Being a first employee is pretty different from being in a middle-stage organization. In particular, the opportunity to shape what will come has an appeal that can I think rightly bring in folks who you can’t always get later. (Folks present base rates for various reference classes below; I don’t know if anyone has one for “founding” vs “later” in small organizations?)
Relatedly, my initial guess back in ~2013 (a year in) was that many CFAR staff members would “level up” while they were here and then leave, partly because of that level-up (on my model, they’d acquire agency and then ask if being here as one more staff member was or wasn’t their maximum-goal-hitting thing). I was excited about what we were teaching and hoped it could be of long-term impact to those who worked here a year or two and left, as well as to longer-term people.
I and we intentionally hired for diversity of outlook. We asked ourselves: “does this person bring some component of sanity, culture, or psychological understanding—but especially sanity—that is not otherwise represented here yet?” And this… did make early CFAR fertile, and also made it an unusually difficult place to work, I think. (If you consider the four founding members of me, Julia Galef, Val, and Critch, I think you’ll see what I mean.)
I don’t think I was very easy to work with. I don’t think I knew how to make CFAR a very easy place to work either. I was trying to go with inside views even where I couldn’t articulate them and… really didn’t know how to create a good interface between that and a group of people. Pete and Duncan helped us do otherwise more recently I think, and Tim and Adam and Elizabeth and Jack and Dan building on it more since, with the result that CFAR is much more of a place now (less of a continuous “each person having an existential crisis all the time” than it was for some in the early days; more of a plod of mundane work in a positive sense). (The next challenge here, which we hope to accomplish this year, is to create a place that still has place-ness, and also has more visibility into strategy.)
My current view is that being at workshops for too much of a year is actually really hard on a person, and maybe not-good. It mucks up a person’s codebase without enough chance for ordinary check-sums to sort things back to normal again afterward. Relatedly, my guess is also that while stints at CFAR do level a person up in certain ways (~roughly as I anticipated back in 2013), they unfortunately also risk harming a person in certain ways that are related to “it’s not good to live in workshops or workshop-like contexts for too many weeks/months in a row, even though a 4-day workshop is often helpful” (which I did not anticipate in 2013). (Basically: you want a bunch of normal day-to-day work on which to check whether your new changes actually work well, and to settle back into your deeper or more long-term self. The 2-3 week “MIRI Summer Fellows Program” (MSFP) has had… some great impacts in terms of research staff coming out of the program, but also most of our least stable people additionally came out of that. I believe that this year we’ll be experimentally replacing it with repeated shorter workshops; we’ll also be trying a different rest days pattern for staff, and sabbatical months, as well as seeking stability/robustness/continuity in more cultural and less formal ways.)
Working at CFAR (especially in the early years) was a pretty intense experience, which involved a workflow that regularly threw you into these immersive workshops, and also regularly digging deeply into your thinking and how your mind works and what you could do better, and also trying to make this fledgling organization survive & function. I think the basic thing that happened is that, even for people who were initially really excited about taking this on, things looked different for them a few years later. Part of that is personal, with things like burnout, or feeling like they’d gotten their fill and had learned a large chunk of what they could from this experience, or wanting a life full of experiences which were hard to fit in to this (probably these 3 things overlap). And part of it was professional, where they got excited about other projects for doing good in the world while CFAR wanted to stay pretty narrowly focused on rationality workshops.
I’m tempted to try to go into more detail, but it feels like that would require starting to talk about particular individuals rather the set of people who were involved in early CFAR and I feel weird about that.
So I’m imagining there might be both a question (for what types of reasons have CFAR staff left?) and a claim (CFAR’s rate of turnover is unusual) here. Anna should be able to better address the question, but with regard to the claim: I think it’s true, at least relative to average U.S. turnover. The median length Americans spend in jobs is 4.2 years, while the median length CFAR employees have stayed in their jobs is 2.2 years; 32% of our employees (7 people) left within their first year.
I would guess that many startups in Silicon Valley making big promising about changing the world and then when they employers spend a year at the company, they see that there’s little meaning in the work they are doing.
If people at CFAR don’t keep working at CFAR that seems like a value judgment on CFAR not being that important.
I would guess that many startups in Silicon Valley making big promising about changing the world and then when they employers spend a year at the company, they see that there’s little meaning in the work they are doing.
I’ve worked for 4-6 silicon valley startups now (depending on how we count it), and this has generally not been my experience. For me and most of the people I’ve worked with, staying in one job for a long time just seems weird. Moving around frequently is how you grow fastest and keep things interesting; people in startups see frequent job-hopping as normal, and it’s the rest of the world that’s strange.
That said, I have heard occasional stories about scammy startups who promise lots of equity and then suck. My impression is that they generally lure in people who haven’t been in silicon valley before; people with skills, who’ve done this for a little while, generally won’t even consider those kinds of offers.
