The outline structure makes this easy to skim. Thank you!
Richard Möhn
Karma: 268
I like this. The actionable points are a bit buried in the prose, but you describe two ways of going astray that I hadn’t thought about. Thank you!
One thing I would always mention is that false negatives are less costly in hiring than false positives. But I guess the article is written for an intermediate level of hiring skill, so that point is taken for granted.
It’s long, but it looks like Rethink Priorities have put a lot of thought into this job posting: https://careers.rethinkpriorities.org/en/postings/8588ecc5-3e26-4086-bdb2-fe9a2eb43252
Richard Möhn’s Quick takes
Sounds good!
By the way, another thing one might try: Adding salt during the soaking and again during the cooking. Perhaps one teaspoon per kg of beans. In my experience, it also reduces cooking times. I haven’t evaluated it rigorously, though.
Perhaps it’s because of farts? I hope I don’t get downvoted for bringing this up – it’s serious and, I suspect, a major inconvenience for people who cook beans from scratch.
It could be that cooking beans for a long time (maybe combined with regular skimming or whatever other techniques we don’t know about) makes them cause way less flatulence than soaking them in little water and cooking for a short time. People recommend soaking for reducing beans’ gas-generation potential, but in my experience (yes, I’ve used a tally counter to count my farts under different soaking and cooking conditions and bean species, but obviously N=1) it takes a lot of soaking water to do that. I’ve found 7 l for 500 g of dry beans to work decently. After soaking I drain and then cook in a small amount of water.
And soaking with a lot of water has implications that might not work for Ugandans:
You need a much bigger soaking container than cooking container. (Or have to soak in multiple changes of water, which becomes tedious.)
You need more water.
If you want a lot of beans for dinner, draining the water becomes physically difficult for one person.
Speaking of dinner: If you eat three meals with beans per day, you’ll have two or three containers going for soaking. It’s likely easier to have one pot over the fire that just gets restarted soon after each meal. (Assuming that refrigeration is hard to come by in Uganda.)
Further practical issues:
If the beans are small, draining the soaking water requires a sieve or colander, which people might not have.
Beans start to ferment when soaked in hot weather (as mentioned in other comments, I think). The more they ferment, the stranger they taste and the longer they need to be cooked because of acid building up. (Try and cook some beans with vinegar added to the water.)
It’s easy to forget to start soaking them in time.
Personally, I do soak and use a pressure cooker. But perhaps that’s a luxury.
Thanks for writing this analysis! I agree with a most of it. One other argument I’ve heard for not providing feedback after job applications is that it carries legal risk. What the risk is specifically, I don’t know – perhaps a candidate could sue you for discrimination if you inadvertently choose the wrong words? A way to mitigate this risk is the phrase ‘You didn’t demonstrate… [mastery of Python, facility in calming down angry customers, whatever]’. It avoids making statements about the candidate in general and instead focuses on their behaviour during the application process, which you’ve observed. [1] It can be addition to your points about how to give feedback.
[1] https://www.manager-tools.com/2013/07/you-did-not-demonstrate-part-1-hall-fame-guidance
Another important skill for supervising translators:
Management of production processes. (In contrast to classic project management.)
And if the translators are semi-professionals drawn from the community:
Leadership/management
I’ve seen problems from a lack of these in one translation project.
Thanks for taking the initiative on this!
Thanks! I appreciate your comment. (Not so sure about the magnanimity. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to get my revenge.) But Harold Godsoe gave me some good advice.)
It happens often on this forum. 🤷♂️ (This is meant seriously, not as a reference to the mass-downvoting my article experienced.)
This whole affair has cost me way more time than anyone else, I suspect. I just wanted to have some closure. And it’s not like I ‘pressured’ someone to engage on the front page. (Although for some reason, more people appear to be looking at this than I expected.)
Thanks for not deleting my comment outright, though.
Finally I got some answers for you, although they don’t address your questions directly. Earlier I didn’t want to cast suspicion on a potentially innocent person and wanted to investigate further. But now I’ve found a way to respond without spending time investigating and in a way that gives the person a chance to clear the suspicion.
In the top comment, Lizka writes that the user who did the mass voting is being banned for six months (ie. until around April 2023). I suspect that it is Neil Ferro (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/neil-ferro-1) and I’ve emailed him that I posted this comment. If he replies to this comment, he is not banned and therefore most likely innocent. If he doesn’t reply to this comment, he is most likely banned for creating a bunch of accounts to downvote my post. Whatever the outcome, I have no plans to take further steps.
As to the organization behind ‘Hirely’: I want to point out again that they’ve probably improved. And it’s not like other EA orgs do hiring perfectly either (see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jmbP9rwXncfa32seH/after-one-year-of-applying-for-ea-jobs-it-is-really-really, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qJMjbHp9HKxT8XEhp/, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/njJzBcaWJqtuFgqCh/the-job-interview-process-is-borderline-predatory). And I still won’t mention their name, but I will list a few organizations they claim they have worked/are working with. This allows you (or the rare other person who comes across this) to ask those organizations (and ideally the applicants) about their experience with any former hiring consultants and find out how they’re doing with regard to the points I’ve laid out about hiring well:
Jaan Tallinn
I’m glad it’s helping!
Great reminder! This podcast episode has some actionable ideas for how to reach out to people who were laid off: https://www.manager-tools.com/2009/02/bench-development-downturn
I see. Thanks!
Good to know, thanks!
For completeness, my idea of a rejection phone call (derived from https://www.manager-tools.com/2014/11/how-turn-down-job-candidate-part-1) is:
You call, greet the person, say in the first sentence that you won’t be making an offer, say a few more short sentences, react to any responses, then hang up. You don’t make it a conversation. The important thing is that they hear your voice.
It’s fine to speak on voicemail and for the other person not to call back. This avoids phone tag.
Note that Manager Tools doesn’t always have to most airtight arguments, but they tend to have tested their core guidance (which includes hiring) empirically.
What share of people took you up on that?/Did anyone comment on the offer?
Because with email it’s easy to read in a tone of ‘you suck, we’re sending you boilerplate niceties to get rid of you’, which is not possible with a phone call. (Unless the caller makes it sound like boilerplate niceties. I’m not saying such calls are easy. Email is the easy cop-out.) Something like that. Have you had the experience where you keep communicating with someone by text and get more and more annoyed with them, then you get on a call and all annoyance melts away because hearing a voice reminds you of the other person’s humanity? Perhaps it’s just me who thinks strange things.
Ultimately it’s an empirical question and my prediction is that on balance, a phone call has more value.
I think Yanni isn’t writing about personal favourites. Assuming there is such a thing as objective truth, it makes sense to discuss cause prioritization as an objective question.