I’m at a work retreat in the mountains, playing volleyball and declining expensive wine (okay, okay, I’m hiding in the bathroom) and trying to figure out: why are many tech jobs a lot more flexible and generous about vacation time and concerned-with-making-you-feel-valued-as-an-employee than other highly-in-demand jobs?

I used to think that this was a basic supply-and-demand model: there’s lots of demand for tech talent, so companies have no choice but to accommodate whatever workers want, and workers want (in addition to lots of money) flexible hours, good benefits, catered meals, expensive wine, work retreats, etc., so companies that don’t offer those can’t retain any talent. 

Because I had this model, I figured that all we needed was to make work more optional (via a UBI or similar) so that there was lots of demand for all talent and McDonalds would grab you the minute you came in the door for an interview and tell you about their unlimited paid vacation and flexible hours and support for your continuing education and $5/month healthcare deductibles and call you an hour later to ask if you had any questions about the job they could answer for you, because they were really eager to have you on their team.

But people pointed out to me that other jobs where there’s lots of demand aren’t like this. There’s lots of demand for nurses but I’ve never heard my nurse friends talk about their company providing them with catered meals. Top tier law and finance both pay really well, but have hellishly stressful hours and don’t seem to have the benefits popular in Silicon Valley either. 

So I think it’s driven by another factor. To overgeneralize:

It’s really easy to leave tech jobs and costly for the company to lose employees. This isn’t true in law or finance, I don’t think; you don’t have the same tradition of frequently changing jobs to get a higher salary or a cooler project to work on, and I think if you’ve quit a couple law jobs it’s hard to find another in the same pay range. In tech, one year is not a short duration to stay at a job, and three is positive longevity. You will not lose career capital or look like a bad bet if you change jobs every two years. At the same time, it’s pretty costly to companies to lose tech employees, because they are hard to hire and it takes a long time to ramp them up. That makes companies work a lot harder to retain employees. 

This seems like a thing where there are two equilibriums, one good for employers and one good for employees. In the good-for-employers equilibrium, everyone knows that employees are expected to stay for five years minimum at each job. Any employee who doesn’t do that is probably unusual in some way, and so maybe a worse bet to hire. Therefore, employees stay even if they don’t love their job, unless they’re pretty much ready to quit the industry, and companies know it and don’t have to work as hard to keep the job appealing.

In the good-for-employees equilibrium, everyone knows that employees will jump ship as often as they see fit, and that their next employer won’t hold it against them. So companies can try to filter via resumes for employees who will stick around, but they aren’t going to be able to improve retention much that way and they’ll be screening out a lot of the talent in their industry. And they know that if they are a bad work environment, people will leave, and so they work pretty hard. 

(I think nursing has high socially-accepted turnover but has lower ramp-up time than tech, so employers don’t perceive this turnover as costly and don’t do as much to decrease it.)

Both of these equilibriums seem pretty self-sustaining. I wonder if there are good prospects for workers-advocacy work to focus on shoving industries from the employer-friendly one to the employee-friendly one. 

This is a really interesting question. Why are tech jobs so cushy compared to many other high-paying jobs like law and finance?

Suppose we do have these two equilibriums, the good-for-employers one where people have to stay at a job for a long time, and the good-for-employees one where employees can switch jobs a lot. I don’t think this actually goes far enough at explaining the differences. It predicts that law firms won’t have the same cushy benefits as tech jobs, but it also predicts that law firms won’t pay as well--if people can’t afford to quit, they will accept lower salaries.

I would add that it’s common knowledge in the tech industry (note that common knowledge does not necessarily mean true) that companies don’t give out enough raises, so employees have to frequently switch jobs to get fair raises. But that isn’t particularly true in law or finance as far as I know. Shouldn’t it be the opposite? If you can easily switch jobs, employers will want to give you lots of raises to incentivize you to stay. And if switching jobs is hard, companies don’t need to give big raises because they know you won’t leave anyway.

Today in unintended consequences (from this NYT article)

Semi-relevant: according to a survey of college admissions programs, admissions officers care much more about grades (especially grades in hard classes) and SAT scores than about extracurriculars. I suspect many people are putting too much focus on developing extracurriculars when they’d be better served taking more AP classes and/or studying harder for them.

I believed you but I just had to look that up and

sometimes I think I’m too cynical about the government being a really really horrible instrument to use to fight literally any problem

but I’m not cynical enough

hours of operation for a website? scheduled system maintenance for 12 hours every week and an extra 15 hours every other week which can’t fit into the 8 hours every day that the site is down?

