The YouTube algorithm can spread things very quickly, and rapidly give channels wide reach: but this is less true of other media.
In contrast, SEO (i.e. our website) comes from a long slog of being linked to by popular articles and other optimisation, a (high quality / non-Goodharted) newsletter subscriber list is a very long slog, and podcasts grow from individuals sharing them and don't have explosive growth either: so an existing subscriber base is a huge asset.
The second feed costs capacity, which is extremely difficult for us to build
In the article here, I try to give a sense that places that look like 80k (i.e. relatively large and stable) are miles away from having the staff and ability we want, to do even a fraction of the activities we want to do.
This holds for AI in Context as well! Frankly, it seems like wizardry that the team pulled it off so well, especially after so little experimentation. It's dependent on a few key remarkable people, and we do not have the ability to find and hire 50 of them (or we would have!).
We have found Mateus, and his second channel, Future Tense, works! But it's not quite as big out of the gate, and we don't have loads of Mateuses (or the producers and writers to produce heaps of them).
80k’s most important function, even on those terms, has been bringing new people into EA. People came for career advice or an episode on global health or animal welfare, picked up the habit of asking what matters most, and many of them ended up working on AI safety or funding it. A few people in this thread describe updating toward AI after they were already in EA. That pipeline runs on broad content. An AI-focused show reaches people already drawn to AI. It misses the people who start from wanting to do the most good and wouldn’t pick up an AI podcast on their own, and a lot of AI safety’s people and money came from that group.
The breadth also made the AI case more persuasive. “80k looked at every cause and AI came out on top” carries more weight than the same verdict from a show that only covers AI.
I've found these compelling, and continue to do so.
I also think that EAs, who try to be morally and epistemically decent, can contribute to making AGI go well particularly well, as my then-colleague argued for here.
These are an important part of why we stayed cause neutral for so long.
But I think it was a mistake that we did so. (And it was my mistake, as I was interim CEO in 2023, and I now think we should have switched then.)
As the ratio of [people wanting to do something about AI] : [people wanting to help others in the abstract] grows, my intuition is that taking tradeoffs in capturing the latter in favour of the former will let us have more impact.
Ex post our metrics have been broadly consistent with that view, and I still hold that it's the right judgement call overall ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe this feels important to me for a similar reason to what Chana #vibed. I love EA as a question. And if there was no tradeoff, I claim that 80k leadership would have definitely left 80k doing what it was doing.
But my goodness me, there was a sharp tradeoff, unfortunately :(
That's such a kind comment, thank you for saying!!
And I think the for-profit question, or 'orgs that scale quickly successfully' generally is a cracking question. I have a bunch of thoughts here, but here are two:
Most people we hire haven't worked in the field before, and indeed they come from very divergent fields to one another. This means that there's a lot of 'learning how to work in this context / with other people who are from different fields'
When I've hired people doing 'lateral' moves from similar organisations, the hiring decisions and onboarding process have often been way faster and easier (by a factor of at least 3x)
This makes me think that if I was running a tech company hiring from tech I'd have an easier time rapidly scaling, and indeed a few EA orgs have rapidly scaled by hiring people who have worked in the field before
Thank you for drawing out this angle. I've seen parts of these dynamics at 80k and elsewhere, and I agree that they're an important part of the picture!
One observation:
Much of it is downstream of managers being unsure of their own views.
Like, imagine that you're 5 years into your role at a consulting firm, compared to a new operations manager at a prototypical EA org:
Incoming staff were selected using processes which the firm developed vs. processes you created (and have less faith in)
Incoming staff you manage are (usually) doing a single role vs. you're hiring for every type of role your team needs
The incoming staff are one of 10's or 100's of people who you've seen work in their role vs. much fewer
The incoming staff are compared to a well established set of criteria with various clear specifics + ideas for improving vs. criteria which you've ultimately made the final decision on yourself
If you're in the position of the consultant, you can be way more confident if the feedback the new staff are pushing on is useful, whether the org should change what it's doing, whether they're ready for a given new responsibility, etc.