This explanation seems unlikely to me. More likely seem to me the highly competitive labor market (with a lot of organizations trying to outbid each other), a lot of long work hours and a lot of people making enough money that leaving their job for a while is not a super big deal. It’s not an implausible explanation, but I don’t think it explains the variance very well.
If you primarily work to earn a paycheck, then you can easily switch around to another organization that pays more money.
If you strongly believe in a certain organization having a mission that’s very important it’s harder to change.
The personal development workshops I usually attend are taught be people who have more then two decades of teaching experience and likely more then 20000 hours of time refining their skills behind them.
From what I hear from CFAR about the research they are doing a lot of it is hard to transfer from one head to another.
It seems that if you have a median tenure of 2 years most of the research gets lost and nobody will develop 10000 hours in the domain.
Well, I think it can both be the case that a given staff member thinks the organization’s mission is important, and also that due to their particular distribution of comparative advantages, current amount of burnout, etc., that it would be on net better for them to work elsewhere. And I think most of our turnover has resulted from considerations like this, rather than from e.g. people deciding CFAR’s mission was doomed.
I think the concern about short median tenure leading to research loss makes sense, and has in fact occurred some. But I’m not that worried about it, personally, for a few reasons:
This cost is reduced because we’re in the teaching business. That is, relative to an organization that does pure research, we’re somewhat better positioned to transfer institutional knowledge to new staff, since much of the relevant knowledge has already been heavily optimized for easy transferability.
There’s significant benefit to turnover, too. I think the skills staff develop while working at CFAR are likely to be useful for work at a variety of orgs; I feel excited about the roles a number of former staff are playing elsewhere, and expect I’ll be excited about future roles our current staff play elsewhere too.
Many of our staff already have substantial “work-related experience,” in some sense, before they’re hired. For example, I spent a bunch of time in college reading LessWrong, trying to figure out metaethics, etc., which I think helped me become a better CFAR instructor than I might have been otherwise. I expect many lesswrongers, for example, have already developed substantial skill relevant to working effectively at CFAR.
Note that that statistic is how long people have been in their current job, not how long they will stay in their current job total. If everyone stayed in their jobs for 40 years, and you did a survey of how long people have been in their job, the median will come out to 20 years. I have not found hard data for the number we actually want, but this indicates that the median time that people stay in their jobs is about eight years, though it would be slightly shorter for younger people.
Why did so much of the initial CFAR employees decide to leave the organization?
My guesses, in no particular order:
Being a first employee is pretty different from being in a middle-stage organization. In particular, the opportunity to shape what will come has an appeal that can I think rightly bring in folks who you can’t always get later. (Folks present base rates for various reference classes below; I don’t know if anyone has one for “founding” vs “later” in small organizations?)
Relatedly, my initial guess back in ~2013 (a year in) was that many CFAR staff members would “level up” while they were here and then leave, partly because of that level-up (on my model, they’d acquire agency and then ask if being here as one more staff member was or wasn’t their maximum-goal-hitting thing). I was excited about what we were teaching and hoped it could be of long-term impact to those who worked here a year or two and left, as well as to longer-term people.
I and we intentionally hired for diversity of outlook. We asked ourselves: “does this person bring some component of sanity, culture, or psychological understanding—but especially sanity—that is not otherwise represented here yet?” And this… did make early CFAR fertile, and also made it an unusually difficult place to work, I think. (If you consider the four founding members of me, Julia Galef, Val, and Critch, I think you’ll see what I mean.)
I don’t think I was very easy to work with. I don’t think I knew how to make CFAR a very easy place to work either. I was trying to go with inside views even where I couldn’t articulate them and… really didn’t know how to create a good interface between that and a group of people. Pete and Duncan helped us do otherwise more recently I think, and Tim and Adam and Elizabeth and Jack and Dan building on it more since, with the result that CFAR is much more of a place now (less of a continuous “each person having an existential crisis all the time” than it was for some in the early days; more of a plod of mundane work in a positive sense). (The next challenge here, which we hope to accomplish this year, is to create a place that still has place-ness, and also has more visibility into strategy.)
My current view is that being at workshops for too much of a year is actually really hard on a person, and maybe not-good. It mucks up a person’s codebase without enough chance for ordinary check-sums to sort things back to normal again afterward. Relatedly, my guess is also that while stints at CFAR do level a person up in certain ways (~roughly as I anticipated back in 2013), they unfortunately also risk harming a person in certain ways that are related to “it’s not good to live in workshops or workshop-like contexts for too many weeks/months in a row, even though a 4-day workshop is often helpful” (which I did not anticipate in 2013). (Basically: you want a bunch of normal day-to-day work on which to check whether your new changes actually work well, and to settle back into your deeper or more long-term self. The 2-3 week “MIRI Summer Fellows Program” (MSFP) has had… some great impacts in terms of research staff coming out of the program, but also most of our least stable people additionally came out of that. I believe that this year we’ll be experimentally replacing it with repeated shorter workshops; we’ll also be trying a different rest days pattern for staff, and sabbatical months, as well as seeking stability/robustness/continuity in more cultural and less formal ways.)
