seemed much lower than what I experience on the international level (in this forum, for example) or even at the city level at times.
I would be more excited about either local structures (cities or small regions with fewer than 10 million people) or larger structures (sub-continents, professional groups, etc.) where people truly form a community in the sense that they see each other in person, or where there is a large enough body to allow for meaningful participation in democratic processes.
Thank you for offering this! Are you collaborating with Tlön?
My guess would be that the main pros of having democratic deliberation doesn’t come from when the going is normal but rather as a resillience mechanism?
Perhaps, but I can also imagine that a hand-selected nonprofit board may be able to spot risks and react to them better than a board voted in an assembly. The coordination function of an assembly in trying to fill specific board roles seems lower than if a smaller group of existing board members can discuss it.
Picture it. The year is 2035 (9 years after the RSI near-miss event triggered the first Great Revolt). You ride your bitchin’ electric scooter to the EA-adjacent community center where you and your friends co-work on a local voter awareness campaign, startup idea, or just a fun painting or whatever. An intentional community.
We run something similar in Munich, where we have a coworking space that also hosts EA-adjacent events (including crafting events), located in the middle of the city, allowing people to bike there. So, very sympathetic to the idea of having local groups doing this.
I agree with the benefits of local community structures. However, I don’t believe that national EA groups can offer as much as informal local groups. I help manage both formal and informal networks of EA (adjacent) individuals in Munich, and there, I see these points much more clearly. Running a coworking space, hosting in-person events, convening private meetings, and having one-on-ones seem like activities that would fit your list.
Thank you for writing this up!
Some critics worry that democracy might impede nimble decision-making or divert energy from high-impact goals. Yet EA Norway’s record — attracting steady funding and successfully supporting members with their careers and donations — suggests otherwise.
I’m somewhat confused about what led you to this conclusion. I was the co-director of EA Germany for two years, an organization that is similarly structured. When I compare it to the memberless nonprofits where I’m a board member, the overhead for organizing a general assembly has been greater, yet it hasn’t resulted in significant decision-making input from the members.
Having fee-paying members suits an organization that benefits its members. At EA Germany, the target group for the interventions wasn’t the members, but rather people in earlier stages of the talent pipeline. If I want to contribute to talent pipeline development, I would prefer to donate to the charity I consider most cost-effective. It is unlikely that this would be the national EA group, given the numerous players in this space. Therefore, I would personally hesitate to join a national group that requires fees, unless tax reasons or special insider knowledge lead me to believe this is the best use of my donations.
Overall, I worry that national membership groups in EA lead people to make decisions that are not solely motivated by EA principles. My theory is that the main activities currently undertaken by national EA organizations could be carried out more cost-effectively by fewer players with a broader geographic reach. I fear that membership organizations are not the best structures to critically evaluate their existence and shut down if they believe members’ time and money could be better spent elsewhere.
I very much agree with that. When people with no/little professional experience ask me about getting into impactful work outside research, my default advice is to upskill outside impact orgs for a few years and then see how they can apply this experience later. Sometimes I fear that organizations in our space contribute to the problem by hiring more on the basis of value alignment than professional skills, with hiring managers sometimes not even aware of what the strongest candidate for a role could look like, as they don’t have experience with this.
This ultimately goes up to management, where I’m surprised to see few org founders hiring experienced CEOs and stepping into roles they are better suited to (Chief Strategist, Chief Researcher, Chief Policymaker, etc.). When I started my first startup straight out of school, this is what we did, and that enabled us to grow the org to over 100 people quickly. I would have been out of my depth at that time to hire the kind of middle management orgs need at that size.
That being said, at RAISEimpact, we help org leaders with hiring strategy and thinking about team composition and culture, so hopefully we can help in this way.