This post was an excellent introduction into what an operations job or role looks like and feels like from the inside plus touches on what other people think (especially if they aren’t in operations) think of operations roles and the people working such jobs (hint: they tend to look down on such roles and individuals, especially if they hold a “socially higher status” and/or intellectual type of job). Reading it helped me realize that my previous job was in fact a very high autonomy operations role and that’s been helpful in emotionally processing what that job was to me, what I experienced doing it, and whether or not I want another operations job in the future.
I’m nominating it for the above reasons mostly, but also because I think LessWrong could really use more content about operations type jobs / roles. You can have as many people talking very intelligently about something as you’d like, but until someone gets their hands dirty and does the operations work to spread those ideas, book a venue, publish a book, organize a community, manufacture something novel and innovative, and much much more, then those ideas are nice, but they stay fairly locked up where they originated and don’t get broadly dispersed, thus making them much less helpful / useful than they could have been.
It’s one thing to have a small niche community with unique and new ideas, but it’s quite an entirely other beast of a challenge and accomplishment to spread said ideas more broadly, to “go viral”, and have an outsized impact on the world beyond small local improvements. The aforementioned small niche community is nice, I like it, feels good to be a part of, but if that community or individuals within it want to globally instead of hyper locally “decrease worldsuck”, “do good better”, “raise the sanity waterline”, “create dath’ilan”, etc. etc. etc. then they had better get good at operations and start organizing.
Ideas run the world but operations keep them running and help them grow :) I’d love to see a full sequence on operations such as what Swimmer963 mentioned at the end of their post.
Cheers,
Willa
P.S. I think these yearly reviews are good examples of smart operations at work and they help us as a community become more organized with our ideas, reflect more, open more space for improvement, etc. My paragraph about the niche community vs imagined larger robust good at operations and organizing community was not meant to be any sort of attack nor a critique. Its purpose was only to point things out that seemed good to point out :) (I think many here at LW are already cognizant of such things, anyways.)
This post was an excellent introduction into what an operations job or role looks like and feels like from the inside plus touches on what other people think (especially if they aren’t in operations) think of operations roles and the people working such jobs (hint: they tend to look down on such roles and individuals, especially if they hold a “socially higher status” and/or intellectual type of job). Reading it helped me realize that my previous job was in fact a very high autonomy operations role and that’s been helpful in emotionally processing what that job was to me, what I experienced doing it, and whether or not I want another operations job in the future.
I’m nominating it for the above reasons mostly, but also because I think LessWrong could really use more content about operations type jobs / roles. You can have as many people talking very intelligently about something as you’d like, but until someone gets their hands dirty and does the operations work to spread those ideas, book a venue, publish a book, organize a community, manufacture something novel and innovative, and much much more, then those ideas are nice, but they stay fairly locked up where they originated and don’t get broadly dispersed, thus making them much less helpful / useful than they could have been.
It’s one thing to have a small niche community with unique and new ideas, but it’s quite an entirely other beast of a challenge and accomplishment to spread said ideas more broadly, to “go viral”, and have an outsized impact on the world beyond small local improvements. The aforementioned small niche community is nice, I like it, feels good to be a part of, but if that community or individuals within it want to globally instead of hyper locally “decrease worldsuck”, “do good better”, “raise the sanity waterline”, “create dath’ilan”, etc. etc. etc. then they had better get good at operations and start organizing.
Ideas run the world but operations keep them running and help them grow :) I’d love to see a full sequence on operations such as what Swimmer963 mentioned at the end of their post.
Cheers,
Willa
P.S. I think these yearly reviews are good examples of smart operations at work and they help us as a community become more organized with our ideas, reflect more, open more space for improvement, etc. My paragraph about the niche community vs imagined larger robust good at operations and organizing community was not meant to be any sort of attack nor a critique. Its purpose was only to point things out that seemed good to point out :) (I think many here at LW are already cognizant of such things, anyways.)