# Lightcone is hiring a generalist, a designer, and a campus operations co-lead

Lightcone is hiring! We build beautiful things for truth-seeking and world-saving. 

![Image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G8UtH9AaEAAtlCE?format=jpg&name=4096x4096)

We are hiring for three different positions: a senior designer, a campus manager, and a core team generalist. This is the first time in almost two years where we are actively hiring and trying to grow our team! 

Senior Designer
===============

When we are at our best, I think we produce world-class design. AI 2027 was I think a great design achievement, so is much of LessWrong.com itself. I also think on a product and business level, making things beautiful and intuitive and well-crafted is crucial. I like some of Patrick Collison's thinking on this:

> If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful, and Stripe doesn’t embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I’ll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, the world’s just uglier than it needs to be… One can do things well or poorly, and beauty is not a rivalrous good.
> 
> My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things—and for kind of rational reasons because what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well it tells you the person who made it really cared… And so if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.

I want us to continue making beautiful and well-designed things. Indeed, we currently have enormous demand for making more things like AI 2027 and DecidingToWin.org, with multiple new inquiries for projects like this per month, and I think many of those opportunities could be great. I also think LessWrong itself is substantially bottlenecked on design.

Now, design is a very broad category. The specific role I want to hire for is someone helping us make beautiful websites. This very likely implies understanding HTML and CSS deeply, and probably benefits a lot from frontend coding experience. But I can imagine someone who is just used to doing great design in Figma, without touching code directly, making this work.

This is a senior role! I am expecting to work with whoever we hire in this role more closely than I am currently working with many of my current core staff, and for this role to involve managing large design projects end-to-end. Correspondingly I am expecting that we will pay a salary in the range of $160k - $300k for this role, with the rough aim of paying ~70% of that person's counterfactual industry salary.

[**Apply here**](https://airtable.com/appb8P36D2CSXg9AX/pagiMwfLiH5nIhz2u/form)

Campus Operations Co-Lead
=========================

Help us run Lighthaven! Lighthaven is our 30,000 sq. ft. campus near Downtown Berkeley. We host a huge variety of events, fellowships and conferences there, ranging from 600+ person festivals like LessOnline or Manifest, to multi-month fellowships like the MATS program or Inkhaven.

We are looking for additional people to run a lot of our operations here. This will include making sure events run smoothly for our clients, figuring out how and when to cut costs or spend more and working on finding or inventing new events.

The skills involved in this role really vary hugely from month to month, so the key requirements are being able to generally problem-solve and to learn new skills as they become necessary. Some things I have worked on with people on campus in the last few months: 

*   Figuring out pricing for conferences and fellowships that run here
*   Taking over work from our cleaner and porterage staff for a few days to notice which parts of the job are unnecessarily hard, so we can work on making them easier
*   Programming and deploying our room booking software for events
*   Plunging a clogged toilet during an event
*   Hiring architects to help us file a bunch of permits to the City of Berkeley
*   Getting into a car and getting backup food from a nearby restaurant for a conference that didn't order enough food for their attendees

This role could really take a very wide range of levels of compensation and seniority, ranging from $100k/yr to $300k/yr.

[**Apply here**](https://airtable.com/appb8P36D2CSXg9AX/pagiMwfLiH5nIhz2u/form)

Core-team generalist
====================

Lightcone has a core team of 7 generalists who work on anything from design, to backend programming, to running conferences, to managing construction projects, to legal, advertising, portage, fundraising, sales, etc. We tend to operate at a sprint level, with teams and leadership of those teams being reconfigured every few weeks depending on what's current organizational priority. As an illustration, approximately every person on the core generalist team has managed every other person on the team as part of some project or initiative.

For the core team, I try to follow Paul Graham's hiring advice: 

> What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during [our](https://www.paulgraham.com/road.html) startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.  
>   
> What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call *New York Times* reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.  
>   
> Almost everyone who worked for us was an animal at what they did.

At least basic programming skill is a requirement for this role, but beyond that, it's about being excited to learn new things and adapting to whatever schemes we have going on, and getting along well with the rest of the team.

Lightcone is a culturally thick organization. Working with us on the core team is unlikely to work out if you aren't bought into a lot of our vision and culture. It's hard to summarize our full culture in this post, but here are some things that I think are good predictors of being a good fit for working here: 

*   Strongly resonating with the LessWrong sequences
*   Being excited about Edward Tufte and his writing on design
*   Having dedicated your career to AI existential risk reduction
*   Taking strong inspiration fromPaul Graham's writing on running and working at startup
*   Being very argumentative and having your own perspective and opinions on things

We try to pay competitively for this role, but are still somewhat limited by being a nonprofit. Our general salary policy is to pay 70% of whatever you would make in industry (with some cap around $300k-$400k, since we can't really pay 70% of the $5M+ salaries flying around in a bunch of AI land these days). 

[**Apply here**](https://airtable.com/appb8P36D2CSXg9AX/pagiMwfLiH5nIhz2u/form)

Some more thoughts on working at Lightcone
==========================================

I think Lightcone is a pretty good environment for thinking about the future of humanity. We tend to have a lot of spirited and intense discussion and debate about how to make things go better, and try to do a healthy mixture of backchaining from making AI go well, and forward-chaining from how to make ourselves and our community more productive and more sane. 

We also generally have a quite intense work culture. Many people on the team work routine 60 hour weeks, and I consider it a sign of a well-calibrated workload to have around one all-nighter every 6 months or so in order to meet some last-minute deadline (we average a bit less than that, which suggests to me we should be a bit more ambitious with the commitments we take on, though not much more!).

We seem to work much more collaboratively than most organizations I've observed. A common unit of work allocation within our organization is a pair of people who are expected to spend many hours talking and thinking together about their assigned top priority. Our work environment tends to be pretty interruption-driven, with me generally doing "[Management by Walking Around](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_around)", where I spend much of my day visiting people in their workspaces, checking in on what their bottlenecks are, and solving concrete problems with them.

For a much more in-depth pointer to how we work, I have also recently published a sequence of essays about our operating principles, which are adopted from weekly memos I write about how I would like us to operate: 

*   [Question the Requirements](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/BECDxh5jKjcmxs7hw)
*   [Do not hand off what you cannot pick up](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/rSCxviHtiWrG5pudv)
*   [Two can keep a secret if one is dead. So please share everything with at least one person.](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/FM7tWezTknbcTinu9)
*   [Tell people as early as possible it's not going to work out](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/Hun4EaiSQnNmB9xkd)
*   [Increasing returns to effort are common](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/swymiotpbYFv9pnEk)
*   [Put numbers on stuff, all the time, otherwise scope insensitivity will eat you](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/sdvBcPSR7p5mKhB7b)
*   [Close open loops](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/Shfziga3BdCi2L5D6)
*   [Aim for single piece flow](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/NytNporGkzzvyxJZC)
*   [Automate, automate it all](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/QTR9NDQmQKEiv6bGb)
*   [Be Naughty](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/wGa5gd49225GufcFi)

By default we do a 1-2 week trial, then if we expect it to work out we do a 1-3-month extended trial. But this is quite negotiable if you are not able to do this (e.g. many people can't do a 3-month trial without quitting their existing job, so need a firmer offer). We have successfully sponsored many H1B visas in the past, so non-US applicants are welcome.

And if you have any uncertainties or questions about applying, please send me a DM or leave a comment!

[**Apply**](https://airtable.com/appb8P36D2CSXg9AX/pagiMwfLiH5nIhz2u/form)