YC

Yonatan Cale

@ Effective Developers
4122 karmaJoined Feb 2021Working (6-15 years)Seeking workTel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

Bio

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I'm happy to help

  • People running EA aligned software projects (about all the normal problems)
  • EA Software engineers (about.. all the normal problems)

Link to my coaching post.

I'd be happy for help from

  • People who think about global EA priorities:
    • Rewriting arxiv.org: Is this a high impact job?
    • Does EA need a really good hiring agency?
  • Funding my work would be nice

My opinions about hiring

A better job board

  • draft 1: 75% of 80k's engineering jobs are unrelated to software development. This board is the other 25%.

Tech community building & outreach

(apparently I'm doing some of this?)

  • Some ideas I'm working on or strongly considering working on
  • Are you talking to someone about working on strange neglected problems? Here's how I'd frame it

My opinions about EA software careers

  • An alternative career guide
  • Improving CVs (beyond what I saw any professional CV editor doing)
  • Getting your first paid software job
  • [more coming]

My personal fit for jobs

  • Owning the tech of a pre-production (helping with things around it, like some Product)
  • I really enjoy coaching, user research, explaining tech concepts and tradeoffs simply to non tech people, unclear if this will fit into some future job

Fun

  • I'm currently reading ProjectLawful and Worth A Candle [26-7-2022]
  • Big hpmor fan
  • I like VR
  • My shirts have cats on them

Contact details

How others can help me

  • Connections to EA aligned orgs that have software problems

How I can help others

  • Running software projects, specifically hiring
  • EA careers

Comments
814

Cool!

I definitely defer to you on design.

If you write a pitch about it, btw, then perhaps I'll refer orgs to it. (and if I hear about an org that wants a website anytime soon, I'll refer them to you directly)

Hey!

I sometimes speak to devs who want to work at EA orgs, and EA orgs that want devs, here's stuff I'd suggest if you'd be interested in my opinion:

  1. Compensation matters. Consider finding a first 1-3 clients, figure out how much they're willing to pay, so you can post it here
    1. It's unclear if your target audience is "people willing to work for free" or "people who want this as their half-main thing and need a salary"
    2. If you already have concrete projects to work on, that will attract people much more than being "on watch" for incoming projects (based on my experience. I didn't expect this)
  2. Consider writing (if?) that you're open to questions. For example, if someone won't apply to this because they don't know the compensation, you probably want to hear about it
  3. Consider posting in the EA Software Facebook group
  4. More thoughts here
  5. This is a similar org (person), maybe you can get clients from there, and/or get other useful info (like "all EA orgs have an existing annoying wordpress template, if we could just switch that we'd solve everything!" (I just made that up, not sure what you'll hear))

 

Thoughts based on being a bit related to your target audience (and not on conversations with others), so this is weaker:

  1. "Strong code organizational habits, and willingness to follow instructions from project lead regarding how to organize code" - Do you expect to hire someone who'd need to follow your directions on how to organize code? Because if not, then this might deter people who are already able to organize code and would like to own this part themselves (as I would personally prefer if I'd apply)

 

Stuff I'm way less confident in since I'm not a designer at all:

  1. building a custom wordpress theme seems like a bit of an overkill for most orgs
    1. "desire to achieve pixel perfection" - also seems like something most orgs wouldn't need, I'm guessing that something out-of-the-box would be better (while using the correct fonts+colors) (?)

Just like you wouldn't schedule a meeting to ask someone what are the names of the U.S states (because you can check wikipedia), I'm against scheduling meetings to ask something you can check in the EA Forum (or lesswrong). 

For example, if you're curious what's new in global health and wellbeing, check the "global health and wellbeing" tag, and sort by "new".

(Maybe after checking the tag you'll still want a meeting for some reason, but I'd at least check the tag first).

 

Examples:

  • I wouldn't do: Ask an org if they're hiring without checking the 80k job board (and/or the org's website, and/or the org's tag).
  • Seems ok: Reaching out to someone from an org, saying "I see you're hiring, I'm considering studying for 3 months and then applying, do you think it would be better for me to apply now and if I don't pass then study and apply again in 3 months?"
  • Seems great: Asking this in Swapcard, maybe they can just reply in 5 seconds with "yeah sure apply, no problem to repeat after 3 months"? Or maybe they'll say it's better to meet.

I agree, I'm speaking to @Davidmanheim who runs ALTER in Israel, we're considering reaching out or doing something else around this

If I'd point you to one more resource, it would be AGI safety career advice by Richard Ngo.

Hey!

If you elaborate a bit on what you'd like in your website (or if you join for a video call), maybe some people would enjoy collaboratively building it in this group (I'd share your post now but I think it needs a bit more producty work first)

getting exposure to a broader set of ideas

Effective Dropouts believes in viewing this as an "exploration exploitation" problem, and considering that there are many ways to approach the problem (where university is just one approach), and many things that the exploration-exploitation-tradeoff might be trying to optimize. 

As a naive example (not from the official ED curriculum), if I'd suggest you read 100 random articles from Wikipedia, would that count as "getting exposure to a broader set of ideas"? If not, why not? (what's the thing you're implicitly trying to optimize for?) Would "read the top 10 posts from [some blogs]" count? Would "do 3 months of work in various different jobs" count? University might be the ideal way for some people to explore options, but I do think most people would benefit from considering at least one other option

Maybe one day a university will let students study any topic they want from the internet, that would be rad

Hey! I don't think that "signing up" aligns with our values here at Effective Dropouts (the values of Effective Altruism plus the inverse of the values of universities), so I fast-tracked you to graduation (and co-founder) level, which I assume a university would never do, not that I'm such an expert in universities myself

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