Part 1: EA tech work is inefficiently allocated & bad for technical career capital

By Arepo @ 2021-07-25T13:03 (+59)

Epistemic status of sequence: empirically untested. Therein lies the excitement ...

Tl;dr of the sequence

In part 1, I argue that tech work at EA orgs has three predictable problems:[1]

The common root of these problems is siloed small/nonexistent tech departments across EA orgs.

In part 2 I lay out the case that moving tech work to agencies would largely address these problems.[2] Qualitatively I would expect them to either increase the availability of EA tech staff, increase their career capital or both, and to help assess new tech hires. Quantitatively, I argue that if all EA nonprofits with an existing tech department were to fold their tech departments into an agency, it would save the movement approximately 11-43% of the cost of a software developer per organisation in efficiency gains from greater productivity.

In part 3, I look at three modes of funding outsourced EA tech work, which cut across both agencies and individuals: donor-funded[3], low-bono and full-profit. I’ll argue that there are several advantages of a donor-funded agency over the other funding modes, both in the value it could add to the space of EA tech work and in the appeal of working for it as a developer. I’ll then look at some of the unique challenges a donor funded agency would face (such as lack of market incentives), and consider ways to resolve them and in some cases turn them to its advantage.

In the final part, I look at the pros and cons of an alternative mode - of effectively donor-funding an ‘agency’ that’s a branch of an existing org - and suggest tentatively that it might be a good option to get started, planning eventually to spin the orgs off into independence. Having focused on tech agencies throughout I’ll briefly look at how much the overall reasoning could apply to the case for other specialties.

I’ll prompt again for input at the very end, but feedback would be especially valuable from three groups of people (feel free to PM me if you’d prefer not to answer publicly) - though I do recommend reading the whole sequence first:

Part 1 Introduction

For about three years I worked as a software developer at an EA organisation, mostly as the only active developer on the team. This was a rewarding time overall, and I strongly believed and believe in their mission; however, working in that environment as a lone developer brought with it some fundamental problems that seemed likely to generalise to many other EA nonprofits. EA nonprofits typically have a) 0 or 1 software developers, and rarely more than 2, and b) a lot of conceptual overlap in their tech work requirements - to wit, various flavours of web development - yet very little systemic cooperation between these departments.

In this post I explore three distinct negative effects of these common traits:

  1. EA tech work is bad for developing technical skills
  2. EA tech work is inefficiently allocated
  3. EA tech work is difficult to assess hires for

EA tech work is bad for developing technical skills

As a long-time advocate of intra-movement support processes, I find this effect the most concerning of the three.

Four years ago Ben Todd observed that the EA movement struggled to recruit software engineers. Two years ago Jeff Kaufman observed a similar difficulty. Some people in those threads speculated that the difficulty might come from low salaries; others thought it was due to EA tech work being unrewarding.[4]

I speculated that, given my own experience plus what I’d learned anecdotally of other EA orgs, these concerns would generalise to the wider movement. To test this theory, I polled and then ran follow-up interviews with EAs who’d chosen not to work at EA orgs, and also interviewed the existing software developers at some EA organisations.

Interviews with software developers not working at an EA org

Last year I created a series of Facebook polls, in the ‘Software, Data, and Tech Effective Altruism in London’, the ‘Software, Data, and Tech Effective Altruism’, and the ‘Effective Altruism Polls’ groups (posted Feb 20, Jan 21, and Feb 21 respectively)[5] asking the question ‘Software developers both in industry and at EA orgs, what reservations about/critiques of the EA tech sector do you have?’ If you can’t or don’t want to view those groups or want to see the totals in one place, the results are grouped here.

The three most common choices were

  1. I don't think I would get enough career capital (12 agreed)
  2. EA orgs don't pay enough/not good enough perks (11 agreed)
  3. I want to work in a larger tech department (5+ people) (10 agreed)

I believed that 1 and 3 were highly overlapping, and sent some semi-structured follow-up questions to respondents to the first poll, based on the responses they’d given, to test this belief and to explore the question of pay. You can see the pseudonymised answers in full. They’re difficult to summarise, but some themes stuck out.