I know, I know, never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but if I ascribe the state of Massachusetts enough incompetence to absolve them of malice for this, I have to conclude that they are far too incompetent to have any right to power over their citizens.

This is not that strange. Yes, most websites are up all the time, but they have to work really hard to be able to do that. For a government office it’s probably not worth it to spend the additional resources on keeping the site up 24/7, and the maintenance hours are pretty short (only about 1/10 of the week, during times when most people wouldn’t use the site anyway). Like it’s not ideal but I don’t think this is a huge problem or anything.

Ag-gag laws are an example of really terrible laws that the public overwhelmingly opposes, but still get passed because of corporate interests.

(I don’t think there are many laws like this, but this is one.)

It is not actually true that GiveWell concluded MIRI has limited evidence of effectiveness.

About four years ago, Holden, the co-founder of GiveWell, wrote this post explaining his concerns with MIRI: http://lesswrong.com/lw/cbs/thoughts_on_the_singularity_institute_si/

This article represents his personal opinion and is no way an official GiveWell report.

More recently, in 2015, Open Phil (a branch of GiveWell) gave money to FLI for regranting: http://www.givewell.org/labs/causes/ai-risk/FutureOfLifeRFP

FLI gave about $300K to MIRI. Open Phil oversaw all the grants that FLI made and endorsed FLI’s grant decisions, which means Open Phil endorsed this grant to MIRI. So if anything, we should be reaching the conclusion that GiveWell *does* endorse MIRI’s effectiveness–not with words but with money.

It’s almost certainly more than that, actually. If about 200 million Americans use tape on a regular basis, that’s 1/100th of an hour per American per year, which is about 40 seconds. It takes maybe 10-15 seconds to figure out where the tape roll starts, so it’s easily over 2 million hours if the average American uses tape 2-3 times per year.

A question for people who do good things that most people would consider exceptional or difficult, such as be vegan for moral reasons, or donate unusually high percent of their money to charity - is this hard for you? Like, do you have to constantly struggle with willpower issues and say “I know this isn’t what I want to do, but I’ll tough it out to make the world a better place”? Or does it just seem like the obvious action and proceed fluidly from your beliefs and values?

I donate a large percent of my income. Donating money isn’t burdensome at all for me (it makes me feel mildly good--some people report that it makes them feel awesome but I haven’t experienced this). I do put in more effort than I normally would to try to minimize my expenses, which amounts to maybe an average of five minutes of inconvenience per day. I already have a habit of not spending much money.

I’m also vegan, which was hard for the first month or so during which I really missed eating animal products, but after that was pretty trivial. Most people I’ve talked to have had a similar experience: it takes some people longer than it took me to get used to veganism, but most people do say it gets pretty easy after a while.

charitable dialogue

effective altruist: Almost everyone wants to make the world better, but a lot of charities have an astonishingly bad track record and/or are outright scams. Even the good ones often don’t have a sense of which of their programs work best, and priorities aren’t set by reasonable standards. What if we took charity more seriously? We’d give a lot more than the average American does. We’d create organizations like Giving What We Can that let you take a pledge to give and then that check up to hold you to your word. We’d try to rate charities by demonstrated effectiveness, like GiveWell does, and direct our money where it’s needed the most by looking at room for more funding. We’d try to direct talented young people into careers where they can make a big difference. 

We’d start asking weird questions like “can we eradicate malaria with sexy sterile males” and “was Bush actually a good President” and “can insects suffer? if they do, should we care?” and “what is likeliest to wipe out the world?”

interlocutor: All of those things sound great. But most movements aren’t as impressive as their message. In practice, do you donate more than anyone else does? In practice, are the evidence-based charities you recommend really that much better than other charities doing the same thing? Doesn’t “directing talented young people” mean that a lot of your energy goes to giving a hands-up to each other instead of working directly on the problems you care about? Doesn’t it open you up to getting distracted into a movement that is about perpetuating itself? And looking at the charities you donate to, a lot of them are charities that seem designed to appeal to people like you. I like your ideas, but I don’t trust your execution.

