Thanks for writing this, and for liberating the draft!

As someone who's closer to category #2 than #1 (I worked in the corporate world for a long time before starting at an ea-aligned and -founded biosecurity nonprofit) I'm, as you say, naturally inclined to like this post. But considerations in the other direction:

• People who didn't spend 5+ years in the corporate world and instead spent them doing altruistically useful things probably got a bunch of altruistically useful things done.

• If you're advising young EAs on what to do after graduating this is effectively suggesting they wait 3-10y before substantially contributing, which is time during which they might drift away from EA (or AI might end the world as we know it, etc).

• People who went to grad school (ex: my PhD biosecurity coworkers) are already pretty far into their career by the time they fully finish school. But maybe you're mostly thinking about college grads?

To the extent that you're thinking about where to recruit EAs for direct work, though, if you can find people with more experience in a wide range of work that's certainly valuable!

Thank you for this post - I definitely have some similar and related concerns about experience levels in senior roles in EA organisations. And I likewise don't know how worried to be about it - in particular I'm unclear about whether what I've observed is representative or exceptional cases. 

What I have observed is not from some structured analysis, but from a random selection of people and organisations I've looked up in the course of exploring job opportunities at various EA organisations. So in line with note above about being unsure whether it's representative, it's very unclear to me how much weight to assign to these observations.  

Concerns: narrowness of skillsets/lack of diversity of experience*; limited experience of 'what good looks like'; compounding effect of this on junior staff joining now.
*By 'experience' I do not strictly mean number of years working; though there may often be a correlation, I have met colleagues who have been in the workforce 40 years and have relatively limited experience/skillset and colleagues in the workforce for 5 years who have picked up a huge amount of experience, knowledge and skills. 

Observations I've been surprised by:
- Hiring managers with reasonably large teams who have only been in the workforce for a couple of years themselves and / or have no experience in the operational field they're line managing (e.g. in charge of all grant processes, but never previously worked in a grant-giving organisation). 
- Entire organisations populated solely with staff fresh out of university. Appreciate these are often startups, appreciate you can be exceptionally bright and have a lot to contribute at 22/post-PhD, but also you don't know what you don't know at that very early career stage. 
- EA orgs with significant budgets where some or all of the senior leadership team have been in the workforce for 3 years or less, and / or have only ever worked in start ups or organisations that have a very small number of employees.

Unfortunately, it is not just limited to potential(ly unfounded concerns about) inexperience of individuals. As I've been reading job descriptions, application forms etc., specific content has also made me uneasy / feel there is a lack of experience in some of these organisations. This has included, but is not limited to: poor/entirely absent consideration of disabilities and the Equality Act in job application processes; statements of 'we are going to implement xxxx' that seem wildly unrealistic/naive; job descriptions that demonstrate a lack of knowledge of how an operational area works; and funders describing practices or desired future practices that are intentionally actively avoided by established grant funding organisations due to the amount of bias it would lead to in grant awarding decisions. 

Why am I concerned? 
In the case of the content that surprised me, I'm concerned both because of the risks associated with the specific issues but also that they may be indicators of the organisations as a whole having poor controls and low risk maturity - and it's very difficult for organisations to be effective and efficient when that is the case. 

Also I've been in the workforce for nearly 15 years, and when I think about my own experience at different organisations, it strikes me that:
- I've learned an awful lot over that time and I see a huge difference in my professional competence and decision making now versus early in my career. 
- There has been a big difference in the quality of processes, learning and experience at different organisations. And being honest, in larger organisations I learned more; working with colleagues who had 20+ years' experience and had been in charge of large, complex projects or big teams or had just been around long enough to see some issues that only happen infrequently has been very valuable. Seeing how things work in lots of different organisations and sectors has taught me a lot. 
- I worry a lack of diversity amongst employees in any organisation. For all organisations, decision-making is likely to be worse if there's a lack of diversity of opinions and experience. And in particular orgs where everyone did the same degree can have big blind spots, narrow expertise, or entrenched group think issues. For EA organisations in particular, in the same way as I think career politicians are problematic, I worry that people who have only worked in EA orgs may lack understanding of the experience of the vast majority of the population who don't work in the EA sector, and this could be problematic for all sorts of reasons, particularly when trying to engage the wider public. 
- Many of these EA orgs are in growth mode. I've seen how difficult rapid growth can be for organisations. Periods of rapid growth are often high risk not just because of the higher stakes of strategic decision-making in these periods, but because on the operational side it is very different having a 5 person organisation vs a 20 person organisation vs a 100 person organisation vs a 1,000 person organisation - you need completely different controls, systems, processes and skillsets as you grow and it can be very challenging to make this transition at the same time as (1) trying to deliver the growth/ambitions and (2) probably being in a position where you have quite a lot of vacancies as the hiring into roles will always lag behind identification of the need for additional staff. Trying to do this also with a team who also hasn't seen what an organisation of the size they are aiming for looks like is going to mean even greater challenges. 