On pay/perks

I asked those who’d agreed about low pay/perks what they imagined the salaries would be, vs the minimum salary they’d accept, and got the following answers:

This is very limited data, and very dependent on experience and location (all the people who answered this question were based or expected to be based in London) but it’s interesting that a) their guesses at EA salaries are a long way below market rate for their experience (base rate of about £48,000-53,000 in London going by Glassdoor average for a mid-level developer/engineer, which probably means about 3+ years of experience), b) their starting rates still seem a little below market rate for their experience, and c) their guesses are mostly less than I was paid by the time I left (then with about 5 years experience), and much less than the salary of one of the two EA-employed software developers who shared theirs with me (see below). They’re also in the range of the two EA software jobs currently open and specifying salary at the time of writing (£50,000-70,000 for CEA and £53,000-65,000 for GWWC), though CEA and GWWC might have higher budgets than the average EA org.

The perk suggestions were a mix of benefits, working flexibility, and learning support (ie career capital):

Another poll option that got 5 votes was ‘Not enough remote positions/the main hubs are too far away from me’, further corroborating the ‘flexibility’ concerns - though in retrospect the phrasing makes it unclear how many of those people would actually want remote work.

So inasmuch as perks are translatable to salary and actual EA software dev salaries are substantially higher than EAs working elsewhere seem to believe, salary may not be as much of a blocking factor in the EA world as the responses suggest.

On career capital

The respondents who clarified after voting for ‘career capital’ or ‘want to work in a larger tech department’ all mentioned limited learning opportunities, and in most cases corresponding CV concerns:

Interviews with current EA developers

I messaged various software developers currently working at EA orgs where I could find contact information for them, though this only led to three interviews and one informal conversation that I was unable to follow up on. Those three I asked various questions about their job satisfaction on a 1-7 rating scale.

Three of the four of them were very happy with their job (satisfaction 6). Many forms of selection bias could apply here; nonetheless, this is evidence against the idea that EA tech jobs _overall) are unrewarding. But three of the four raised concerns around their career development, in particular the lack of other developers to work with, and the one who didn’t described himself as having a much broader role: ‘something closer to a broad, founder-y position, where I get involved in all sorts of things, including web design, product strategy, writing, operations, management and hiring’.

(You can access this table as a PDF here)

Developer C also mentioned that their org had struggled to hire for a tech role, ‘since within EA in particular, there are lots of developers who have ‘stronger technical skills than we need, relative lack of interest in web development’. Taking this at face value, it seems like the technical work at the organisation was relatively unchallenging, but that their broader set of responsibilities made up for this for them. A similar generalism/level of autonomy seems to have contributed to Developer A and B’s overall satisfaction.

That said, Developer C also mentioned ‘not enough breadth of interest / competence in non-technical areas’ as a difficulty in hiring for the role, so we can’t assume much about what proportion of  EA developers would be motivated by these elements - they won’t matter much to skilled non-EA developers who might have considered the role. As Developer B noted, the experience from them is probably much less valuable if you ever expect to work at non-EA organisations.

So inasmuch as we can infer from N=3-and-a-bit, I found that tech jobs have higher overall job satisfaction than I’d expected, if the selection bias effect wasn’t too strong - but the concern that the jobs can counterfactually retard your technical skills seems well founded.

Summing up

Hiring now may not be as difficult as it was when Ben Todd and Jeff Kaufman posted their observations. One of the tech staff I interviewed above claimed ‘the landscape has changed dramatically in the last 4 years. All roles at EA orgs have become much more competitive.’

But the nature of EA tech work hasn’t particularly changed since then. If we believe it was - and therefore still is - bad for technical skill development, then the cost has just shifted from the organisations (paying in time and effort to recruit) to their tech staff (paying in counterfactual career capital).