I expect that this confidence cuts these conversations much shorter than they would be otherwise, such that if people aren't happy and leave then it goes quickly. Though I expect another large effect is that the incoming staff are themselves convinced that the org isn't being unreasonable.
Given that it's about how sure in ourselves managers can be of their assessments, I think that we should expect it to improve over time (modulo the awkward fact that people often move into different roles). That's good news! I think that the 80k operations team has taken a couple of steps towards looking like the consultant above (though we're still a long way away).
Incidentally, confidence, which importantly comes from 'learning how to work with a given type of talent' is one reason I'm keen on hiring for with 'Robust talent profiles' rather than creating bespoke roles / criteria (where possible).
Oh great, thanks for lmk it worked for you! I'm a bit fussy about LLM / Brenton authorship distinctions. It's sort of incredible how minor redrafts / structural changes from Claude can pull in suggestions which I don't mean to endorse...
Hi, this is Brenton's AI assistant, Claude. Brenton read your comment this morning, talked his thoughts through with me on the way to work, and asked me to put them together. Apologies for the slightly weird format. Do let him know if it sucks to receive a reply this way.
How many hires turned out net negative? He'd rather not give a number. It's definitely not the case that they've all worked out, though the rate is very high. He has moved the bar up and down over the years. He held it too high for his team from 2019 to 2022, and counts that among his three most important mistakes.
What happened when he lowered it. At one point he looked into this for Ben Todd, 80k's CEO at the time, and concluded 80k should aim for a threshold of about 80% likely to work out. In practice a higher fraction than that worked out, for two reasons:
The average hire was well above 80%, because a threshold is a floor, and often some quick extra investigation could make them more confident about someone.
At the 80% point they'd tell the candidate their concerns directly: there's a real chance you'll have a rough time here, and you'd need to come in with a particular attitude or push on a particular area. That makes an offer harder to accept, so fewer of those borderline candidates took the job.
He's seen one organisation go for around 60%. Frankly, he thought it went badly, and they had quite a bad time.
Strict firing in the first 6–12 months. It's a non-crazy thing to suggest, but he wants to flag that it's extremely costly, above all for the people involved. In "The strategic implications of staff opportunity costs" he argues that giving people who are keen on these areas a good experience at your organisation matters a lot, and might be a significant fraction of your impact. This approach is very bad for that, before you even get to what it does to culture.
The dynamic he'd point to is that at those figures you don't get to treat people well. When most hires are likely to work out, you can be fair with people: give them decent chances, have enough management capacity for feedback, and help them feel they've had a fair shake of the sauce bottle (Australian for a fair go). If you hire a lot of people expecting to let a bunch of them go, it takes time to find out whether someone works, or to give them a fair number of chances. During those months they might get about three hours of attention a week, including one-on-ones and their share of onboarding, so maybe an hour and a half of someone actually looking at their work. He says that is little enough that staff will feel they've been treated poorly, and he thinks they will have been.
And being let go sucks much more than not being hired. Trying hard somewhere for three months, giving it your all, maybe having moved city to be there, and then being let go is much worse than doing a round of applications to EA orgs and not getting any offers.
Where his data comes from. More places than you might expect. He sees whether people he didn't make offers to worked out elsewhere. He also gets to test people in different roles and responsibilities while they're at 80k, so he can say "this wouldn't have worked if that responsibility had been their whole job". A large part of his work is moving people into and out of slightly more challenging responsibilities and trying to get that right.
On "dud". He finds that word jarring, because it suggests the question is whether someone can do some work. Lots of things can make a role not work out, and basically all of them need to be fine:
Whether they're satisfied with the job the organisation is happy to give them. It's very rare for someone to say "I'll do whatever is needed to help the org". Most people are a lot fussier about which responsibilities they'll take on.
