On Hiring at TfW Foundation

In September 2021, we put out calls for applications to fill three positions at Technology for Wildlife Foundation. As of January 1st 2022, we have a team of five full-time staff, as well as a number of consultants and volunteers working on specific projects. This post describes the remote process we used to select and hire our new staff members at the tail-end of 2021.

Sankey Diagram depicting the process for all the candidates across all three advertised positions.

We had a clear idea of the positions ready in early 2021, which were incorporated into our requests for funding. Once our funding was secured, we prepared detailed job descriptions which were used to inform the Google Forms that were our first point of contact with our applicant pool.

A screenshot of a section of the Conservation Geographer application form.

Our call for applications was straightforward; we provided information about the job profile, the salary range and the requirements of the position, as well as of the required and preferred skillsets. At this stage, we asked the applicants to provide their name, their CV and to answer just one question: in their own words, why did they want to work as the <advertised role> at Technology for Wildlife Foundation. For the communicator role, we also asked for a link to an illustration/design portfolio.

We sent out the call for applications, along with the link to the website page, on our social media channels as well as through our networks. Applications were open for a two-week period, from September 6th 2021 through to 20th September 2021. We received a total of 232 applications for all three positions, which exceeded both our expectations as well as our capacity to process them within our expected schedule. We had 50 applicants for our Conservation Communicator position, 90 for our two Conservation Geographer positions and 92 for our Ghost Gear Research Consultant.

Sankey Diagram depicting the process for the Conservation Communicator position.

Our initial set of eliminations was based solely on their answer to our singular question. We weren’t looking for command over the language, length or even expertise. This round was simply about understanding whether the candidate had put some thought into answering the question, along with an understanding of our purpose at TfW Foundation. Candidates whose answers solely expressed an interest in drones or maps, without any interest in conservation, or conversely, those which expressed an inchoate interest in wildlife or conservation, with no reference to our approach, were eliminated at this stage.

Sankey Diagram for the Conservation Geographer positions, including the test component.

For the second round, we looked at the CVs of the remaining candidates, and used an interview matrix, with a point-based system, to assess whether they had the required and preferred skills as advertised. Based on this, we were able to reduce our candidate pool. We also provided our Geographer candidates with a technical test, and reduced that pool of candidates further, from 18 to 7.

We then conducted semi-structured interviews with those remaining at this stage. Our goal here was to find candidates whose interests, motivations and career aspirations were aligned not just with us, but with the role they’d applied for. A primary requirement was that they would be capable of working independently and with minimal supervision; while this is my personal preference in terms of work culture, it’s also essential when operating during a pandemic.

Sankey Diagram depicting the process for the Ghost Gear Research Consultant position

For each of these final candidates, we re-assessed their CVs, their answer to our initial question and their professional conduct as expressed over emails and during the interviews. Clear preferences emerged, and we prepared a short-list of our candidates. Each candidate at this stage was asked to connect us with their referees, who we communicated with over email. The sole purpose of the reference check was to verify whether the candidates had portrayed themselves honestly over the course of their interactions with us.

Finally, in early November, we were able to make our first offers! Once we finalised a position and closed applications, we sent out an email to every candidate who applied, letting them know that we would not be taking their application forward. Our final employee joined us on January 1st 2022, and we were able to close this, the second phase of our hiring process.

We deliberately chose to make the salary range visible at the beginning of the application process, and to ask for references only towards the end of the process. There’s enough information out there, as well as substantial anecdotal experience (shout-out to www.reddit.com/r/antiwork), to indicate that this works to the benefit of both applicants and to the hiring organisation.

P.S.: The Sankey Diagrams were made by our Conservation Communicator, Nancy Alice, using SankeyMATIC.

Persevering with PARIVESH

I have been signing petitions and participating in campaigns to stop the clearing of large forest areas for the construction of some major road or highway for almost a decade now. Clearing of forests also involves forced rehabilitation of tribal communities and of course the habitat loss for biodiversity. In 2016 and 2017, I naively sent emails to ministers to inform them why constructing a 6-lane highway through a tiger reserve would be a bad idea. Unfortunately, all of my letters and signature campaigns fell on deaf ears. In most cases, the agencies responsible for felling trees had already secured the clearances needed to do what they were doing, and those roads would eventually be built. The projects had already been approved by various authorities, including those who were responsible for protecting those forests in the first place, many months before the protests or petitions. I could only sit back and watch forests being destroyed in the name of development. The interaction between development and conservation, and the idea of attaining a balance between them (if that’s even possible) has always been of interest to me. Therefore in 2018, I decided to study infrastructure impacts on the environment as part of my master’s thesis. It was while conducting the research for my thesis that I came across an absolute goldmine of information on a website called PARIVESH: (Pro-Active and Responsive facilitation by Interactive and Virtuous Environmental Single window Hub). This is a web-portal launched by the Ministry of Environment Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) in 2018 which has a historic database of all new and old projects seeking environmental, forests or wildlife clearances, along with links to relevant documents and assessment reports. It also allows the user to track project clearances and review comments put forward by government officers. As a real-time clearance portal, This website seemed to be an honest attempt to bring about transparency in the approval process for development projects that require various environment-related clearances. Although not fully accessible unless one knew their way around on the website, it seemed to be a good start to know about projects beforehand. I assumed everyone in the conservation space, especially the groups who often initiated those petitions I had been signing, would be using the website extensively . I was glad about the existence of the portal and amazed with the government’s initiative to come up with it.