effective altruist: All of those are fair complaints. But if you like the message more than the movement, why not do that? If you think it’s a good idea to publicly pledge to give 10% or 20% of your income, take the pledge! If you want career support or advice directed at doing more good, read what’s out there! Check the track records and evidence of effectiveness of the charities you’re giving to! If you think we’re doing all of those things badly, do them without us. Because it’s the message that matters, not the movement. And if you can do what we’re trying to do - efficiently tackle social problems - then we’ll watch you and learn from you. If you make the case for the causes you give to, and the case is convincing, we’ll start giving there too. 

interlocutor: Easier said than done. You can think it’s in principle really important to change your mind freely, but in practice be impossible to persuade of anything. Even if I spent a while making a detailed case for the causes I give to, I worry you’d go “you’re missing the point” and keep giving to the causes I’ve argued at length are nonsensical. 

effective altruist: I’ve changed where I give four times in the last five years, based on arguments. I’m not saying we’re perfect, but I will say that new arguments really do change our minds. Make the case for a charity you care about, and at least give us the chance to live up to the principles we believe in. 

I really like this point about the message being more important than the movement. I don’t care if you identify as an effective altruist, I don’t care if you want to go to our club meetings. But I do care if you donate money to effective causes, and if you use your resources to have a large positive impact on the world.

reflections on my job search

I’m pretty much writing this for myself, but people who are in college and are similarly clueless about the real world might find it helpful.

Keep reading

Some thoughts in response:

1. In the early stages, you can get a lot of interviews by going to career fairs. I personally find this a lot easier than applying online and get a much higher response rate. This requires that you be able to talk to strangers for a long time, which I’ve had some trouble with but it was easier for me than I expected since the conversations are fairly formulaic (ask about their company, tell them what you’re looking for, talk about your resume, give them your resume and leave).

2. *Cracking the Coding Interview* is a popular book for practicing programming interview questions.

3. If a company asked me about specific features of Java, I would not work there. This tells me that they have no understanding of what makes someone a good programmer. I have never had a good software company ask me a question like this.

Is there any food in particular that you enjoy the taste of, or look forward to, or have fond memories of eating?

(Apologies for any insensitive questions).

Don’t be, I asked for help. There are foods which I observably eat in reasonable...

I generally don't like eating food, but I was recently able to gain 30 pounds in three months. Here are some things I did that may work for others as well:

1. Schedule specific meal times and always eat at those times. If you're like me and don't ever feel hungry, it can be easy to just not eat. You can prevent this by always eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time each day. In addition, you should prepare a sufficiently large quantity of food and make yourself eat all of it. This is hard at first but gets easier with practice.

2. Have ready-to-eat snacks and try to snack on them at least once a day.

3. Eat foods that taste good, even if they are "bad for you". A lot of times, when people describe food as "bad for you", what they really mean is "contains a lot of calories", or possibly "doesn't contain a lot of vitamins". If you're trying to gain weight, you probably don't really need to worry about vitamins, so most foods that are bad for overweight people aren't actually bad for *you*. There are a few exceptions to this, but if you're underweight, you're probably not in danger of eating too much of foods that are genuinely bad for you.

Try to find foods that you can eat a lot of. I find that I can eat a huge bowl of sugary cereal for breakfast, and I actually want to eat it because it's so sugary. (I can't stomach cereals like Lucky Charms or Froot Loops, so I often eat granola, which usually has tons of sugar but feels more like real food.) I can also easily eat 1000+ calories of peanut butter, potato chips, or french fries. These might not work for you, but try to find foods that do work. (Most people probably don't want to gain as much weight as I did, and shouldn't eat 1000 calories of chips in one sitting. Maybe eat 500 instead.) Of the foods you mentioned, lentils have the most calories—it should be feasible to eat 500 calories of lentils in one meal. (It's probably not feasible to eat that much broccoli.)General note: You probably don't need to worry about eating too much. If you're already underweight and you don't like eating, it's unlikely that you will accidentally eat too much. And if you think you're gaining too much weight, you can always pull back a little.

I really don’t see what people find so confusing about population ethics. I like happiness and dislike suffering. That axiom leads you pretty much directly to total utilitarianism. All these questions about whether things are really “people” or not can be entirely skipped, and life is super simple.

I don’t think it’s exactly that people find population ethics confusing. But if you accept total utilitarian population ethics (which I do), it leads to some counterintuitive conclusions, e.g. killing 5-year-olds is morally equivalent to failing to have children, or that the best thing to do is populate the universe with tiny happy beings. When people try to avoid these counterintuitive conclusions, they end up producing really complicated theories.