The most rewarding EA tech jobs seem to go well beyond just ‘software development’. But not all EA tech jobs have this added responsibility, and it doesn’t address the problem raised by many would-be and actual EA developers of developing technical skills. As for shifting the cost to developers: drawing from EAs’ future career capital will have all kinds of harmful effects on the movement longer term, even if it’s ‘working’ at the moment.

EA tech work is inefficiently allocated

Small tech departments are inefficient when they have common values. I’ll explore this more rigorously in part 2, but it’s quite an intuitive problem. The rate at which tech work comes in constantly fluctuates and some projects are vastly more valuable than others. This means that at any given time, it’s likely that developers at some organisation are largely wasting their time on low value work while developers at another org - that might have very similar goals or at least similar terminal values - are overworked on some major project that needs to be released ASAP.

To attempt to quantify this effect, I’ve used a simplifying model which I’ll detail in the appendix to the next part, but the short version is that this inefficiency seems to lose each single-developer org value very roughly equal to half of the cost of employing the developer alternately in money wasted by overstaffing and output lost by understaffing. How much of this waste an agency could prevent depends on further assumptions - also laid out in part 2’s appendix.

There are also many more EA orgs with no in-house developer (there’s a wiki of EA orgs, roughly 90% of which don’t seem to have one). Additionally, sometimes someone outside an EA org - or entirely outside the EA space - will propose a high value one-off project and then take little or no further ownership, often meaning it doesn’t get done (although in one of those cases the proposer ended up doing it himself). We could consider such projects pico-orgs[6], since they’re amenable to the same logic as macro-orgs (by which I mean any 1+ person organisation).

Each <1-developer-org constitutes a potential value loss of whatever value its tech projects would have when implemented, minus the pro-rata cost of developer time it would take to implement them. In some cases this will be a low enough loss that we would prefer to counterfactually spend the money elsewhere; in others it will be high enough that we would gladly pay pro rata for an in-house developer if that were an option. Instead, we have to choose between not doing the projects and paying perhaps 3x the pro rata cost for a traditional software agency (see parts 2–3 for more on this comparison). In practice such orgs (especially pico-orgs) will often not apply for funding such an expense, even if it would still be worthwhile. Sometimes volunteers will step up, but reliable volunteers are in short supply (more in part 3 on the comparative value of volunteers).

The problem of fluctuating tech work could perhaps be mitigated by part time staff, but this only helps to the extent that an org can find a developer whose part time preferences closely match the org’s requirements, which will continue to fluctuate.

The problem is accentuated by the way tech work is split into many specialisations. Web development alone approximately consists of frontend, backend and devops work - and many more sub-specialisations. While there are many ‘full stack’ developers (ie generalists between the three) they inevitably have some preference, and inevitably would benefit from being able to consult with someone with different strengths.

A problem unique to EA?

As far as I know, this is not something EAs have thought much about, possibly because it’s much less of a concern in the for-profit space. A for-profit company only focuses on its own efficiency relative to its competitors’ - the absolute efficiency of its sector is otherwise irrelevant to it. Moreover a successful startup will gradually grow to the point where it can afford enough tech staff to substantially balance out fluctuating work, retaining some cross-department inefficiencies, but with better balanced workloads overall since reassignments causing much less friction than hiring and firing.

Conversely, the EA space as a whole cares about its absolute efficiency, not that of any given organisation relative to its ‘competitors’. And even the most successful EA nonprofits tend to stay relatively lean - I know of only a couple with even two full time software devs.

Meanwhile, EA for-profits will typically want to grow, but obviously start small, and still be concerned with the efficiency of their space. So until they reach capacity for a multi-person tech team, they have the same problems as nonprofits.

Summing up

The EA space has a very high proportion of small orgs, losing a lot of potential value.

EA tech work is difficult to assess hires for

To a first approximation judging a potential hire is harder the more senior they are relative to your current best employee in that field (presuming they’re doing the interviewing). This is somewhat less of a concern for tech, where there are relatively objective tests of some of the relevant skills; nonetheless, if you have 0 developers, which many EA orgs do when they’re hiring, it’s going to be difficult to make an informed decision.