However, fast forward to a few months later in 2019. Whilst working with one of the leading conservation organizations of the country, I realized that the reality was that far from PARIVESH being extensively utilized by many people, it’s existence was not even widely known. This was a shock to me, to say the least, but it was also my chance to understand the PARIVESH portal and find ways to make use of the huge amounts of information it made available. This seemed like a fun thing I could do through which I could somehow revolutionize the entire process of advocacy for sustainable, wildlife friendly infrastructure in India. Naive, I know, but this was my first job ever.

I soon realized the revolution was not going to happen easily. The more time I spent on the portal the more I realized that while the government’s intentions for this portal may have been that it would make the clearance process transparent and efficient, the design, as implemented, would do just the opposite. I realized that there were a number of major issues with PARIVESH (either on purpose, or due to sheer ignorance) which made information on the portal inaccessible and unusable. For instance, anyone interested in learning more about a potential project must know some very specific keywords to find the project details via the available search options. For updates on the project, they would have to check the portal every day. The projects uploaded for approval would be in the last phase of project planning, with very little scope for any stakeholder to put forward their concerns and recommendations. Although there are some other government websites that allow one to look up new projects in the initial planning phases, those websites happen to be much more complicated than PARIVESH. One would have to be extremely patient to collate information from all of those. Moreover, PARIVESH allows the spatial visualization of projects uploaded on the portal but this useful function is not accessible to the general public. This GIS section is accessible to only government officers with state-authorized login credentials (as of October 2021). For everyone else, it’s a matter of skill, expertise and patience for they would have to download each spatial file individually before beginning any sort of spatial analysis. Finally, I cannot count the number of times the portal has just blocked my access to it, whilst in the middle of research about some upcoming problematic mining or highway development project, almost as if it knew what I was trying to get at!

Personally, having spent so much time just exploring the various buttons and functions of the portal, I believe that the only way for conservation organisations to use PARIVESH effectively is to have a person dedicated to the task. Their role would be only to monitor the portal and make sense of its information and processes to be able to effectively use it for any conservation purpose. However, it turns out there is an alternative. We can develop a better model, something that actually bridges all the gaps and limitations of PARIVESH, allowing for a smoother, more pleasant user experience. I did not know something like this could be done but, currently I am part of the team which is doing it! I am working with colleagues who have been as frustrated as I by the multiple badly designed portals and websites containing lots of crucial information for both development and conservation, lying there in inaccessible formats. We are all motivated by the vision to accomplish what the government may have initially envisioned – a user friendly, transparent and efficient portal which allows easier access to all the information on various development projects within environmentally fragile areas collated from different sources. This is something that I, as a PARIVESH user, wished existed for the past 3 years and it is absolutely exhilarating for me to be a part of something that might make it a reality. The portal would make discussions about upcoming projects in ecologically important areas more evidence-based and would allow for more effective stakeholder involvement. 

If you have ever tried to find information on PARIVESH or have signed petitions to stop the construction of roads which already had all the requisite clearances, the urgent need for the existence of a transparent system that we are building may resonate deeply with you.

Flowchart illustrating an user agency’s process in PARIVESH by Ashwathy Satheesan

Choosing a laptop in 2021 (and a mini anti-Apple rant)

I’ve been looking to upgrade our laptops here at TfW for a few months now. We’ve been using what would be politely considered as ‘vintage devices’, and new computing devices were well overdue.

