Job ad disguised as a blogpost

Help me save this blog?

I haven’t posted here for ages, despite having a growing backlog of things I want to write about. That’s mostly because I’ve been really underwater, which doesn’t seem likely to change soon. Except, that is, for one shot, one opportunity.

We’re hiring for four senior generalist roles on the GCR team at Open Philanthropy, including someone who’ll work very closely with me. I’m really excited about what getting the right people in all these roles could mean, for a bunch of reasons (many of which are in the job ad). Here, I just want to share some of my personal excitement about the role working with me.

I have a pretty “spiky” ability profile; some tasks that others find straightforward take me ages and can easily leave me too drained to do the work I’m actually good at. I’ve worked pretty hard to go from:

• bad at a bunch of stuff

• good at a bunch of other stuff

to

• just about competent at a bunch of stuff

• good at a bunch of other stuff

But “just about competent” is still some distance away from “good”.

I think there’s a chance that we find someone for the role working with me whose strengths heavily overlap with my weaknesses. I’d be really excited if we managed to. I find my work incredibly interesting, and find the stakes of what I’m working on equal parts motivating and terrifying. I want to be able to get more done, and I don’t like how much of a bottleneck my weaknesses are to that happening.

Also, it might mean that I end up able to spend more time writing. So if you weren’t convinced by the rest, but for some reason you think one of the most important problems in the world is reviving this blog¹, please consider applying or referring someone. If you refer someone we end up hiring, we’ll give you $5,000.

If you’d like to hear someone else’s perspective on what working with me is like, my colleague Catherine wrote this.

1. Of course, it’s also pretty plausible that me working with someone who’s good at prioritisation causes fewer blogposts to happen. If so, sorry I guess? Might be good for the world though.