Happy to see this being discussed :) I may come back and write more later, but a couple quick points:
I’ve been having lots of convos with different people in this vein, and am feeling optimistic there’s growing momentum behind recognizing the importance of recruiting mid+ career professionals—not as a matter of equity and diversification, but as one of bringing critical and missing talent into the movement. I think EA has, on the whole, significantly overvalued “potential” and significantly undervalued “skills” and “capacities” in the past.
One of the advantages of the funding overhang is that it creates an opportunity to “remove the excuse” for people to not switch to direct work. It is a very big mistake IMO to be arbitrarily limiting salaries for talented professionals to well under market (for what purpose?). It seems like this is increasingly recognized and orgs are developing more context-sensitive approaches to compensation—accordingly, I think it’s something of a mistake to provide an anticipated salary range (generally below what I would expect mid-career professionals to be paid, I’d add) and describe it as a potential downside of moving to direct work. It’s mentioned in the post but bears repeating: IF MONEY IS THE ONLY THING HOLDING YOU BACK FROM A CAREER IN DIRECT WORK, TALK TO PEOPLE IN THE COMMUNITY ABOUT THIS—there is flexibility here.
Happy to see this being discussed :) I may come back and write more later, but a couple quick points:
I’ve been having lots of convos with different people in this vein, and am feeling optimistic there’s growing momentum behind recognizing the importance of recruiting mid+ career professionals—not as a matter of equity and diversification, but as one of bringing critical and missing talent into the movement. I think EA has, on the whole, significantly overvalued “potential” and significantly undervalued “skills” and “capacities” in the past.
One of the advantages of the funding overhang is that it creates an opportunity to “remove the excuse” for people to not switch to direct work. It is a very big mistake IMO to be arbitrarily limiting salaries for talented professionals to well under market (for what purpose?). It seems like this is increasingly recognized and orgs are developing more context-sensitive approaches to compensation—accordingly, I think it’s something of a mistake to provide an anticipated salary range (generally below what I would expect mid-career professionals to be paid, I’d add) and describe it as a potential downside of moving to direct work. It’s mentioned in the post but bears repeating: IF MONEY IS THE ONLY THING HOLDING YOU BACK FROM A CAREER IN DIRECT WORK, TALK TO PEOPLE IN THE COMMUNITY ABOUT THIS—there is flexibility here.