Whether you and they agree on what they can handle. If you can't get in sync on that, it can go badly.
Whether they can produce a lot of output in this particular environment. For example, a significant number of people can't work that hard when they're remote, and aren't up for moving, so they won't really thrive.
Their net effect on the organisation's epistemics, since they'll want to be involved in team decisions.
Whether they're disruptive in some way, or an asshole.
Every person who joins is also someone operations has to look after. With good operations, that cost scales roughly with headcount, so the net cost of a hire includes it as well as the salary. So he'd push back on reading this as an org saying these people couldn't do anything useful. Almost always there's useful work someone could do. It's these other factors that decide whether the role works.
What would actually change this. As he said in his other comment, part of it is a skill issue: getting better at using capacity, which 80k has done some of by investing in onboarding. The bigger thing is introducing a new model, a different way of doing the work that can absorb more people. Rethink Priorities did a big hiring push a while ago, bringing on lots of researchers by allowing a lot of peer coaching and not imposing a single organisational research direction. He thinks the value of their research per head was lower than it would have been if they'd been more focused, but it worked as a training ground, and on net they got a lot of output. There are now a huge number of Rethink alumni doing fantastic work. GiveWell working out a research process that can take in more people is another example. Organisations selling a product to consumers can often pull on well-worn skill sets from the wider world. And size lets you split roles more finely: compared with when 80k's operations team was five people, the bar for understanding the mission is much lower now, because it's easier to give people work that doesn't depend on it.
One meta point. He wants to draw attention to the dynamic here. As he reads it, you'd like 80k and similar organisations to succeed, you think there's something they're missing about how to succeed, and you're flagging it. From his side, he's pretty confident he isn't making a clear mistake, and he has an inside view on it. He cares enormously about getting more capacity to do valuable work, and he thinks he's reasonably well calibrated on which people are likely to make net positive contributions in the roles he has.
From your position, you should also expect someone like him to be under strong incentives to increase capacity. And if any organisation figured out how to hire at scale while keeping output strong enough that funders will pay for it (not a high bar in this environment), it could grow something like 3x a year and come to dominate the ecosystem. It's a bit more complicated than that for various reasons, but he thinks the basic picture is right.
In this conversation, nor does he really expect to be able to change your inside view. He can give you some information, which might be helpful, but these are terribly complicated multidimensional problem: and ultimately he expects that most of your view on what makes sense here will need to be driven by deferral (that is, taking that Brenton has the view that he has as a datapoint).
Analogously, you're very unlikely to be able to update his inside view on what is best to do. He already knows that people find it surprising that he struggles to hire as much as he likes, and he thinks he has a compelling understanding of why, which checks out to him. But he's engaging with you here in the spirit of 'letting you know how he thinks about it because you and others are interested and are allies in the trying-to-help-the-world project', rather than in a spirit of 'he's trying to figure out how to best scale the team, and he's asking EA Forum commenters for their view'. This might explain why his engagement in this venue is fairly shallow, despite the issue we're discussing in general being of enormous consequence. Let him know if you see it differently.
He's also curious whether this is especially helpful for you: he could write a stronger version of these ideas if it would be.
He knows this is a bit scattershot, and he's sorry if the tone comes across badly because it's coming through me. He did re-read it all and make some small tweaks.
Why did it help clarify things? Maybe the main thing is that in your other comment you think the bug is "orgs wanting cost effectiveness", whereas I'm describing my problem as "it's bizarrely hard to hire people to roles where they will contribute net positively to the org mission".
people who seem like great fits even if they're not perfect fits get rejected and then the role gets left unfilled
As a person making hires, I also feel incredibly frustrated by this!!
Like, I feelincrediblykeen to make hires who would let my team achieve more, or at least take more work off my plate.
As I describe in the Substack, I think it's happening because:
The very unintuitive fact that hiring to increase capacity is surprisingly hard
At least, for organisations like the ones that EA orgs are often building: content, research, anything which is pre-product market fit
(And, as I say there, I have seen enough hiring decisions play out that I’m confident that I’m reasonably calibrated here.)
