219: Ben's Friend Ben
Episode
41 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Leadership, Design & UX
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Writing for quantity over quality: Publish on a consistent schedule — weekly at minimum — before optimizing for quality. Blog post readership follows a heavy-tailed distribution where top posts reach 100x more readers than average ones. Volume generates the samples needed to identify what resonates, and that pattern recognition eventually enables fewer, higher-quality posts per year.
- ✓Effective altruism and scope neglect: When comparing charitable causes, calculate the cost-per-outcome rigorously. A guide dog costs $40,000; a blindness-curing surgery costs $40. That is a 1,000x difference in impact per dollar. Most people skip this math entirely. Using a rough quantitative framework — even an imperfect one — catches order-of-magnitude errors that intuition misses.
- ✓Career impact via 80,000hours.org: Developers seeking high-impact career paths should start at 80000hours.org, which maps cause areas by scale and provides one-on-one career coaching. Direct-impact roles — like building financial infrastructure for unbanked populations — can outperform earn-to-give strategies by creating a tangible connection between daily work and measurable outcomes for large populations.
- ✓Engineering interview design: Give every candidate the same task — ideally extending an existing codebase rather than greenfield work — to enable calibration across candidates. The task should be conceptually tricky but completable within four hours. If interviewers frequently press the "weak yes" or "weak no" buttons in debriefs, the task is not generating sufficient signal and needs redesign.
- ✓Behavioral interview precision: For managerial roles, ask candidates to describe handling an underperforming direct report, then probe three specific timeline checkpoints: how quickly they detected the issue, how quickly they addressed it after detection, and how quickly they reached resolution. Defining good versus bad answers before the interview prevents vague responses and makes it harder for candidates to omit damaging gaps.
What It Covers
Ben Coon, Wave employee and blogger, joins host Ben Orenstein to discuss developing a writing habit, applying effective altruism principles to career decisions, Wave's mobile money impact in Senegal, and building high-signal engineering interview processes that distinguish strong candidates from weak ones.
Key Questions Answered
- •Writing for quantity over quality: Publish on a consistent schedule — weekly at minimum — before optimizing for quality. Blog post readership follows a heavy-tailed distribution where top posts reach 100x more readers than average ones. Volume generates the samples needed to identify what resonates, and that pattern recognition eventually enables fewer, higher-quality posts per year.
- •Effective altruism and scope neglect: When comparing charitable causes, calculate the cost-per-outcome rigorously. A guide dog costs $40,000; a blindness-curing surgery costs $40. That is a 1,000x difference in impact per dollar. Most people skip this math entirely. Using a rough quantitative framework — even an imperfect one — catches order-of-magnitude errors that intuition misses.
- •Career impact via 80,000hours.org: Developers seeking high-impact career paths should start at 80000hours.org, which maps cause areas by scale and provides one-on-one career coaching. Direct-impact roles — like building financial infrastructure for unbanked populations — can outperform earn-to-give strategies by creating a tangible connection between daily work and measurable outcomes for large populations.
- •Engineering interview design: Give every candidate the same task — ideally extending an existing codebase rather than greenfield work — to enable calibration across candidates. The task should be conceptually tricky but completable within four hours. If interviewers frequently press the "weak yes" or "weak no" buttons in debriefs, the task is not generating sufficient signal and needs redesign.
- •Behavioral interview precision: For managerial roles, ask candidates to describe handling an underperforming direct report, then probe three specific timeline checkpoints: how quickly they detected the issue, how quickly they addressed it after detection, and how quickly they reached resolution. Defining good versus bad answers before the interview prevents vague responses and makes it harder for candidates to omit damaging gaps.
Notable Moment
After switching from a well-paying machine learning role to Wave, Ben Coon noticed a sharp increase in his own productivity — not because the work was more intellectually stimulating, but because the direct connection between his daily tasks and real user outcomes made even tedious accounting work feel worth completing.
Episode Transcript
Hey, everyone, and welcome to AOP. Sorry about the break, but I'm back today talking with my friend, Ben Coon, who lives just down the street from me. Ben, welcome. Thanks. I am excited to be here. Yeah. I'm excited for you to be here too. I think you are the second person ever where we recorded an episode and the audio became, or we determined it was unusable, unfortunately. So welcome back for try two. And let this be a lesson to future podcast guests not to try such a fancy audio setup. Yes. I was crafting a tweet in my head, which is like, I'm begging people, like, please just plug a USB microphone into your computer or something. It's like all these audio interfaces I find to be, a little unreliable. I had a friend who had an even more fancy audio setup than me, and every time we had a call, he would spend the first two minutes debugging which part of it was going wrong this time. The next four hours of our calls or whatever would be glorious because he had such a great camera and such a great microphone, but it was a little bit funny. Yes. Of course, as you're talking, my AirPods are kind of freaking out, but I think we're okay. Oh, no. Are you sure it's the AirPods Pods and not my audio? I I really hope so. Fingers crossed. You sound you sound great right now. Okay. Alright. So let's let's let's dive into it with with abandoned and just assume that life is good. Alright. Onwards and backwards. You sound awesome. Alright. So my first question is, how did you develop your writing habit? How did I develop my writing habit? Well, so it started in college when I didn't have much else to do. And I had some friends who had started keeping blogs. One of them, some of your listeners may have run into, Jeff Kauffman, also lives down the street from you. And I think his most famous blog post is about how he discovered a mercury spill in his house. If you have show notes, maybe you should put that one in the show notes. Anyway, mostly he just blogs about whatever he was thinking about at the time or some things he had been talking to friends about or something. There wasn't really, like, a topic or a set of ideas. It was just him writing down random thoughts that he had had, but I really enjoyed reading them. And so I thought, what if I tried doing this? So Jeff wrote a lot because he just likes doing it. I tried to give myself a goal of writing once a week and, later for a shorter period, actually, even once a day. I didn't publish all the things that I wrote when I was writing once a day. I would take whatever I wrote, and I would, like, post it to …
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Tools
- 80000hours.orgRecommended
“Developers seeking high-impact career paths should start at 80000hours.org, which maps cause areas by scale and provides one-on-one career coaching.”
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