Several ex-employees have shared positive experiences with Nonlinear or Kat Woods on LW or EAF. I would like to ask those employees for some specifics:
how explicit were salary negotiations (yours or those you heard about)? It seems like one of the things that went wrong here was extremely informal ~employment agreements, and I’d like to know if that was common practice.
If negotiations were informal or after the fact (which isn’t uncommon in EA), what happened when there was a disagreement? Did it feel like Kat/Emerson/Nonlinear went out of their way to be generous (as this person describes in their explicit negotiations with Kat at Charity Science Health), or was it very stressful to get even basic needs met (like Ben describes getting medical attention in PR).
I can imagine some of the problem lived in Alice and Chloe, and people who were better at advocating for their own needs would have been fine. I would never work in the conditions described here specifically because they would make me bad at getting my own needs met. I would still think this represented a problem on Nonlinear’s part, but it’s a much smaller problem than if they were deliberately exploitative.
When did whatever quoted interaction take place, and with what org? Some of the positive information about Kat comes from different orgs several years ago, which I think has some relevance but less than people who worked for nonlinear in the last few years.
at least two people commented on receiving coaching from Kat and finding it very positive. This isn’t irrelevant, but the power dynamics are so different I don’t find it that useful.
Several ex-employees have shared positive experiences with Nonlinear or Kat Woods on LW or EAF. I would like to ask those employees for some specifics:
how explicit were salary negotiations (yours or those you heard about)? It seems like one of the things that went wrong here was extremely informal ~employment agreements, and I’d like to know if that was common practice.
If negotiations were informal or after the fact (which isn’t uncommon in EA), what happened when there was a disagreement? Did it feel like Kat/Emerson/Nonlinear went out of their way to be generous (as this person describes in their explicit negotiations with Kat at Charity Science Health), or was it very stressful to get even basic needs met (like Ben describes getting medical attention in PR).
I can imagine some of the problem lived in Alice and Chloe, and people who were better at advocating for their own needs would have been fine. I would never work in the conditions described here specifically because they would make me bad at getting my own needs met. I would still think this represented a problem on Nonlinear’s part, but it’s a much smaller problem than if they were deliberately exploitative.
When did whatever quoted interaction take place, and with what org? Some of the positive information about Kat comes from different orgs several years ago, which I think has some relevance but less than people who worked for nonlinear in the last few years.
at least two people commented on receiving coaching from Kat and finding it very positive. This isn’t irrelevant, but the power dynamics are so different I don’t find it that useful.