I get the (purely anecdotal) impression that recruiting is sensitive to salaries in the sense that some people who would be good fits for EA charities automatically rule them out because the salaries are low enough that they would have to make undesirable time/money tradeoffs. However, it’s a bit of a tricky problem, because most nonprofits want to pay everyone roughly the same amount, so hiring one marginal person at say 20% more really means increasing all salaries by that much.
Another relevant factor is how much of a salary cut you’re looking at when moving from EtG to direct work. In for-profit organizations, the most competent people frequently get paid 3-10x as much as average. I don’t think a 3-10x disparity would be culturally acceptable in EA charities, which means that someone at the top essentially has to forgo a much higher percentage of their salary to do direct work.
I get the (purely anecdotal) impression that recruiting is sensitive to salaries in the sense that some people who would be good fits for EA charities automatically rule them out because the salaries are low enough that they would have to make undesirable time/money tradeoffs. However, it’s a bit of a tricky problem, because most nonprofits want to pay everyone roughly the same amount, so hiring one marginal person at say 20% more really means increasing all salaries by that much.
Another relevant factor is how much of a salary cut you’re looking at when moving from EtG to direct work. In for-profit organizations, the most competent people frequently get paid 3-10x as much as average. I don’t think a 3-10x disparity would be culturally acceptable in EA charities, which means that someone at the top essentially has to forgo a much higher percentage of their salary to do direct work.