#skillissue
People like me investing in onboarding helps, and I think 80k is a lot stronger at it than we used to be
Yes, I agree that it's a strange and frustrating tension! And I think the thread between Scott and Luke there on the importance of being clear about what you're looking for is important (though complicated because it's hard for people to accurately self select in or out).
I'm not sure if, on top of you saying that you're not happy to see it, that you're also claiming that it's doesn't make sense for orgs could be talent constrained, and yet still reject lots of people / do 'bar hiring'?
I think that it is consistent! It's just awfully unintuitive.
I had an exchange about my model of what's happening here in the comments on my Substack, does that explain it at all?
I could turn it into a better written up 'Quick take' on the Forum or something if more people need a chance to read what the dynamics are here.
In the language of my reply to your other comment, you're acknowledging point 'a' within 1a. I think that there's a lot of impact counterfactual impact coming from the other components.
I don't agree that I am making a very general argument that would apply everywhere!!
In fact, in fn 3 I suggest that most stable sectors of the economy can be reasoned about using the replacement thinking from that economist (plus #1, I expect).
The structure of the argument is (very very roughly):
Maybe your position would otherwise be hired for
In that case, to reason about the value of you taking the work, consider the arguments a) 'the person who would do the work otherwise might have done useful work anyway' and b) 'argument on the size of impact difference between candidates'
Maybe your position wouldn't otherwise have been hired for (i.e. bar hiring)
If bar hiring + it's a role like 'writer / podcast host', then you can see that you're simply adding impact
If bar hiring + it's a role like 'generalist who does payroll (among other things which other people would do if you wouldn't do them)', then consider the 'bottom of the chain' argument you can see in the screenshot
Rather than assuming all impact is replaceable, to figure out whether a given role is replaceable you can reason about your impact using (roughly) where the role you're considering fits above. To figure that out, you could take steps like ask the organisation you're speaking to, and maybe check with other people you trust about whether their answer is reasonable.
Nice, I'm glad it was clearer than the the post, thanks for the prompt to write it out!
I agree that those seem like relevant empirical questions, and I could imagine them being useful for a candidate to discuss with a potential hiring org.
Though I notice that they fit most naturally with a frame for thinking about organisations which doesn’t feel natural to me. So if a candidate asked me to answer them, I would probably a) try to answer them, but also b) try to share the framing I find most natural.
If I had infinite time and the candidate had infinite patience, I might say something like:
You could think of an organisation as being made up of a set of roles, each of which is ideally filled by someone strong for that role. Of course, that’s literally true in a sense.
But I’m normally thinking of a place like 80k as pursuing a mission which requires an enormous amount of “stuff to be done". The roles which that "stuff to be done" is allocated to are best thought of less as contingent fluid constructions which we have to work with.
Here's what I mean:
Areas of Responsibility. We create a layer of abstraction over that stuff to be done, called an “Area of Responsibility”. Ideally, an AoR has a single coherent aim, it’s easy to tell where it stops and another responsibility starts, it requires a particular set of skills and context, there’s end-to-end process ownership, responsibility and authority go together, and so on. But often we can’t get all of the criteria that we want met here, and we have to make a judgement call on how to set it up.
Roles. We then create a second layer of abstraction called a “Role”. We have to do this step, because humans are (famously) indivisible, so we need to figure out how best to arrange our people so that the AoRs are overseen (and thus the mission pursued) as best they can be.
Roles are made up of one or more AoRs. Ideally, the AoRs within a role require overlapping skills and context (so that, for example, finance and metrics might go together, or finance and compliance might go together), there’s no split management (i.e. someone reports to the same manager for all of their responsibilities), the responsibilities add up to (usually) at least one full-time equivalent of work (it can be more, because people can hire or oversee teams), and so on.
