I'm going to repeat something that I did about a year ago:

A very small, informal announcement: if you want someone to review your resume and give you some feedback or advice, send me your resume and I'll help. If you would like to do a mock interview, send me a message and we can schedule a video call to practice. If we have never met before, that is okay. I'm happy to help you, even if we are total strangers.

To be clear: this is not a paid service, I'm not trying to drum up business for some kind of a side-hustle, and I'm not going to ask you to subscribe to a newsletter. I am just a person who is offering some free informal help. I enjoy helping people bounce ideas around, and people whom I've previously helped in this way seemed to have benefited from it and appreciated it.

A few related thoughts:

• There are a lot of people that are looking for a job as part of a path to greater impact, but many people feel somewhat awkward or ashamed to ask for help. If I am struggling in a job hunt, I don't want to ask friends or professional contacts for help due to shame; I worry that they will think less of me for not being competent. So asking a stranger that you've never met and that isn't connected to your life can be a nice option.
• There is a lot of 'low-hanging fruit' for making a resume look better, from simply formatting changes that make a resume easier to understand to wordsmithing the phrasings. Sometimes you just need a helpful person to look with a critical eye.
• There is also something about 'playing the game.' I think of this something like informal coaching. Some people don't know that when you are asked about a time you had an interpersonal conflict, instead of telling about a time you had an interpersonal conflict you should instead tell about a time you had an interpersonal conflict and you resolved it and it makes you look good.

I have a thought on this. It related to the level of effort from the advice giver, and the willingness to understand the recipient's context. Often advice is given with only a few seconds of effort, or with  the giver applying a sort of cookie-cutter template to their understanding of the recipient. That is when useless advice comes from. When the giver dedicates some time minutes toward understanding and exploring the receiver's context, toward actually paying attention, then the advice is able to be of much better quality.

This is specifically fresh in my mind because a few days ago I helped John Doe review his resume. John told me that I was not the first person to help, several other people had looked at his resume and told him that is was pretty good. But I did more than merely glance at his resume; I read through it with a critical eye. I had a page full of notes for him. Some of the notes were preference/stylistic things, but plenty of the notes were 'errors' that other people hadn't bothered to notice: the text used two different shades of dark blue, there was inconsistent formatting in the dates. John was amazed that multiple people had reviewed his resume, and nobody had noticed or bothered to tell him that he was using two different colors (it was not intentional on his part to use two different colors).

In contrast, I've heard and (heard of) plenty of career advice within EA that simply isn't apt. Recommending a recipient with no interest in an area to pursue that area, or ignoring a recipient's visa/legal status, ignoring a recipient's financial constraints, etc. I was once told to treat people to coffee and to use my parents' professional networks. Both of those things are true in general, but I don't live within a hundred miles of a place where I could treat networking contacts to coffee, and my retired working class parents don't have professional networks. It reminds me a little bit of trying to try; how much effort do people actually put into the act of giving helpful advice.

Meandering and exploratory follow-up.

Even if the justification is reasonable, it is quite exclusionary to candidates outside of the required time zone. Think of a company who wants to hire a data analyst, but instead of the job posting listing 'skilled at data analytics' it instead lists 'MA in data analytics.' It is excluding a lot of people that might be skilled but which don't have the degree.

I think the broader idea I'm trying to get at is when X is needed, but Y is listed as the requirement, and they are two distinct things. Maybe I need someone that speaks German as a native language for a job, but on the job describing I write that I need someone who grew up in Germany; those are distinct things. I'd reject all the German expats that grew up abroad, as well as the native-German speakers who grew up in Switzerland or Austria.

There might also be something here related to the non-central fallacy: applying the characteristics of an archetypical category member to a non-typical category member. Most people in distant time zones probably wouldn't be able to manage an abnormal working schedule, but that doesn't mean we should assume that no people in distant time zones can handle it.

Of course, the tradeoffs are always an issue. If I would get 5 additional candidates who would be good and 95 additional candidates who are poor fits, then maybe it wouldn't be worth it. But something about the exclusion that I can't quite put my finger on strikes me as unjust/unfair.

There is a reasonably high base rate (off the cuff: maybe 30 percent?) of candidates claiming overconfidently in interviews that they can meet a work schedule that is actually incredibly impractical for them and end up causing problems or needing firing later on. 

That is a very real concern, and strikes me as reasonable. While I don't have a good sense of what the percent would be, I agree with you that people in general tend to exaggerate what they are able to do in interviews. I wonder if there are good questions to ask to filter for this, beyond simply asking about how the candidate would plan to meet the timing requirements.

