All of AmritSidhu-Brar's Comments + Replies

For another perspective: personally I feel like the most important aspect of “good ops writing” is something like “making it really easy for the other person to do exactly the thing they need to do and get the info they need, even if they're just quickly skimming^[1]”. I'm thinking of things like:

• Good use of formatting, e.g. bold, bullet points, etc; so that someone who's skimming it at a glance will easily identify the parts relevant to them or where they need to engage further.
  • The opposite of this: important facts being hidden in the middle of long plain

Thanks, Eli! This seems great to me and I'm glad to have things like this out there.

I wanted to provide another perspective on a couple of points. 

(For context, I've recruited for a junior ops role once, and for a senior ops role once. Unsure how much the below applies to other hiring managers.) 

On writing skills and quality of work tests: 

• I agree that people probably underrate how important writing skills are for success in an ops role.  However, that said, when recruiting I only pay attention to writing quality in some conte

Agreed; but I'd also add that I think in any role, the default assumption is that if you're selected for the job, you're likely to be at least somewhat better than the next best candidate. Applying for the job is a great way to find this out, and if you're uncertain about the counterfactual, you can also be open with the team about this and ask them how much they prefer you to the next best candidate – I've done this before and got replies that I think are honest and open. (Though some care is needed with this reasoning: if everyone did this, they'd j... (read more)

Fully agree. And a flip side of this: reading this list also seems very valuable for people looking to recruit for early-stage projects. Putting yourself on the more reassuring side of as many of these points as is achievable is likely to aid recruitment, and reduce risks around staff retention, satisfaction and public image. 

Some of the points won't be possible in every situation (e.g. things that cost a lot when you're tight on funding); but others are likely achievable for everyone, e.g. clarifying expectations around the items on this list, having a written agreement (even if informal) detailing what each side is committing to.

Just wanted to echo this point about reducing work hours! In cases where this option is available + financially viable, I think it can be very worth considering. I did this a few years ago when I was in a non-impact-driven job, reducing my work schedule permanently from full-time to 4.5 days per week then later 3.5. I used the other time for small volunteering and consulting opportunities in EA (though finding them involved some luck), which I think really helped me towards eventually moving into a permanent direct work role later.

makes me apprehensive of taking up a 'seat' that could have been taken by someone who'd have worked 80 hour weeks and vastly outperformed me.

As a fellow non-dedicate,  I like to discuss expectations around working hours in the "any questions" section of an interview anyway, since personally I wouldn't want to accept a job where they expect a lot more than a 40-hour week from me. That way, they also get this info about me to use in their decision, so I know if they make me an offer they think I'm the best candidate, having considered these factors. &nb... (read more)

Yeah it seems accurate that the need for operations folk is significantly less than in 2018. That said, I've seen plenty of operations job postings in the last year or so, and it looks like e.g. CEA and OpenPhil currently have roles on the 80k job board. Combining that with the fact that EA organisations seem to generally be growing, it seems like there's still a need for more ops people in EA orgs overall. I guess the harder question is similar to your second one, namely whether such roles are currently easily filled with  the in-EA people already ai... (read more)

+1 to Martin's suggestion of reaching out to EA orgs and asking whether they need any short-term/contractor (or possibly volunteer) work doing.  

Orgs will rarely run full hiring rounds for these, but my impression is that a fair amount of this kind of work exists. (Not saying that I think this strategy is anywhere near certain to work, but I would recommend it.) I never managed to make myself proactively ask people for roles like these, but the roles in this category that I got (which I think happened to me through chance really) mostly ended up being really useful for skill-building.

For point #2, one speculative thing that comes to mind is the legal and governance structure of an incorporated organisation, i.e. being incorporated, and having a board – whether a board of directors/trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation and whom the team ultimately report to, or an advisory board.  

I know that plenty of larger EA groups, particularly national ones, have these kinds of things already, and I wonder whether it would be beneficial for more large EA groups to do so. (I don't know what the answer to this question is.... (read more)

I'll have a go at adding some more ideas for #2. (Similarly to Martin, I don't feel like this is my area of expertise and I'm sure there are others in the EA community who've thought about thisway more than me, but here goes for a try: )

In an organisation that has paid staff one important thing for commitment would be making sure people are compensated well. While volunteers are unpaid and to a large extent doing it for the impact of the role, I wonder whether there are easy-ish ways to optimise the non-money benefits  that volunteers are getting out ... (read more)

Makes sense, thanks!

That's really interesting to read, thanks very much! (Both for this answer and for the whole AMA exercise)

Are lottery winners subject to  conflict of interest restrictions similar to EA Funds? E.g. could a winner end up choosing to donate to an organisation they run or work at, or fund themselves or a connected party to do independent work? 

( I am currently undecided as to whether I'm going to donate to the lottery, but this question isn't a factor in that – just asking out of interest as the question occurred to me, seemed like it might be important, and I don't think I know what I would want the answer to be as a donor, so would be curious to hear the answer!)

A related question: are there categories of things you'd be excited to fund, but haven't received any applications for so far?

Okay, I called CAF to ask about this, as I was interested too. Apparently the Charity Account's 4% fee is a one-off at the time of donation, rather than annually recurring. You can hold the money indefinitely after it's put into the account for no fee. The fee is 4% on the first £22.5k donated per year, after that it reduces to 1%. (They linked me to a PDF detailing this here.) So this seems like it could well be worth it, in cases where you have more than a few £000 to donate to registered charities, if it would be more efficient to be... (read more)

My impression from CAF's webpage on their Charity Accounts was that the 4% fee was a one-off when you contribute money to the account, rather than an annual fee on the balance. However it's not very clear and the other interpretation definitely makes sense too. Is anyone's knowledge from a source other than the website?

Thanks so much for writing this! I feel like I end up trying to express this idea quite frequently and I'm really glad for the resource on it. I’d also love to see talking about our non-altruistic goals and motivations become more normalised within EA, so yes, thanks 🙂

Personally I identify with the approach you're expressing very strongly – I find it hard to understand the thought that I might care for my friends only because it ultimately helps me help the world more; I think of them in different categories. But then I know others who find it v... (read more)

Thank you very much for sharing this; I think it's a really powerful idea and piece of writing!

I feel similarly to you, however I also strongly identify with the opportunity framing myself – I think this is beause I've always seen it a little differently to how you're expressing it:

For me the "excitement" in the opportunity framing isn't in finding out that there are people in a very bad situation whom I have an opportunity to help; it comes in finding out that something can be done about problems that I, if in a non-specific... (read more)

Thanks for posting this, this is really helpful to me!

I don’t currently have a blog (well, I do, but not at all related to EA), so unfortunately I can’t answer your first three closing questions. However I’ve been planning on starting an EA blog for the last month or so and have been thinking about some of this stuff – particularly about just having my own blog vs. just posting to the forum vs. occasional cross-posting – so reading your thoughts from your place of much more experience was useful, thank you.

Are you considering exporting your posts to the

I think this is a great idea, and I was really interested, and also touched, by the stories people have already posted, so thank you all! Holly, I love the sentiment of “an extra dose of empathy and mutual appreciation” – I feel like to some extent EA culture, or at least that of its online spaces like this one, is very good at hiding the many meaningful personal relationships that I know the community has fostered.

I found EA in late 2012, just after I’d started my first degree in Oxford. At the first meeting of the science fiction society (which I then ne... (read more)