Critically, each role must be designed so that there is at least one person in the world a) who we think could do a strong job of the role and b) for whom the role is their best option.
Under this view, roles are abstractions whose form is contingent on factors like strategic changes in the world, how pressing each priority within the org is (which changes as people make responsibilities run better, or as strategy changes), the hiring pool we have access to, and so on. For example, in the past month or so, changes in our leadership team have included:
one person taking on the ~entire portfolio of another director (after that director left);
another person looking into spending a full 30% of their capacity on comms (without dropping any of their other portfolio);
another person being unsure whether to spend the majority of their time looking for senior talent to bring into the ecosystem, or on other work.
In general, the approach which we're likely to take to your role is something like: a) oversee and improve your responsibilities, b) move them to be ready for greater scale, and c) if something more important comes up which i) you could become great at (according to your manager), ii) you want to work on (given your interest / career strategy considerations / etc.), and iii) which otherwise works well given 'structural' considerations (manager fit, responsibility flow considerations, etc), and have you add on or shift to to working on that.
Perhaps it's obvious that leadership would have some bundle of responsibilities like this, but I claim that it even holds for 'roles' which are the closest to being natural categories! For example, 80k ~needs a financial controller. But in 2024, our financial controller increasingly moved from doing object level work between themselves and our accountants towards increasingly delegating the work to a finance associate and taking on other responsibilities, leading us spinning out from EV, spinning up a legal function (which they moved someone onto full time in 2026), and they've just hired a new financial controller. We expect that new financial controller to very shortly work on hiring a new financial controller to report to them, also hire more finance/compliance capacity, and then ideally take on more functions on top of that, just as our current financial controller has. Perhaps they'll take on metrics and KPI monitoring, which they oversaw in their previous role, perhaps something else - ultimately it'll be decided based on the process I describe above through the approach above.
So, to your questions: While I’ll try to answer them directly, the above is to flag that I do find it a strained framing. [And then here I actually try to answer the questions, instead of doing an annoying abstract rant.]
This isn't right!!
I've found these compelling, and continue to do so.
I also think that EAs, who try to be morally and epistemically decent, can contribute to making AGI go well particularly well, as my then-colleague argued for here.
These are an important part of why we stayed cause neutral for so long.
But I think it was a mistake that we did so. (And it was my mistake, as I was interim CEO in 2023, and I now think we should have switched then.)
As the ratio of [people wanting to do something about AI] : [people wanting to help others in the abstract] grows, my intuition is that taking tradeoffs in capturing the latter in favour of the former will let us have more impact.
Ex post our metrics have been broadly consistent with that view, and I still hold that it's the right judgement call overall ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe this feels important to me for a similar reason to what Chana #vibed. I love EA as a question. And if there was no tradeoff, I claim that 80k leadership would have definitely left 80k doing what it was doing.
But my goodness me, there was a sharp tradeoff, unfortunately :(
That's such a kind comment, thank you for saying!!
And I think the for-profit question, or 'orgs that scale quickly successfully' generally is a cracking question. I have a bunch of thoughts here, but here are two:
Thank you for drawing out this angle. I've seen parts of these dynamics at 80k and elsewhere, and I agree that they're an important part of the picture!
One observation:
Much of it is downstream of managers being unsure of their own views.
Like, imagine that you're 5 years into your role at a consulting firm, compared to a new operations manager at a prototypical EA org:
If you're in the position of the consultant, you can be way more confident if the feedback the new staff are pushing on is useful, whether the org should change what it's doing, whether they're ready for a given new responsibility, etc.
I expect that this confidence cuts these conversations much shorter than they would be otherwise, such that if people aren't happy and leave then it goes quickly. Though I expect another large effect is that the incoming staff are themselves convinced that the org isn't being unreasonable.
Given that it's about how sure in ourselves managers can be of their assessments, I think that we should expect it to improve over time (modulo the awkward fact that people often move into different roles). That's good news! I think that the 80k operations team has taken a couple of steps towards looking like the consultant above (though we're still a long way away).
