MATS is hiring for two roles on the program team. MATS will have more than a dozen employees at EAG San Francisco 2026, so feel free to come talk to use if you are interested in joining the team.

• Program Systems Associate: Build and maintain MATS' internal infrastructure, including databases, data collection forms, and integrations. Refactor legacy systems and collaborate across teams to improve infrastructure and establish best practices. Create ambitious, shared infrastructure for the AI safety talent ecosystem. Requires strong database design skills and a product mindset; software engineering or LLM-assisted coding proficiency preferred.
• Program Talent Manager: Own MATS' full applicant process across 3+ high-volume cycles per year (100+ fellows, 50+ mentors per cohort). Interface with mentors at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and other organizations to understand talent needs. Design applications, coordinate evaluations, manage reviewers, and prepare applicant shortlists. Develop outreach strategy to attract top talent. Requires strong judgment in evaluating technical/policy candidates and excellent project/stakeholder management; recruiting or structured evaluation experience preferred.

I've seen so many scenarios in which EA folks reinvent wheels that are already very well-established in the broader professional world, or in which people rely on networks of EAs for advice rather than asking a subject matter expert. I've mostly seen this in relation to hiring because that is an area that I've seen internal processes for a few different EA organizations.

More broadly and more informally I've seen people failed to train new managers and fail to adopt project management practices (or to even be aware that they exist). One person mentioned to me that the Project Management Institute sounded fake. I have the vague impression that a lot of people understand project management to be something like "putting tasks in a list and then ticking them off," and simply aren't aware of earned value management, risk management, quality control, and other major areas.

This is vague and handwavy, but it does seem to resonate with a general tendency toward insularity: rather than ask a consultant with many years of experience who is an expert in an area, EAs seem to be happy to ask a friend who has two years of work experience and who did a thing once fairly well.

I'm curious how easy or hard it is to set up some drop shipping. A few items (t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, caps) with a few choices of designs might be feasible, much like the Shrimp Welfare Project Shop, or the DFTBA shop.

A semi-regular reminder that anybody who wants to join EA (or EA adjacent) online book clubs, I'm your guy.

Copying from a previous post:

I run some online book clubs, some of which are explicitly EA and some of which are EA-adjacent: one on China as it relates to EA, one on professional development for EAs, and one on animal rights/welfare/advocacy. I don't like self-promoting, but I figure I should post this at least once on the EA Forum so that people can find it if they search for "book club" or "reading group." Details, including links for joining each of the book clubs, are in this Google Doc.

I want to emphasize that this isn't funded through an organization, I'm not trying to get emails to put on a newsletter, and I'm not selling an online course or push people to buy a product. This is literally just online book clubs: we vote on books and have video chats to talk about books.

Would you be willing/able to share a bit more detail or context about this? I'm somewhat interested, but there isn't enough information here for me to feel comfortable to step forward and raise my hand.

If you want, I'd be happy to have a conversation, give you feedback, review your resume, etc. I've been involved in hiring for quite a few years, including at multiple EA organizations. I also know from personal experience how rough it is to send out many, many applications without success.

I read the book a while back and I enjoyed it. It was kind of fun to get some juicy details about bad things inside Facebook. My main takeaway was something along the lines of "a fish rots from the head." Leaders of an organization set priorities, direction, culture (to a great extent), and this books served as sort of a case study of leadership that has a fairly narrow focus. Poor social skills and poor common sense, entitlement, and the general idea that you get everything you want all stood out to me. The levels of sycophancy and self-interest were a bit surprising, but not terribly so.

Trying to apply ideas from this book to an EA context involves a bit of contortion, but in a sense I think that I'm not too concerned. The culture/values of EA tend to have a very different focus than Facebook did/does, and the leaders of the organizations often^[1] tend to have better common sense than what was displayed in Careless People. I would find it hard to imagine most senior leaders at EA orgs throwing fits because of a McDonald's meal or aggressively pushing for the promotion of their personal projects using company resources. If anything, the book left me thinking that EA orgs will probably avoid many of the issues described in Careless People due to the focus on ethics and morality.

1. ^{^}

   This is certainly not always true, and the level of common sense or general knowledge is noticeably lower than I would like. I've seen many people with very little or very narrow life experience ask about or propose things that I found silly or poorly considered. But my impression is that this is an eye-catching minority, and it is much more common for organizations to have leadership teams are more mature.