For the time zones, I had been thinking of individuals that had done this previously and can honestly claim that they have done this previously. But I do understand that for many people (especially people with children or people who live with other people) it would be impractical. Maybe my perception of people is fairly inaccurate, in the sense that I expect them to be more honest and self-aware than they really are? 😅

I want to try and nudge some EAs engaged in hiring to be a bit more fair and a bit less exclusionary: I occasionally see job postings for remote jobs with EA organizations that set time zone location requirements.^[1] Location seems like the wrong criteria; the right criteria is something more like "will work a generally similar schedule to our other staff." Is my guess here correct, or am I missing something?

What you actually want are people who are willing to work "normal working hours" for your core staff. You want to be able to schedule meetings and do collaborative work. If most staff are located in New York City, and you hire someone in Indonesia who is willing and able to do a New York City working schedule, for the organization and for teamwork that isn't different  than hiring someone in Peru (which is in the time zone as New York City).^[2]

I've previously spoken with people in Asian time zones who emphasized the unreasonableness of this; people who have the skills and who are happy/able to work from 9pm to 4am. If someone who lives in a different time zone is happy to conform to your working schedule, don't disqualify them. You can disqualify them because they lack the job-relevant skills, or because they wouldn't perform well enough in the role, but don't do it due to their location.^[3] If they have stable internet connection and they state that they are willing to work a particular schedule, believe them. You could even have a little tick-box on your job application to clarify that they understand and consent that they need to be available for at least [NUMBER] hours during normal business hours in your main/preferred time zone.

1. ^{^}

   Such as must be located between UTC and UTC +8, or must live in a time zone compatible with a North American time zone.

2. ^{^}

   You might make the argument that the person in Indonesia would be giving themselves a big burden working in the middle of the night and (presumably) sleeping during the day, but that is a different argument. That is about whether they are able to conform to the expected work schedule/availability or about how burdensome they would find it, not about whether they are physically located in a similar time zone. Lots of people in low income countries would be happy to have a weird sleeping & work schedule in exchange for the kinds of salaries that EA organizations in the UK and USA tend to pay; that is a good tradeoff for many people.

3. ^{^}

   There are, of course, plenty of other reasons to care about location. There are legal and tax reasons that a organization should only hire people in certain locations. Not all employers of record can employee people in all countries. And there are practical reasons related to the nature of the job. If you need someone to physically be somewhere occasionally, location matters. That person should probably shouldn't be located a 22-hour trip away if they need to be there in-person twice a month; they should be able to travel there in a reasonable amount of time.

Overall, not one of the stronger critiques that I've read.

The "how could anyone put a numerical value on a holy space" snippet struck me. I'm no expert in measurement, but the answer to this question seems to be similar to "how do you measure how extraverted a person is?" or "how do you measure the sum total of all economic activity in a country?" or "how do you measure media censorship?" The answer is that you do it carefully, with the use of tools/assessments, proxies, parametric estimating, etc.

There is plenty of research that basically involves asking people "Would you rather have A or B," and with clever research design you really can measure how much people value various intangible things.^[1] And I don't even study or specialize in that area. So it stuck me as odd to have such an established set of solutions which weren't even mentioned. How to Measure Anything is great, but there is also lots written about willingness to pay.

1. ^{^}

   For anyone not familiar with that kind of research, a simplistic version would basically be asking people "Would you rather have an extra $100 each week or have a local art museum," and by varying the numbers you can get an idea of what dollar value people put on that specific experience. For anyone familiar with the research, please forgive me for my vast simplifications.

Imperfect Parfit (written by by Daniel Kodsi and John Maier) is a fairly long review (by 2024 internet standards) of Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. It draws attention to some of his oddities and eccentricity (such as brushing his teeth for hours, or eating the same dinner every day (not unheard of among famous philosophers)). Considering Parfit's influence on the ideas that many of us involved in EA have, it seemed worth sharing here.

I've most often read/heard this argument in relation to alcohol and marijuana. Something along the lines of "if we had never had this thing and we discovered it today, would we make it legal/illegal?"

I think of it in vaguely the same category as the veil of ignorance and other simple thought experiments that encourage us to step outside of our own individualized preferences.

I think that describing it as a combination of anchoring with confirmation bias seems roughly accurate. Maybe there might be an element of availability bias tossed in as well, since we latch on to the most readily available answer?

I'm not sure, but I think that Julia Galef has spoken about the concept of explanation freeze in interviews or on podcasts, so you might be able to dig up a more detailed and expansive explanation. But with some cursory Google Searching I was only able to find passing references to it, rather than more full explanations.

I really enjoyed this. Several aspects resonated with experiences I have had (or that I have observed in-person). Overall, this struck me as very balanced & grounded advice, especially for a subculture that tends to put so much weight on intelligence and rationality. Thanks for taking the time and effort to write this.