I just read this post from 80,000 Hours about how "AI Safety organisations’ growth is seriously bottlenecked by a lack of senior management, strategy, and operational leadership talent. " rather than by funding. (original boldface). A similar claim was posted in the EA Forum earlier this year: AI safety is extremely bottlenecked on grantmakers — EA Forum.
This seems like an unfortunate but also extremely stupid situation. If this work is so important, why not just hire experienced people to do it?
But there is a disconnect. We often seem to want to hire only "experienced senior EA's." This excellent post from Gergo captures it: Why experienced professionals fail to land high-impact roles (FBB #5) — EA Forum.
As a humble EA, I fully agree with Gergo's explanation. Many senior managers are just not familiar enough with field, have not followed the discussions or read the key books. Maybe they haven't taken any intro courses. It is normal and fair that EA orgs would hire people who have demonstrated the commitment and passion to become experts. If a senior manager wants to pivot to an EA role in management, grant-making or whatever, they need to do the basics first.
BUT here's the thing:
Good senior managers tend not to have a lot of free time. They look back nostalgically on the days when they could read books and engage on 20-minute discussion posts, or take 6-weeks off to do an intensive online course. They may be passionate about EA, but they probably haven't read The Sequences, even the highlights.
Also, their experience of the job-search process is very different: mostly they are head-hunted or recommended for new roles by people in their network. They do not apply for roles with 200 applicants. (They are fine to do work tests and long interviews once there is a serious chance that they will get a role.)
In many cases, they are head-hunted for roles in areas where they have limited experience, based on their core transferrable skillset rather than specific expertise. They are used to steep learning curves.
This last point is maybe the most critical. "Senior management" is a skill-set in itself. It's about delivering objectives within time and budget limits, managing and coaching teams, identifying critical roadblocks and removing them, etc. It sometimes feels like EA orgs only want to hire experienced EA's. But since EA hasn't existed very long, many great senior managers have never even heard of it. But these same people might do a wonderful job in an EA org, and bring a lot of great insights from the corporate or professional world.
So, if EA orgs care about fairness and hiring the most passionate people, they don't need to change anything. But if they are serious about being bottlenecked by a lack of senior talent, they need to do like every non-EA company does: Find people with the required managerial skills and experience, interview them to check their ethical fit and passion foe EA (this is important), and eventually offer them a role, during which you may ask them to spend time getting up to speed.
It is absolutely not fair to prefer them over people who have translated The Sequences into Japanese twice and applied for 231 EA roles. But it is maybe the best way to address the bottleneck quickly and get good people who will ensure the funding is well used. Which is ultimately what matters.
PS I am not one of them! But I have worked with many great managers who find ways to succeed at pretty much everything they do, whose teams are motivated and energized to go the extra mile for them. I am convinced that there are senior managers who would accept the challenge of a very impactful role in an EA org, especially late in their career. Many may even do it for a nominal salary. But if we limit our recruiting efforts to the EA-adjacent world, whose representation among senior people is tiny, we won't find them.
