Why is Operations no longer an 80K Priority Path?

My impression of this, as I worked in Operations at CHAI for two years and talked to several other operations people, is that we still have a very very high need for Operations people.
My intuition is that we have the following level of need from 0 to 10, where 0 is " we have actually too many Operations people" to 10 where "we have a dire need for Operations people such that an EA-affiliated or EA-adjacent org would pay $20K just to hire that person as a hiring bonus (which I think is really high)".

1. COO-type: 7. It's hard to find those people but the current people in operations can level up really fast and become those. (We have both capable and ambitious people!).
2. Manager-type: 8. These people are able to manage very well others, motivate them, keep them on track, create and nurture a great excellence-oriented culture. In small EA organizations, it's quite likely that you one can go from project manager to COO, but as those organizations grow, there will be the additional "manager" step.(EDIT from 01/18/2022: I added this category )
3. Project manager-type: 7.  A proactive person, very agent-y, team-oriented and deeply aligned with the purpose of the org. A junior person out of uni can become this after 2 years of junior work in an EA org or a consulting company-like. We lack this kind of people at the moment but it's not dire yet.
4. A very specific type of Project Manager: the Personal Assistant/Chief of Staff: 9. This is an incredibly rare skill set that requires to be in the "brain" of the person they help and multiply their impact. It requires all the properties of the PM, plus a deep alignment with the person they're helping and the "humility" to be behind the scene and do both high-level work and admin work.
5. Junior PM: 5 this is the "helpful intern" that an EA org can recruit to help with a project or with an event. We have plenty of brilliant students EAger ( ;) ) to help and their help is really welcome. They'll become 3 (and hopefully 4!) soon!

Hey there,

My impression is that the relative degree of ops bottleneck might have become worse recently (after easing a bit by early 2020), so we'll consider updating that blurb again. To double check this, we would ideally run another survey of org leaders about skill needs, and there's some chance that happens in the next year.

Another reason why we dropped it is just because 'work at EA orgs' is already a priority path, and this is a subpath of that, and I'm not sure we should list both the broader path and subpath within the priority paths list (e.g. I also think 'research roles at EA orgs' is a big bottleneck but don't want to break that out as a separate category).

Edit: Given the other answers here it seems like there probably is a higher unmet demand for ops roles than I suggest here, so I don't think this comment should be the top answer here. I think my comments below might still be helpful for indicating why we and some other organizations have had less trouble hiring for ops than other organizations, but it seems like a bunch of groups are struggling to hire for ops.

I've hired operations people for EA-aligned organizations both during the period that 80,000 Hours had ops as a priority area and after.

Some quick thoughts:

• I've never perceived there to be a bottleneck in operations talent. I remember hiring for a role around 2018 that received probably 50+ applications that seemed worth at least looking at, and now we regularly receive 100+ for ops roles.
• My experience is that there are way more aligned and strong ops candidates than previously (e.g. in 2018 we'd probably have 2-3 highly skilled ops candidates per round, and now we have more like 10, though this is across two different organizations, so not a direct comparison).
• At the time they made ops a priority area, I was fairly surprised, as were several other people in ops I spoke to, because we had not had any trouble at all hiring ops people (my impression is now it's even easier, but it didn't feel like a bottleneck then either).
• The organizations I've hired for have been 100% remote. I think this is likely where the dividing line is between organizations that have trouble with hiring ops people, and those that don't.
  • From the perspective of people considering EA careers during college, I think the non-remote ops jobs are pretty unappealing — they are relatively low salaried and status despite being mostly in some extremely expensive cities (e.g. San Francisco, London). If I was a college student considering in-person jobs, salaries for ops roles vs. technical roles in San Francisco would strongly bias me toward pursuing technical roles.
  • Right now, I think remote organizations are in a way better market for EA-aligned talent. I'd guess in terms of EAs-per-job, the number is much lower in the Bay Area, Oxford, etc. vs outside those cities, and remote organizations can hire in the hub cities too. Plus, remote organizations can offer highly competitive salaries outside expensive cities without breaking the bank.
  • I think it is fairly likely that this was made a priority area in the first place because of bottlenecks at some non-remote organizations or because of very high standards for value-alignment that might now be looser, but I am uncertain about this.
• Identifying talent for projects that haven't been started seems like a fundamentally different bottleneck that operations for existing projects.

Based on my experience working in hiring at Open Phil, my sense is that operations is an urgent need and that many organizations are currently struggling to meet it. I think this is a shift I've seen happen especially in the last year as more mature organizations are trying to scale, and an increasing number of early stage projects are working to get off the ground. Anecdotally, over the last year I have been asked (by others in the community) for referrals/recommendations for operations roles more frequently than I've been asked about any other kind of role, and I can easily think of 10+ EA organizations or projects that have recently suggested to me that they are struggling to hire skilled and aligned operations people.

I'll also take this as an opportunity to reiterate that OP is currently hiring for virtually every operations function and will be for the foreseeable future. (As are many exciting EA organizations right now including Redwood Research, Anthropic, Lightcone, Rethink Priorities, and more!)

Excuse the cell phone thumbs :-) Anecdotes ahead Good question! I'm glad that you've written it! I think the bottleneck I'm more familiar with is longtermist operations issues, and I can say at least from my own perspective it is quite severe. Ben's survey, fwiw, will not capture orgs that have funding available but no one to lead the org if he's only reviewing existing orgs. It's a terrible thing to have a great idea and money for a thing and no one who can lead the project or run ops with minimal direction.

For just a taste: in at least the past 24 hours there have been two separate needs for ops roles (senior and mid) in the same org. There are at least 4 other longtermist projects/potential orgs I'm aware of that need an Executive Director (ED) type to lead them. At least in the longtermist space I think value alignment of an ED means more than in other cause areas because the vision and direction of the org have to be aligned (but this is true in climate change, animals, and most causes so maybe this is not unique). If the ED does not fit within your definition of ops than please disregard. To me an ED is fancy ops management person layered with strategic thinking. Also agree with everything Caroline says here.

I think what would be exciting would be more people who have experience managing teams or running ops (in any capacity) leveraging their networks (or building out their networks) and actively seeking ED opportunities or opportunities to create new businesses or orgs or work at new businesses or orgs instead of spending time on 80k job board. This is NOT a criticism of 80k, I just think that people should be more creative and ambitious than, "hmm, I should scan 80k for EA jobs." I think time would be better served spending a few hours actively reaching out to folks on LinkedIn and, if interested in longtermism, other longtermists, and talking to them about how you want to help with "x" (e.g., "I have experience in managing a team of 6 people at my current job but I'd really like to help with longtermist community building.") I've seen it be the case that a lot of hiring gets done through connections (due some mixture of more trust and time restraints) so this can be really great to just be a name that comes to mind when someone is thinking of starting an org. Sorry this also turned into advice but I hope it helps at least one person reading.