Importantly - I suspect there are advantages too:
- I can see real advantages, particularly culturally, to having a workforce where all or most staff are early career or otherwise have not experienced work outside of EA orgs. For example, lots of long-established or large organisations really struggle to shift culture and get away from misogyny or to get buy-in on prioritising mental health. Younger staff members - as a generalisation - tend to have more progressive views. And experience in the private sector can cause even progressive individuals to pick up bad habits/take on negative elements of culture.
- Though I've been alarmed by some elements of application processes, some elements of the unorthodox application processes have been positive. It's refreshing to see very honest descriptions/information, and prompts that try to minimise time from candidates in early application stages. 
- Perhaps linked to culture being set by more progressive leaders, in many EA orgs I've looked into there is a focus on time and budget for learning/wellbeing that is in line with best practice and well ahead of many organisations in other sectors. E.g. I've commonly seen a commitment to £5k personal development spend from EA orgs; in many sectors, even in large organisations this type of commitment is still rare and it's much more common to see lip-service type statements like 'learning and development is a priority' without budgetary backing. 

N.B. In the spirit of drafts amnesty week, this response is largely off the top of my head so is rough around the edges and could probably include better examples/explanations/expansions if I spent a long time thinking about and redrafting it. However, I took the approach of better rough and shared than unfinished and unsaid. 

People are asking for data on this, and I think it is a good intuition to do so, but I know myself and the options were either write/design this in 20 minutes or it never exists at all.

Maybe it’s motivated reasoning but sometimes I hope posts like this provide the groundwork for scaffolding, whereby someone takes the tiny amount of confidence I had and builds on it.

Yeah, I think this is basically right. EA orgs probably favor Profile 1 people because they've demonstrated more EA alignment, meaning: (1) the Profile 1 people will tend to be more familiar with EA orgs than the Profile 2 people, so may be better positioned to assess their fit for any given org/role, (2) conversely, EA orgs will tend to be more familiar with Profile 1 people, since they've been in the community for a while, meaning orgs may be better able to assess a prospective Profile 1 employee's fit, and (3) if the Profile 1 employee leaves/is fired, they'll be less inclined to trash/sue the EA org.

Favoring Profile 1 people because of (3) would be bad (and I hope orgs aren't explicitly or implicitly doing this!), but favoring them because of (1) + (2) seems pretty reasonable, even though there are downsides associated with this (e.g., bad norms are less likely to get challenged, insights/innovations from other spheres won't make it into EA, etc). 

That said, I think one thing your post misses is that there are a lot of people who are closer to Profile 2 people (professionally) who are pretty embedded in EA (socially, academically, extracurricularly, etc). And I think orgs also tend to favor these people, which may mitigate at least some of the aforementioned downsides of EA being an insular ecosystem (i.e., the insights/innovations from other spheres one, if not the challenging norms one). 

A final piece of speculation: getting a job at an EA org is a lot more prestigious for EAs than it is for people outside of EA, and the career capital conferred by working at EA orgs has a much lower exchange rate outside of EA. As a result, it wouldn't shock me if top Profile 2 candidates are applying to EA jobs at much lower rates and are much less likely to take EA jobs they're offered. If this is the case, the discrepancy you're observing may not reflect an unwillingness of EA orgs to hire impressive Profile 2 candidates, but rather a lack of interest from Profile 2 candidates whose backgrounds are on par with the Profile 1 candidates'. 

Thanks for this post! To add one thought that keeps bugging me: I believe joining an EA org on average lowers career capital by a medium to large extent in comparison to alternative plausible careers.

1. many jobs are less specifically relevant for the continuous development of industry-job market cash-cow skills (or whatever one wants to call that).

2. joining an EA-org feels rather awkward to explain to the majority of employers with a feeling that most are not particularly moved towards "PRO-employ" by the explanation one will give.

If true, this has some severe implications which IMO are not discussed prominently enough (both in the struggle for attracting talent and in the discussion on leadership's abilities which this post adresses, see e.g. lock-in effects and biases).

In my personal career decisions, this suspicion has had a large multiplier effect on the uncertainties I am struggling with (say, the good-ness of E2G (I believe the community under-estimates), EA (..), how much to invest into career capital vs. when to start cashing in).

Edit: For people downvoting this, please don't if you do it because that data is already available. I made this comment before Lorenzo's excellent data was published (see his comment, above).

I think having data at least just roughly on how many percent there is of each would help me. If its 95% and 5% it feels like we lack diversity in experience. If it's 30% and 70% I think I would be less worried.