The Center on Long-term Risk, looking for an Operations Associate / Operations Manager, to work with me on supporting and improving our operational infrastructure in areas such as 💛 HR, 💸 accounting, or 🪑 office management 💡 The application deadline is 11th September. CLR is a research charity based in London, with the goal to address worst-case risks from the development and deployment of advanced AI systems.

→ You can see more details and apply on our website here.

In this role you'd be joining a small (~2.5-person) operations team, so your work will be varied and you'll get to take on responsibility quickly in a wide variety of areas. CLR is in a position to provide mentorship, and you'll be able to get to know existing operational systems in context in a well-functioning organisation, as you take on responsibility for managing them.

This role would be equally suited for a recent graduate looking to gain operations experience in operations quickly, or for candidates who've done some operations work before. No specific experience or qualifications are required.

🌳 We prefer candidates who'll work fully in-person in our London office. Part- or fully-remote considered. 🕐 We're open to full-time and part-time candidates, with a preference for closer to full-time.

Feel free to drop me a message if you have any questions!

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.  I think being open like this is probably the best way to treat this area of uncertainty (rather than not applying), since the employer will have the better overview of other candidates.

(EDIT: To be clear, I don't think it's necessary to raise this at this stage: the employer seems unlikely to assume that applicants will work more than a standard working week by default, since many people don't do that. And I don't think it makes sense for the burden to be on people who will only work a standard working week to raise that in the recruitment process. I just mean that if you're concerned about the effect of accepting a job where you'll perform less well because of sticking to standard hours, I think discussing it with the employer before accepting is a good way to handle that.)

might my non-dedicate status mean I end up being a net-negative addition to the team?

I think  that having people with clear work/life split around can also be helpful. Partly since it helps make the culture more welcoming to other such people and, as Ozymandias argues, being open to non-dedicates is often helpful. But I also think the added diversity of perspectives can be helpful for everyone: for example it could help dedicates have a better work/life balance, in cases where they're too far towards the "work" end on pure-impact grounds. For example, they might not naturally think of ideas for work/life boundaries that, after they're raised,  they would endorse on impact grounds. (I don't think it's clearly always better to add more non-dedicates to a work environment or anything, but I think there are considerations in both directions.)

(Views my own, not my employer's.)

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 aiming for them or with non-EA applicants, vs. whether there'd be a benefit to more EAs (with a particular amount or type of experience) doing so. I don't have much of an answer to this, unfortunately.

One random thought on this is that  different kinds of operations experience might can be important as well as different amounts of experience.  I have the impression that EA orgs are getting large enough that operations roles can get fairly specialised in some places. For example, I'm not certain, but I think I've seen roles for people focussing on automation, for a Salesforce admin, for junior accounts people. I could imagine that for these roles, experience in the right specific thing might be an advantage, even if the experience isn't that long. (Though I wouldn't take that too strongly.) Something pointing in the other direction would be that, for more specific roles, value-alignment may be less important and so it may be easier to recruit from outside EA.

+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.) Possible advantages that I can think of of such a setup:

• If you can find board members who are knowledgeable about the area – like maybe some EA community-building funder, or a leader of a larger EA group or something – their input might be great for strategy.
• Running the legal entity's operations could be good skill-building for the organisers, e.g. if any of them want to work in operations or entrepreneurship.
• It might be better for longevity and stability of the group – the board would always be responsible for the organisation, so if a dedicated group leadership team moved on before finding good successors, it would be the board's job to try again later.
• If there are paid organisers, they could be on payroll, which might be nicer experience for them than being paid directly by the funder. If the group ever wanted to rent property, it could do so in its own name.
• Particularly if it's a charitable structure, having a legal entity might help with outreach due image reasons, particularly if targeting professionals rather han students.
• If a  charitable structure, it might help get more funding, or funding from more diverse sources.

DIsadvantages I can think of include the effort and administrative complexity (which for a charity, might be very high), the time cost to the board members, the financial cost (e.g. incorporation fees, insurance etc, maybe legal advice or professional fees depending how much you did yourself), and maybe worse consequences if things go wrong (like forgetting to do some legal filing or doing your accounting wrong or something). I also  have no idea whether groups that are student societies are allowed to be incorporated.

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 of the role – e.g. skills, connections and so on. I guess one way to do this would be just to pay particular attention to volunteers "as clients" when doing the group's normal community-building activities. Alternatively, are there benefits that can be provided specifically to volunteers – like maybe connections to more established people doing similar work to the volunteer's role, or social activities specifically for the volunteer team? (Though those probably aren't low-cost, now that I think about it!)

Martin's idea of a retreat could be good for the engagement goal too – at EA Cambridge, where I'm a volunteer, there was  a committee retreat one year. To be honest I don't remember what the main goals of the event were, but I think one benefit was helping me feel more engaged/committed in the committee that year.

The other main area I can think of that might help is ensuring that volunteers  have plenty of ownership and space to make meaningful decisions and innovate (and that things stay that way as the team grows), both so that people feel a sense of responsibility and are more committed, and just to help the work be interesting. Like, where possible, delegating an area of responsibility, a problem or a sizeable project rather than the implementation of a specific solution; and ensuring that volunteers know what the extent of their freedom to change things is. 

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?