The laptop I’ve been using since November 2011 is a 15” Apple MacBook Pro (early-2011) which I absolutely loved working on. It’s gotten me through various projects and one Master’s degree, but I’ve had my issues with it. Due to a manufacturing defect with the discrete AMD GPU’s soldering, my motherboard was replaced thrice under warranty and once out-of-warranty. As the device was originally purchased in California, I was even contacted by Whitfield Bryson & Mason LLP about being included in a class-action lawsuit against Apple! I understand that this lawsuit was part of the reason Apple finally allowed for out-of-warranty motherboard replacements on this series of laptops (justifying my 4th free motherboard replacement). After the final motherboard repair however, I felt that any further use I got out of this laptop would be a bonus, and didn’t really expect it to run for more than a year or so. I swapped out the HDD for an SSD in 2014, the optical drive for a secondary storage tray in 2015, and replaced one of the two fans in 2017. When the GPU finally gave up in November 2019, I found some code online that bypassed the problematic discrete AMD GPU and forced the use of the integrated Intel GPU. When the screen started up with vertical line displays halfway through 2020 (indicating some sort of hardware failure), I knew that the end was in sight. Rather than wait for the device to fail catastrophically, I decided to decommission the laptop. On the 2nd of January 2021, just over 9 years after I received it, I backed up my data one final time, stripped out both SSDs and packed up the laptop along with its much-soldered charger (which is another story entirely). It’s now sitting in a box waiting to be taken to a repair station for its final end-of-life diagnosis (refurbish and donate, or dismantle and recycle).

Working at the juncture of technology and conservation, I used to feel an immense amount of guilt every time I considered purchasing a new piece of equipment. I’ve never actually felt guilty about actually buying any equipment though, and that’s because on average, I spend between 6 months to a year studying my options, really working through what I think I need and why. Meanwhile, I solder and hack and do whatever I can to keep existing equipment in action for as long as I can before it just isn’t worth the time and effort anymore. Then, it’s disposed of as responsibly as possible. iFixit has a huge part to play in all of this; I rely on the guides to fix malfunctioning or broken hardware, and on the repairability scores when considering new equipment.

At TfW, we work with a lot of visual data, and manipulate it using spreadsheet, statistical computing and GIS software packages. Most of the commercial GIS software we use, for satellite and drone images, has been optimised for Windows machines. Even so, I would have considered MacBooks dual-booting OS X and Windows for our new machines, if not for their terrible repairability scores, high prices and lack of a touch screen. With the newer MacBooks, it is almost impossible to perform any upgrades or repairs without replacing the entire motherboard, as every component is just soldered onto it. This is clearly visible when looking at iFixit’s laptop repairability score; a MacBook Pro 15” from 2012 has a score of 7/10, while one from more recent years, complete with Retina Displays and/or Touch Bars, have scores of 1 or 2. In practice, this means that after the 1+2 year warranty period is over, it’s much cheaper to just throw a MacBook away than to repair it. This is true of laptops from other companies as well, but Apple’s egregious battles against the global #righttorepair movement have left a really sour taste in my mouth. The design and UI/UX may be great (though that’s disputable what is the Touch Bar even for?) but why buy from a company actively opposed to a) fixing things and b) environmental sustainability?

So in 2020-21, when considering new laptops, MacBooks were out of the question. My desired features were a touch screen, portability, repairability/upgradability and price. The laptops I was seriously considering (as of Nov 2020) were the Microsoft Surface Pro 7, the HP Envy x360 and Spectre x360, the Dell XPS 13” 2-in-1, and the Lenovo Yoga C740 and Ideapad Flex 5. Except for the Surface Pro, all the others seem to be great machines; while it does look quite nice, it’s over-priced with the keyboard(!?) and pen only available as even-more expensive extras. Based on the fact that I found a rather nice deal on the Ideapad Flex 5, I finally picked up two devices (Ryzen 7 processors, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD; ~INR 63,000/- each) directly from the Lenovo online store, inclusive of a 3-year warranty, free shipping and Lenovo Active Pens (see that Microsoft?).

The laptops arrived within a week of placing the order, in cardboard boxes with a little too much plastic wrap. Aside from that, they seem to be fit-for-purpose; the RAM and processor aren’t upgradeable, but the storage SSD and battery can be replaced. After the Lenovo/Superfish bloatware scandal of 2014, I was concerned about the pre-installed software, but aside from two MacAfee trialware packages (which I quickly uninstalled) the laptop seems to be clean. The pen works with QGIS, so we can now finally draw polygons by tapping on the screen; now we’re really doing geography in the 21st century! It’s been less than a week since these devices arrived so it’s too early to tell, but my hope is that these laptops allow us to work until at least 2026.

To close, I’d have to state that this is not a Lenovo advertisement, and we’re not technology evangelists; if you need a laptop and can’t fix your old one, buy an appropriate device from any manufacturer you like. Just try and make sure that it’s possible to make it work at least a little longer than it’s been designed to.