Comments
https://80000hours.org/2019/05/annual-review-dec-2018/
(archive)
The review doesn't really have an easy-to-excerpt summary.
They had an increase in high-impact career plan changes in 2018:
We’ve tracked over 130 rated-10 plan changes over our history, so we think our programmes can reliably produce this level of plan change.
Over 2018, we decided to focus on producing more rated-100 plan changes, which involve larger shifts into more senior positions, where we estimate they’ll approximately result in 10-times as much counterfactual impact.
Typically, when we ask donors and researchers in the community to place a number on the value of a 1-3 year speed up into one of these positions, they estimate these kinds of shifts are equivalent to over $1m in additional donations by the community. There are many issues with this method, but if our rated-100 plan changes indeed involve a speed up of this magnitude, it suggests they have value to the community of around this level.
We recorded ten new rated-100 plan changes this year, compared to ten over our entire previous history since 2011. About half of these seem to be significantly driven by content and in-person advice that we think is similar to our existing programmes (as opposed to personal contact with our founders, a source of impact which may not scale as rapidly with marginal funding).
From the "plans for 2019" section of the review:
cf. with "We had 3,800 sign-ups to our advising wait list despite not actively promoting it, making the one-on-one advice highly oversubscribed."
I don't understand the reasoning for only expanding 80k advising capacity to 4 advisors, given the amount of demand for advising.
Seems like one advisor can advise ~100 people/year in the current configuration ("We delivered one-on-one advice to 217 people [in 2018]...").
So 4 advisors could advise 400 people/year.
What's the case for not hiring more advisors?
Hypotheses, off the top of my head:
The hypothesis I jumped to was "scaling up well takes time".
Even if you hire people who have the potential to be good advisors, who are advising people with the potential to be "tier-1", trying to, say, quadruple the number of advisors within a year would strain 80K's attention and could bring about many difficulties (interpersonal clashes, message drift, dropping non-advisory projects because advisors require managerial time for supervision, increased pressure on the operations team...).
In my experience, scaling teams is fairly straightforward when total team size remains under 15.
(And it probably retains much of this straightforwardness for as long as the total firm size is under 150, Dunbar's number.)
The rule of thumb I've heard in various CEO interviews is that an organization's nature fundamentally changes when it triples in size. 80K has ten full-time staff at the moment (counting their team page plus one person who hasn't been added yet), but if only a couple of those are advisors, tripling the size of the advisory team might change a lot.
Not that I'm saying "concern with difficulty around scaling up" is 80K's only motivation; I'd just guess that it's roughly as important as difficulty finding good advisors.
Just found a relevant line from the review:
Still not sure about the importance of this vs. other factors, though.
Thanks, I missed that!