When you have 1 developer it’s still going to be difficult 50ish% of the time when you’re trying to hire someone with more experience than them, and so on - tending towards 0% as your tech department grows.

Next: Part 2: The advantages of agencies

In which I explore how an EA tech agency could address these concerns.

  1. Two terminology clarifications that apply to this whole sequence:

    Firstly, when I talk about EA organisations, I mean ‘nonprofit EA organisations’ unless otherwise specified. I’m cautiously optimistic that an agency of the type I discuss in subsequent posts could also help for-profit EA startups, with various caveats: 1) it might need a clear definition of what qualified as an EA for-profit, and for-profits would have an incentive to game this, 2) there may be legal restrictions on the support a non-profit could offer a for-profit, and 3) for-profits typically aim to grow much faster and therefore have a smaller window in which outsourcing would be better for them than in-house hiring.

    Secondly, I’m using ‘tech worker’ and ‘coder’ primarily as synonyms for ‘web development worker’ and closely adjacent roles, since those seems to be the main area of EA tech work other than highly specialised AI/research work - the latter of which has very different considerations.

    I suspect that similar patterns as those I describe here apply to a lesser extent to somewhat adjacent areas like data science. In the longer run I’d hope an agency could include them, if only since it gives more breadth of experience to the team, and hence more room for lateral movement to those who want to try something new. But in the short term, I’m imagining a donor-funded tech agency would start by primarily addressing web development, hopefully prove the concept, and only afterwards work its way outwards, to the extent that doing so seemed advisable. Even short term there may be other roles needed, such as (tech-specialised) project managers, but since I’m agnostic on how much the overall argument would apply to them I’m leaving that deliberately open. ↩︎

  2. I’m using the term ‘agency’ throughout because it seems less presumptuous than ‘consultancy’, but in practice I would expect such an agency to eventually provide a shared tech service to the whole EA space, such that over time I would expect it to offer more than just coding-on-demand. A donor funded agency as described in part 3 would have to start doing this sooner, since its domain (as discussed in more detail there) would include finding projects that individual EA orgs might have missed. Plausibly ‘shared service organisation’ would be a better term, but a Google search yields at best a handwavey definition of what that actually means, and it won’t be familiar to most people, so I’ve stuck with the more evocative term.

    While I was writing this, Luke Muehlhauser published a general call for more EA consultancies. His argument is a high level one for a) the general case, rather than tech specifically, and b) not (as I’ll discuss in part 3) contrasting funding models, so our arguments don't overlap much. ↩︎

  3. ‘Donor-funded’ could describe any charity or nonprofit, but in this sequence I’m imagining it implies funding almost exclusively from a small number of individual entities as opposed to sourced from large numbers of small donations. The distinction isn’t super-important - in principle, donor-funded tech agencies and individual workers could source funding from either, but in practice it seems far more likely that they’ll either be funded by major donors or not at all. ↩︎

  4. Eg comments on Ben’s thread: ‘I decided not to apply for the 80k job because it was WordPress, which is horrible to work with and bad for career capital as a developer’ (comment link), ‘I'm concerned the jobs won't be technically challenging enough’ (comment link)- though a couple of comments challenge the idea that they’re the driving reason for hiring difficulty.

    Comment on Jeff’s thread: ‘I took a significant pay cut to work as a software engineer for CEA, considering the difference to be essentially a donation ... I treated it like a standard tech job with flexible hours, and found that I was judged pretty harshly for that by my co workers.

    ‘I was also under the impression that I'd be the manager of the team when I joined and would work on growing the team and mentoring new folks, but it turned out that I was placed under the single existing engineer who had less experience than I did, and after hiring and training one person, the team stayed stagnant and I did not get the opportunity to mentor and train that I'd come in excited to do.’ ↩︎

  5. To my knowledge, this is the biggest FB tech group - it’s members seem to be largely a superset of the ‘Software, Data, and Tech Effective Altruism’ group.