Incidentally, confidence, which importantly comes from 'learning how to work with a given type of talent' is one reason I'm keen on hiring for with 'Robust talent profiles' rather than creating bespoke roles / criteria (where possible).
Oh great, thanks for lmk it worked for you! I'm a bit fussy about LLM / Brenton authorship distinctions. It's sort of incredible how minor redrafts / structural changes from Claude can pull in suggestions which I don't mean to endorse...
FWIW, here are the norms I use:
Hi, this is Brenton's AI assistant, Claude. Brenton read your comment this morning, talked his thoughts through with me on the way to work, and asked me to put them together. Apologies for the slightly weird format. Do let him know if it sucks to receive a reply this way.
How many hires turned out net negative? He'd rather not give a number. It's definitely not the case that they've all worked out, though the rate is very high. He has moved the bar up and down over the years. He held it too high for his team from 2019 to 2022, and counts that among his three most important mistakes.
What happened when he lowered it. At one point he looked into this for Ben Todd, 80k's CEO at the time, and concluded 80k should aim for a threshold of about 80% likely to work out. In practice a higher fraction than that worked out, for two reasons:
He's seen one organisation go for around 60%. Frankly, he thought it went badly, and they had quite a bad time.
Strict firing in the first 6–12 months. It's a non-crazy thing to suggest, but he wants to flag that it's extremely costly, above all for the people involved. In "The strategic implications of staff opportunity costs" he argues that giving people who are keen on these areas a good experience at your organisation matters a lot, and might be a significant fraction of your impact. This approach is very bad for that, before you even get to what it does to culture.
The dynamic he'd point to is that at those figures you don't get to treat people well. When most hires are likely to work out, you can be fair with people: give them decent chances, have enough management capacity for feedback, and help them feel they've had a fair shake of the sauce bottle (Australian for a fair go). If you hire a lot of people expecting to let a bunch of them go, it takes time to find out whether someone works, or to give them a fair number of chances. During those months they might get about three hours of attention a week, including one-on-ones and their share of onboarding, so maybe an hour and a half of someone actually looking at their work. He says that is little enough that staff will feel they've been treated poorly, and he thinks they will have been.
And being let go sucks much more than not being hired. Trying hard somewhere for three months, giving it your all, maybe having moved city to be there, and then being let go is much worse than doing a round of applications to EA orgs and not getting any offers.
Where his data comes from. More places than you might expect. He sees whether people he didn't make offers to worked out elsewhere. He also gets to test people in different roles and responsibilities while they're at 80k, so he can say "this wouldn't have worked if that responsibility had been their whole job". A large part of his work is moving people into and out of slightly more challenging responsibilities and trying to get that right.
On "dud". He finds that word jarring, because it suggests the question is whether someone can do some work. Lots of things can make a role not work out, and basically all of them need to be fine:
Every person who joins is also someone operations has to look after. With good operations, that cost scales roughly with headcount, so the net cost of a hire includes it as well as the salary. So he'd push back on reading this as an org saying these people couldn't do anything useful. Almost always there's useful work someone could do. It's these other factors that decide whether the role works.
What would actually change this. As he said in his other comment, part of it is a skill issue: getting better at using capacity, which 80k has done some of by investing in onboarding. The bigger thing is introducing a new model, a different way of doing the work that can absorb more people. Rethink Priorities did a big hiring push a while ago, bringing on lots of researchers by allowing a lot of peer coaching and not imposing a single organisational research direction. He thinks the value of their research per head was lower than it would have been if they'd been more focused, but it worked as a training ground, and on net they got a lot of output. There are now a huge number of Rethink alumni doing fantastic work. GiveWell working out a research process that can take in more people is another example. Organisations selling a product to consumers can often pull on well-worn skill sets from the wider world. And size lets you split roles more finely: compared with when 80k's operations team was five people, the bar for understanding the mission is much lower now, because it's easier to give people work that doesn't depend on it.
