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.
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.