In curious about that. It seems like a new point for me. What concrete negative effects have you seen there?
(This is Dan, from CFAR since 2012)
Working at CFAR (especially in the early years) was a pretty intense experience, which involved a workflow that regularly threw you into these immersive workshops, and also regularly digging deeply into your thinking and how your mind works and what you could do better, and also trying to make this fledgling organization survive & function. I think the basic thing that happened is that, even for people who were initially really excited about taking this on, things looked different for them a few years later. Part of that is personal, with things like burnout, or feeling like they’d gotten their fill and had learned a large chunk of what they could from this experience, or wanting a life full of experiences which were hard to fit in to this (probably these 3 things overlap). And part of it was professional, where they got excited about other projects for doing good in the world while CFAR wanted to stay pretty narrowly focused on rationality workshops.
I’m tempted to try to go into more detail, but it feels like that would require starting to talk about particular individuals rather the set of people who were involved in early CFAR and I feel weird about that.
So I’m imagining there might be both a question (for what types of reasons have CFAR staff left?) and a claim (CFAR’s rate of turnover is unusual) here. Anna should be able to better address the question, but with regard to the claim: I think it’s true, at least relative to average U.S. turnover. The median length Americans spend in jobs is 4.2 years, while the median length CFAR employees have stayed in their jobs is 2.2 years; 32% of our employees (7 people) left within their first year.
I am not fully sure about the correct reference class here, but employee turnover in Silicon Valley is generally very high, so that might also explain some part of the variance: https://www.inc.com/business-insider/tech-companies-employee-turnover-average-tenure-silicon-valley.html
I would guess that many startups in Silicon Valley making big promising about changing the world and then when they employers spend a year at the company, they see that there’s little meaning in the work they are doing.
If people at CFAR don’t keep working at CFAR that seems like a value judgment on CFAR not being that important.
I’ve worked for 4-6 silicon valley startups now (depending on how we count it), and this has generally not been my experience. For me and most of the people I’ve worked with, staying in one job for a long time just seems weird. Moving around frequently is how you grow fastest and keep things interesting; people in startups see frequent job-hopping as normal, and it’s the rest of the world that’s strange.
That said, I have heard occasional stories about scammy startups who promise lots of equity and then suck. My impression is that they generally lure in people who haven’t been in silicon valley before; people with skills, who’ve done this for a little while, generally won’t even consider those kinds of offers.
This explanation seems unlikely to me. More likely seem to me the highly competitive labor market (with a lot of organizations trying to outbid each other), a lot of long work hours and a lot of people making enough money that leaving their job for a while is not a super big deal. It’s not an implausible explanation, but I don’t think it explains the variance very well.
If you primarily work to earn a paycheck, then you can easily switch around to another organization that pays more money.
If you strongly believe in a certain organization having a mission that’s very important it’s harder to change.
The personal development workshops I usually attend are taught be people who have more then two decades of teaching experience and likely more then 20000 hours of time refining their skills behind them.
From what I hear from CFAR about the research they are doing a lot of it is hard to transfer from one head to another.
It seems that if you have a median tenure of 2 years most of the research gets lost and nobody will develop 10000 hours in the domain.
Well, I think it can both be the case that a given staff member thinks the organization’s mission is important, and also that due to their particular distribution of comparative advantages, current amount of burnout, etc., that it would be on net better for them to work elsewhere. And I think most of our turnover has resulted from considerations like this, rather than from e.g. people deciding CFAR’s mission was doomed.
I think the concern about short median tenure leading to research loss makes sense, and has in fact occurred some. But I’m not that worried about it, personally, for a few reasons:
This cost is reduced because we’re in the teaching business. That is, relative to an organization that does pure research, we’re somewhat better positioned to transfer institutional knowledge to new staff, since much of the relevant knowledge has already been heavily optimized for easy transferability.
There’s significant benefit to turnover, too. I think the skills staff develop while working at CFAR are likely to be useful for work at a variety of orgs; I feel excited about the roles a number of former staff are playing elsewhere, and expect I’ll be excited about future roles our current staff play elsewhere too.
Many of our staff already have substantial “work-related experience,” in some sense, before they’re hired. For example, I spent a bunch of time in college reading LessWrong, trying to figure out metaethics, etc., which I think helped me become a better CFAR instructor than I might have been otherwise. I expect many lesswrongers, for example, have already developed substantial skill relevant to working effectively at CFAR.
Note that that statistic is how long people have been in their current job, not how long they will stay in their current job total. If everyone stayed in their jobs for 40 years, and you did a survey of how long people have been in their job, the median will come out to 20 years. I have not found hard data for the number we actually want, but this indicates that the median time that people stay in their jobs is about eight years, though it would be slightly shorter for younger people.