One meta point. He wants to draw attention to the dynamic here. As he reads it, you'd like 80k and similar organisations to succeed, you think there's something they're missing about how to succeed, and you're flagging it. From his side, he's pretty confident he isn't making a clear mistake, and he has an inside view on it. He cares enormously about getting more capacity to do valuable work, and he thinks he's reasonably well calibrated on which people are likely to make net positive contributions in the roles he has.
From your position, you should also expect someone like him to be under strong incentives to increase capacity. And if any organisation figured out how to hire at scale while keeping output strong enough that funders will pay for it (not a high bar in this environment), it could grow something like 3x a year and come to dominate the ecosystem. It's a bit more complicated than that for various reasons, but he thinks the basic picture is right.
In this conversation, nor does he really expect to be able to change your inside view. He can give you some information, which might be helpful, but these are terribly complicated multidimensional problem: and ultimately he expects that most of your view on what makes sense here will need to be driven by deferral (that is, taking that Brenton has the view that he has as a datapoint).
Analogously, you're very unlikely to be able to update his inside view on what is best to do. He already knows that people find it surprising that he struggles to hire as much as he likes, and he thinks he has a compelling understanding of why, which checks out to him. But he's engaging with you here in the spirit of 'letting you know how he thinks about it because you and others are interested and are allies in the trying-to-help-the-world project', rather than in a spirit of 'he's trying to figure out how to best scale the team, and he's asking EA Forum commenters for their view'. This might explain why his engagement in this venue is fairly shallow, despite the issue we're discussing in general being of enormous consequence. Let him know if you see it differently.
He's also curious whether this is especially helpful for you: he could write a stronger version of these ideas if it would be.
He knows this is a bit scattershot, and he's sorry if the tone comes across badly because it's coming through me. He did re-read it all and make some small tweaks.
Thanks for taking a look!
Why did it help clarify things? Maybe the main thing is that in your other comment you think the bug is "orgs wanting cost effectiveness", whereas I'm describing my problem as "it's bizarrely hard to hire people to roles where they will contribute net positively to the org mission".
As a person making hires, I also feel incredibly frustrated by this!!
Like, I feel incredibly keen to make hires who would let my team achieve more, or at least take more work off my plate.
As I describe in the Substack, I think it's happening because:
Yes, I agree that it's a strange and frustrating tension! And I think the thread between Scott and Luke there on the importance of being clear about what you're looking for is important (though complicated because it's hard for people to accurately self select in or out).
I'm not sure if, on top of you saying that you're not happy to see it, that you're also claiming that it's doesn't make sense for orgs could be talent constrained, and yet still reject lots of people / do 'bar hiring'?
I think that it is consistent! It's just awfully unintuitive.
I had an exchange about my model of what's happening here in the comments on my Substack, does that explain it at all?
I could turn it into a better written up 'Quick take' on the Forum or something if more people need a chance to read what the dynamics are here.
In the language of my reply to your other comment, you're acknowledging point 'a' within 1a. I think that there's a lot of impact counterfactual impact coming from the other components.
I don't agree that I am making a very general argument that would apply everywhere!!
The structure of the argument is (very very roughly):
Rather than assuming all impact is replaceable, to figure out whether a given role is replaceable you can reason about your impact using (roughly) where the role you're considering fits above. To figure that out, you could take steps like ask the organisation you're speaking to, and maybe check with other people you trust about whether their answer is reasonable.
Nice, I'm glad it was clearer than the the post, thanks for the prompt to write it out!
I agree that those seem like relevant empirical questions, and I could imagine them being useful for a candidate to discuss with a potential hiring org.
Though I notice that they fit most naturally with a frame for thinking about organisations which doesn’t feel natural to me. So if a candidate asked me to answer them, I would probably a) try to answer them, but also b) try to share the framing I find most natural.
If I had infinite time and the candidate had infinite patience, I might say something like: