EA - Some notes on common challenges building EA orgs by Ben Kuhn

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some notes on common challenges building EA orgs, published by Ben Kuhn on December 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.(Follow-up to: Want advice on management/organization-building?)After posting that offer, I've chatted with a few people at different orgs (though still have bandwidth for more if other folks are interested, as I find them pretty fun!) and started to notice some trends in what kinds of management problems different orgs face. These are all low-confidence—I'd like to validate them against a broader set of orgs—but I thought I'd write them up to see if they resonate with people.ObservationsMany orgs skew extremely juniorThe EA community skews very young, and highly engaged EAs (like those working at orgs) skew even younger. Anecdotally, I was the same age or older than almost everyone I talked to, many of whom were the most experienced person in their org. By comparison, at Wave almost the entire prod/eng leadership team is my age or older. (Note that this seems to be less true in the most established/large/high-status orgs, e.g. Open Phil.)This isn't a disaster, especially since the best of the junior people are very talented, but it does lead to a set of typical problems:having to think through how to do everything from first principles rather than copy what's worked from elsewheremanagers needing to spend a fair amount of time providing basic "how to be a functioning employee" support to junior hiresmanagers not providing that support and the junior hires ending up being less effective, or growing less quickly, than they would at an org that could provide them more support(At Wave, we've largely avoided hiring people with