I can totally recommend the office with Thomas and Basti organising it. I come here once a week and I enjoy working there a lot. The rooms are spacious, we have spare monitors, the kitchen is big enough to have lunch together and it’s great to bump into people working on EA things :)
If you are ever in Berlin, feel free to come by.
Thanks for taking the time to write this, Joy! I like your clear and engaging writing style, and the length and structure of the post.
Things I’ve done in the past that fall under ops (and haven’t been mentioned before)
Working with all sorts of (external) people:
Volunteers and interns (writing job adverts, coming up with policies and performance reviews, coordination between people and projects)
Members: I worked in a small NGO with 300 members, so I’d be the person to send out updates, answer any questions and do all the admin stuff, plus organising events
Comms things
Newsletters and keeping the website up to date
CRM
small scale Data analysis
Things I’m now doing as an Executive Assistant:
Personal things such as booking doctors appointments, arranging travels and vaccines, phone contracts, sublets, passport renewals, expenses—anything that saves the person I’m supporting some time
Comms: I’m drafting emails in somebody elses voice which is interesting and exciting
Scheduling and getting familiar with all the time zones
Project management
Just a lot of detail oriented, watch team backup, to make sure things don’t drop and deadlines are in check
Some more random thoughts:
I feel like group organisers could make great ops people, because they often have to do a bit of everything. So if you’ve enjoyed being the person holding the group together and making things happen, it could be a good indicator that you’d like ops
Operations sometimes looks easy from the outside, and mostly people only notice you if/when things go wrong (because normally, you remove obstacles before they appear for others)
“If it would feel like a relief to have someone’s permission to go, you have mine.”
This resonates and feels important, thanks for including this, Julia! <3
“Social situations are also assessments”
This is something I was surprised by when I first got more involved. Thank you for writing it out so clearly—I think there are many people who would benefit from knowing about these EA social dynamics.
And more general: Thank you for providing so much value to the community and offering to help in these tricky situations.
Max Dalton (CEA) gave a talk about this at EAG London 2021 - help find your dream colleague, going through the pros and cons and giving some arguments for using some of your time for mentoring.
This is not a helpful comment: But I wish I had known there were EAs in Guatemala when I was there 2 years ago—thanks for the work you do!
Thank you for writing this up and putting it out there (coming from a non-fancy background I can totally relate!).
One of the best things for my mental health this year was realising and allowing myself to accept that I am not and never will be a top researcher/EA thinker/ the person with the most accurate AI timelines/.…
However, I do have an ops background and can see that my work is valuable, and there is no need for me to be the smartest in the room, as long as I get stuff done.
I’d guess there are small things everyone can contribute (even just being a friendly face at an event and talking to new people can be really valuable).
Additionally, I wish we had some more socialiogical studies about the EA community (posts like this one by Julia Wise).
Done, took less than 20 seconds—thanks for posting :)
Thank you for writing this really useful and entertaining post, Severin. It has definitely motivated me to facilitate some more gatherings!
Thank you for taking the time to write this post, Michelle! A lot of it resonates with me and it’s a good reminder to sometimes zoom out a bit and think about the positives and the good parts about EA.
Meta: Just wanted to quickly say that I really appreciate how you communicate on the Forum, Peter. You’re thoughtful, ask productive questions and lay out biases which I find very helpful. Thank you for taking the time to engage with the content on the Forum, and sharing your thoughts.
I’m so glad a project like Magnify Mentoring exists and am really happy to hear that you got funding to run another round. Back in 2020 my mentor helped me navigate my applications to different EA orgs and it was soo helpful!
I now have my first mentee and it’s a very rewarding thing to give back to the community.
As always, thank you so much for your effort and engagement, Kathryn + others!
Thanks for posting this, Zoe, this was really useful! I’ve subscribed to the Newsletter, too.
Thanks for writing this, Phoebe—as Ollie said, this contains a bunch of really good ops advice I find myself telling people who want to get into ops. I’ll def be sending them this post!
Thanks for writing this up, Catherine! Career paths always seem to straight forward in hindsight and I enjoyed getting a bit more context on your path.
As always, thank you for all you do and I’m so grateful we have you in the community!
Thanks for taking the time to write this, Eirin! I love the “if you say things twice, write it down” rule from your other post. I’ll think about setting something like this up for myself.
And I like the idea of having a productivity check in.
Thank you for taking the time to write this post, Tobias.
It resonated a lot with me and as I’ve recently been thinking (and experiencing!) how privileged I am. I’m spending the winter in a warm place and there are a lot of homeless people here. One way I deal with this emotionally is that I give them 50ct-1€ every time I see a homeless person. This money does not come out of my normal donation budget and it makes me feel like I can make a slight difference in somebodys day. I know it’s not the “EA thing” to do, but as others said in the comments, there is no need to be sticking to EA principles 100% of the time.
Especially for ops roles, I’ve been surprised by people not actually following the instructions correctly (especially related to re-naming the work test document in a specific way, or making sure you’re using the correct view settings).
Another extreme example would be for candidates to just copy and paste LLM answers and only slightly formatting them—oftentimes the answers are way too long and not relevant for the specific task.
As Eli said, making sure you have few typos, consistent formatting and answering the questions correctly, being clear on your uncertainties and making comments how you made a decision or what you’d do if you had more time etc.
Recently, I’ve started working as a full-time personal assistant in an EA org. I’d be really interested to hear any advice on how to reduce the amount of time scheduling takes up (currently 1 h of my day). Is there any advice for how to process scheduling requests, often over different time zones and with busy people? Calendly works for some situations, but is not really that helpful.