    I do worry that the phrasing was leading - at the very least, I specifically asked about ‘reservations’ rather than ‘overall view’. I think the number of respondents who picked ‘I enjoy my current job too much to leave but would want to join an EA org if I left’ (4 of 24 total participants) provides some calibration here, but this is a potential source of bias. ↩︎

  6. Definitely a silly term, but Googling ‘micro-organisation’ yields definitions of ‘a small business that employs few people’ so would be confusing; a ‘nano-organisation’ might then be one that employs one person and might also confuse with nanotech organisations, which show up when you Google the phrase; a pico-organisation has no such associations, no meaningful Google hits and, following down the SI prefix chain by order if not cardinality would be the first prefix described an ‘organisation’ of less than one person. ↩︎

Ben_West @ 2021-08-04T01:53 (+40)

Hi Arepo, I think you are describing a tiny portion of EA software development, but are using the term "EA tech" to describe that small portion. I would suggest changing your post to something like "small EA organizations should hire an agency instead of hiring <=1 FTE of developers" and drop the term "EA tech work" unless it's something that genuinely applies to all EA tech work.

The claim “EA tech work is bad for technical career capital” seems particularly unsubstantiated.

I care about this not so much because it affects your agency proposal, but more that I worry software developers who are reading this won't understand that the experiences you describe are not representative, unless they read very closely.

As some justification: Perhaps the most obvious definition of "EA tech work" is to filter the 80 K job board for "engineering" positions. When I do this, the current top positions are at the UK government, DeepMind, OpenAI, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Microsoft. These positions generally do not suffer from the problems you mentioned, like looking bad on a resume.

The 80 K job board is sometimes criticized for being too longtermist-oriented. My guess is that most short-termist EA engineers are at places like Wave, which employ dozens to hundreds of developers, and similarly don't suffer from the difficulties you mention here, though there is not an equivalent job board to check.

In part II you say:

At any given time in the last few years, there have been perhaps 5-10 software developers working full time in EA nonprofits.

CEA, my current employer, single-handedly employs this many full-time software developers.[1] The same is true of my former employer Ought. I expect it's also true of Redwood or Anthropic. It's also true of EA-aligned animal rights organizations like The Humane League and Global Health and Development charities like GiveDirectly. So I'm guessing you are also excluding from consideration "EA nonprofits which have dedicated software development teams."

My best guess is that you are considering only EA organizations which hire <=1 FTE of software developers. This is an important target audience to consider, but is very different from all of "EA tech work".

You noted that 100% of the people who said they were worried about compensation being too low were just factually wrong about EA compensation. I suspect a similar thing is true regarding career capital, and would not want your post to reinforce that misimpression.

  1. Note that CEA includes some umbrella projects like EA Funds and GWWC ↩︎

G Gordon Worley III @ 2021-07-25T22:41 (+28)

As best I can tell you don't seem to address the main reasons most organizations don't choose to outsource:

You could of course hand-wave here and try to say that since you propose an EA-oriented agency to serve EA orgs this would be less of an issue, but I'm skeptical since if such a model worked I'd expect, for example, not not have ever had a job at a startup and instead have worked for a large firm that specialized in providing tech services to startups. Given that there's a lot of money at stake in startups, it's worth considering, for example, if these sorts of challenges will cause your plan to remain unappealing in reality, since the continue with the example most startups that succeed have in-house tech, not outsourced.

Charles He @ 2021-07-25T23:35 (+8)

I agree, that in their posts, the OP only advocates for their idea.

Also, I agree with your points. I think having full time tech staff, someone that knows the ins and out of a system/org and is valuable, and this can be hard to replace in an agency model.

However, I think the rest of your comment is ungenerous. 

