I’m 30 now, and I feel like several of my altruistic-minded friends in my age group in big companies are reluctant to work in nonprofits for stated reasons that feel off to me.
My impression is that the EA space is quite small now, but has the potential to get quite a big bigger later on. People who are particularly promising and humble enough to work in such a setting (this is a big restriction) sometimes rise up quickly.
I think a lot of people look at initial EA positions and see them as pretty low status compared to industry jobs. I have a few responses here: 1) They can be great starting positions for people who want to do ambitious EA work. It’s really hard to deeply understand how EA organizations work without working in one, even in (many, but not all) junior positions. 2) One incredibly valuable attribute of many effective people is a willingness to “do whatever it takes” (not meaning ethically or legally). This sometimes means actual sacrifice, it sometimes means working positions that would broadly be considered low status. Honestly I regard this attribute as equally important to many aspects of skills and intelligence. Some respected managers and executives are known for cleaning the floors or providing personal help to employees or colleagues, often because those things were highly effective at that moment, even if they might be low status. (Honestly, much of setting up or managing an organization is often highly glorified grunt work).
Personally, I try to give extra appreciation to people in normally low-status positions, I think these are very commonly overlooked.
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Separately, I’m really not sure how much to trust the reasons people give for their decisions. I’m sure many people who use the “overqualified” argument would be happy to be setting up early infrastructure with very few users for an Elon Musk venture, or building internal tooling for few users at many well run, high paying, and prestigious companies.
It seems like one solution would be to pay people more. I feel like some in EA are against this because they worry high pay will attract people who are just in it for the money—this is an argument for perhaps paying people ~20% less than they’d get in the private sector, not ~80% less (which seems to be what some EA positions pay relative to the skills they’d want for the hire).
Thanks for this, I feel like I’ve seen this too.
I’m 30 now, and I feel like several of my altruistic-minded friends in my age group in big companies are reluctant to work in nonprofits for stated reasons that feel off to me.
My impression is that the EA space is quite small now, but has the potential to get quite a big bigger later on. People who are particularly promising and humble enough to work in such a setting (this is a big restriction) sometimes rise up quickly.
I think a lot of people look at initial EA positions and see them as pretty low status compared to industry jobs. I have a few responses here:
1) They can be great starting positions for people who want to do ambitious EA work. It’s really hard to deeply understand how EA organizations work without working in one, even in (many, but not all) junior positions.
2) One incredibly valuable attribute of many effective people is a willingness to “do whatever it takes” (not meaning ethically or legally). This sometimes means actual sacrifice, it sometimes means working positions that would broadly be considered low status. Honestly I regard this attribute as equally important to many aspects of skills and intelligence. Some respected managers and executives are known for cleaning the floors or providing personal help to employees or colleagues, often because those things were highly effective at that moment, even if they might be low status. (Honestly, much of setting up or managing an organization is often highly glorified grunt work).
Personally, I try to give extra appreciation to people in normally low-status positions, I think these are very commonly overlooked.
---
Separately, I’m really not sure how much to trust the reasons people give for their decisions. I’m sure many people who use the “overqualified” argument would be happy to be setting up early infrastructure with very few users for an Elon Musk venture, or building internal tooling for few users at many well run, high paying, and prestigious companies.
It seems like one solution would be to pay people more. I feel like some in EA are against this because they worry high pay will attract people who are just in it for the money—this is an argument for perhaps paying people ~20% less than they’d get in the private sector, not ~80% less (which seems to be what some EA positions pay relative to the skills they’d want for the hire).
Agreed. Also, there are a lot of ways we could pay for prestige; like with branding and marketing, that could make things nicer for new employees.