I’ve been trying to stay out of this, but I’m honestly shocked at this claim you’re making.
You say:
We talked to dozens of other people working at the organization, extensively cross-checked the stories they told us
But this is, just, wildly false? You did not speak to dozens of other people working at Nonlinear.
And Ben himself contradicts you. In Ben’s post, he says:
My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).
Ben thinks we’ve only had 7 total team members, but we’ve actually had 21 - extremely far off.
If you “extensively cross-checked the stories,” how did Ben get such a basic number so wrong? And why are you under the impression that you had talked to dozens of employees if Ben did not?
The fact that you spent 1000 hours on this and got such key details this wrong is surprising to me.
Ok, but why is this a big deal? Aside from showing egregiously bad fact checking, a large portion of Ben’s post was trying to make the case that there is a pattern of Nonlinear “chewing up and spitting out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world.” It would significantly weaken your case if it were 2 out of 21 team members [1]were unhappy instead of 2 out of 7.
Not only that, but to my knowledge, Ben did not talk to a single employee or intern since Alice and Chloe to see if these patterns were, in fact, patterns.
Sorry, saying “worked at” is definitely not the right term, sorry about that.
We talked to dozens of people who have either worked at Nonlinear, otherwise worked with people currently at Nonlinear, or have substantially engaged with Nonlinear in a professional capacity and so seem like they are in a good position to judge what happened. “Worked at” is definitely the wrong word. I should have said something like “have worked with people at Nonlinear”.
I don’t particularly want to litigate the employee thing in this random thread. My best guess is Ben was talking about the number of employees during the specific stretch of months that the article was covering.
It is also inaccurate that only 2 employees we talked to had bad experiences. As Ben mentions multiple times in the post, many additional people we talked to had bad experiences (though generally of somewhat lesser magnitude).
I’ve been trying to stay out of this, but I’m honestly shocked at this claim you’re making.
You say:
But this is, just, wildly false? You did not speak to dozens of other people working at Nonlinear.
And Ben himself contradicts you. In Ben’s post, he says:
Ben thinks we’ve only had 7 total team members, but we’ve actually had 21 - extremely far off.
If you “extensively cross-checked the stories,” how did Ben get such a basic number so wrong? And why are you under the impression that you had talked to dozens of employees if Ben did not?
The fact that you spent 1000 hours on this and got such key details this wrong is surprising to me.
Ok, but why is this a big deal? Aside from showing egregiously bad fact checking, a large portion of Ben’s post was trying to make the case that there is a pattern of Nonlinear “chewing up and spitting out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world.” It would significantly weaken your case if it were 2 out of 21 team members [1]were unhappy instead of 2 out of 7.
Not only that, but to my knowledge, Ben did not talk to a single employee or intern since Alice and Chloe to see if these patterns were, in fact, patterns.
This seems like poor truth-seeking to me.
edit: changed “employees” to “team members”
Sorry, saying “worked at” is definitely not the right term, sorry about that.
We talked to dozens of people who have either worked at Nonlinear, otherwise worked with people currently at Nonlinear, or have substantially engaged with Nonlinear in a professional capacity and so seem like they are in a good position to judge what happened. “Worked at” is definitely the wrong word. I should have said something like “have worked with people at Nonlinear”.
I don’t particularly want to litigate the employee thing in this random thread. My best guess is Ben was talking about the number of employees during the specific stretch of months that the article was covering.
It is also inaccurate that only 2 employees we talked to had bad experiences. As Ben mentions multiple times in the post, many additional people we talked to had bad experiences (though generally of somewhat lesser magnitude).