  • There are literally firms that specialize in providing tech to startups, and if you expand this to include general contractor firms in IT, that indeed work for startups, this is a large  fraction of the tech industry.
  • Setting aside OpenAI, few EA orgs focus on creating intellectual property (EA aren't "disrupting" social media/logistics/healthcare, etc.). Indeed, based on the OP's comments, the need is more toward prosaic work (which is sort of the problem). The skill is more fungible.
  • You make a point by saying there's "a lot of money at stake at startups" but this itself supports the OP's point:  (early) employees  in for-profits grind brutally to win equity and exit (often in zero-sum games with competitors). There's less need for that level of control and aggressiveness in EA orgs.

These do suggest that an agency model could work.

More directly, I think it would not have been difficult for the OP to add some pro forma, "there are drawbacks section" but, basically, really your perfectly correct points are sort of expected and normal.  

I don't think the OP is planning to take over all tech in all EA orgs but instead offer an alternative. Even if only 30% of EA orgs use it, the idea seems viable.

I think the level of discussion should be higher and address "devil is in the details", seeing what the demand could be and what can be worked out. That seems to be have the OP is doing.


I do think the EA advantages like the OP suggest is indeed large and may even be unique in the non-profit field.

 

david_reinstein @ 2021-07-26T22:02 (+3)

My impression is that EA orgs are far more mission-aligned and have more scope for cooperation than typical nonprofits and charities. Those guys tend to compete with each other and are very concerned with self-preservation.

Arepo @ 2021-07-26T08:41 (+6)

I think Charles' responses are good. I'd also like to see evidence of the claim that these are the main reasons. Occam's Razor says to me that if outsourcing costs 2-3x (or more) than in-house hiring, then that's the main reason lean startups don't go for it. Otherwise, companies could just hire agencies on permanent contracts, effectively treating them as superexpensive (but partially pre-vetted) in-house staff.

Linch @ 2021-07-26T08:08 (+13)

I really like this idea! I'm particularly excited about having a new agency to do tech work for a fairly simple subset of the arguments you've mentioned:

  1. The unmet demand for the work is there
    1. There appears to be a lot of high-EV software work that is currently undone within EA.
    2. There are probably many more software work that we haven't identified because of not having the capacity to do them.
  2. There are many talented software engineers within our movement, many of whom say they want to do direct work "someday."
  3. There appears to be a fair amount of money in our movement.
  4. And yet the work is not done
  5. Given that there's a burning need in the market, it would be helpful to fill it.* An independent agency seems like a promising candidate to solve this "matching market" issue.


Personally, I find your arguments for having a independent tech agency and the advantages of an EA tech agency to be fairly compelling, and the argument for the agency to be primarily donor-funded rather than primarily consultant fee-funded or a hybrid system to be much weaker. 

Like naively I'd have a picture of the initial tech agency to look like analogous to that of a VC funded startup where initial customers (EA orgs) are subsidized by VC (EA donor) money, until the tech agency "finds its feet" and can do a combination of being paid for services and funded for specific projects. (I gave more specific reasons for doubt in the relevant sections).

But nonetheless, don't let my naysaying dissuade you! Given that the most likely route to making this tech agency a reality is through you (co)founding it, I think it's much more important that the founder believes in the details of the product and the organization rather than a random Forum commentator does! 

*A point that I've made privately a few times and should probably make into a full post is that a rational profit-maximizing firm should always increase investment until marginal cost equals marginal revenue, and the EA talent pipeline is nowhere near that. 

Arepo @ 2021-07-26T10:06 (+4)

Thanks! Much of the challenge of part 3 for me was trying to untangle my own strong intuition that working at a donor-funded agency would be so much more rewarding. If other developers find the low-bono idea more appealing, then I'm confident that such an agency would be enough of an improvement on the status quo that it would be worth setting one up; it'll be interesting to see how developer preferences split.

Peterslattery @ 2021-07-26T02:57 (+12)

Thanks so much for writing this. I have just skimmed the overall arguments but from what I have absorbed I tend to agree with you that there is a need to  centralise tech resources.

Some quick comments/thoughts:

I have been involved in a few organisations and volunteer organisations and all would have benefitted greatly from access to tech expertise. I know others who told me they had similar issues with their organisations. 

Based on my experiences I suspect that if we had well funded and centralised tech support for EA orgs there would be many more websites and tech products and many of those that exist now would be greatly improved. 

Going beyond tech: I think that there is a general need for EA consulting networks, organisations and agencies (e.g., tech, marketing, research, statistics) to help incubate and support the many 'topic 'focused groups (e.g., career advice, animal suffering reduction, charities etc). Also to help disseminate best practice from the experienced EA orgs into the new orgs. The arguments in your post also seem applicable there too (and I see you mention something related in your last post).  However, I am far from knowledgeable or expert here so not at all confident that there isn't something I am missing .

Finally,  I'd like if someone explored if a hybrid model is viable for tech and other agencies. Basically, they could consult for EA orgs at a budget or for free but subsidise this by also consult for non-EA orgs at full price. That model could have a lot of benefits and enable faster scaling, higher salaries etc.

Nathan Young @ 2021-07-28T13:48 (+4)

Hybrid models

These are effectively a subsidy from the developer org to the org they are doing the work for. To some extent this makes them a small grant funding body which distributes to any org claiming to be effective. I would be concerned about free-riding.

It might be better to a charge a normal/slightly discounted rate for "effective" projects and then let the subsidy be delivered  by other funders.

Peterslattery @ 2021-07-30T00:42 (+2)

Thanks for mentioning. Yeah, that makes sense. I think that you could limit it to a certain portion of the work (say no more than 25% of work can be subsidised etc). I'd be ok with the external funding alternative if it didn't add too much extra friction.

ruthgrace @ 2021-08-13T22:41 (+11)

As someone who does software and is interning at an established non profit in San Francisco (just doing research, not software engineering), I agree with your points, and I want to get a little bit deeper into the reasons why.

First, I think a lot of the really impactful technical is like, somebody's working on a report and they need to make a pie chart, and they're not that good with Google sheets. And the technical volunteer is really good at Google sheets and can finish the task in 10 minutes. But to get to the point where the technical volunteer was connected to this task, they've had to attend months of weekly meetings where there weren't any technical tasks available. And that time is good time spent understanding the context of the work that the organization does, but won't feel worth it if the technical volunteer's goal for their involvement is to make technical contributions.

Also, I think it's really difficult for non-technical people generally to describe the problem they want a technical person to solve, in a way that makes sense. Like, it's not going to be the way it is at your typical tech job where your manager gives you the specs of the project and you just make it happen the way they asked. People are going to ask you for stuff that isn't possible or is scoped differently from what they need, and to prevent making something that they aren't actually going to be able to use, it's likely that you will spend more time talking to people to learn about their work and how you can best help them than actually coding. And that skill of figuring out how to best help somebody by talking to them is a skill that I think most software engineers don't actually have, unless they are also entrepreneurs who do that kind of thing regularly.

My recommendation for people who are good at computer stuff generally (doesn't have to be as deep as software engineering, but if you are handy with WordPress, and Google sheets, you can be really useful already) who want to help out is to make an effort to be part of the community that is working on a problem that you care about. That way, you will get the context of what exactly people are trying to do, and understand the nature of the work, and when it becomes clear that a technical solution would be really helpful, people trust you to do it in a way that will be helpful, and there's no friction with trying to onboard you because you are already there.

Charles He @ 2021-07-25T19:25 (+11)

This is incredibly good.

I think this "operational" and "implementation" content, filled with on the ground experiences, is critically valuable.

I have a question/suggestion: 

Have you considered publishing the "sequence" in successive posts, maybe a few days or a week apart?

Arepo @ 2021-07-25T22:12 (+7)

Thanks for the kind words :)

Maybe I'll regret this, but I'd rather not unpublish having already published. I also think the later posts don't make much sense out of context, so the first post is likely to generate most of the responses; so I'd rather the payoff & call to action in later posts was available while this one's still creating visibility.