Could it be that these places actually told them that they couldn’t help them, or tried to help but weren’t able to solve their issues, rather than they decided to leave because they weren’t being spoken to nicely enough or something? I too would predict that they would prioritise solving their urgent issues over feeling comfortable. It could also be that showing a lot of care indicates that you are correctly understanding their issues and needs and are better equipped to give helpful advice, so their avoidance of places that treat them badly does not necessarily signify distorted priorities.
To go into the weeds a little, a lot of this goes back to funding restrictions. As an example, if you’re helping people find employment, you generally operate using funding for that from the state, and the funding generally comes with stringent quotas and reporting requirements.
The expectation is, and what organizations generally do, is deal with the reporting requirements by requiring people to fill out a 3+ page intake form before they will book an appointment to talk to a person[1]. Samaritans chooses to talk to people right away, subtly probing for answers during the meeting (since it’s all stuff they need to know to help with the job search anyways) and have their staff fill out the forms themselves afterwards. This truly creates a lot more work on their end; you can maybe intuit that by choosing to internalize filling out the intake forms, Samaritans are spending 30% more time per client for the same amount of funding.
This sort of “internalization” is standard across Samaritans ventures. It is a giant pain, but they do it because it removes barriers for so many people to access much needed services.
In a truly unfortunate number of cases too, the forms are only available in English and the clients are new immigrants/refugees with limited English skills.
This also then loops right back to point 1; one reason they can afford to spend more time per client is that people are willing to be paid under market rate to work at Samaritans, because of its well deserved great reputation.
One more tactic for reputation management: they have a salary policy where everyone in the entire org has salaries that are within 15% of each other, and the founders, who work regular 60 hour weeks, earn around 55k a year (CAD). The messaging around this is that they both want more of their funding to go towards helping others, and that they want to pay around the Canadian median salary, and it helps with increasing solidarity between Samaritans workers and the people they help. Donors love this.
EAs have this take that you should pay people well, and it’s a good take. It unfortunately also burns reputation.
Very interesting! I would want to see more evidence before concluding that EA salary practices affirmatively burn reputation, though. GiveWell and Open Phil look a bit higher than U.S. federal government to me, even after accounting for the fact that the feds don’t adjust salaries enough in very high COL areas. But I sense that most other orgs pay at a somewhat lower scale . . . so on the whole EA pay may be roughly similar to US Government employee pay? It’s not obvious to me how that rate of pay would affirmatively burn reputation.
Many, many people think of government workers as lazy parasites who are overpaid and hard to fire for no reason, so I’m not sure that’s a super useful comparison lol. I worked in the federal public service for a bit and experienced some of this firsthand :’)
Fair enough, although I think thats a function of their perception of employee quality and about of effort than the rates per se. I used it as a comparison point because the USG underpays at the high end of the talent market (so it’s under market rate for good talent) and because the pay scale is more uniform than the private sector and thus easier to compare with.
Could it be that these places actually told them that they couldn’t help them, or tried to help but weren’t able to solve their issues, rather than they decided to leave because they weren’t being spoken to nicely enough or something? I too would predict that they would prioritise solving their urgent issues over feeling comfortable. It could also be that showing a lot of care indicates that you are correctly understanding their issues and needs and are better equipped to give helpful advice, so their avoidance of places that treat them badly does not necessarily signify distorted priorities.
Great post btw!
Thank you!
To go into the weeds a little, a lot of this goes back to funding restrictions. As an example, if you’re helping people find employment, you generally operate using funding for that from the state, and the funding generally comes with stringent quotas and reporting requirements.
The expectation is, and what organizations generally do, is deal with the reporting requirements by requiring people to fill out a 3+ page intake form before they will book an appointment to talk to a person[1]. Samaritans chooses to talk to people right away, subtly probing for answers during the meeting (since it’s all stuff they need to know to help with the job search anyways) and have their staff fill out the forms themselves afterwards. This truly creates a lot more work on their end; you can maybe intuit that by choosing to internalize filling out the intake forms, Samaritans are spending 30% more time per client for the same amount of funding.
This sort of “internalization” is standard across Samaritans ventures. It is a giant pain, but they do it because it removes barriers for so many people to access much needed services.
In a truly unfortunate number of cases too, the forms are only available in English and the clients are new immigrants/refugees with limited English skills.
This also then loops right back to point 1; one reason they can afford to spend more time per client is that people are willing to be paid under market rate to work at Samaritans, because of its well deserved great reputation.
One more tactic for reputation management: they have a salary policy where everyone in the entire org has salaries that are within 15% of each other, and the founders, who work regular 60 hour weeks, earn around 55k a year (CAD). The messaging around this is that they both want more of their funding to go towards helping others, and that they want to pay around the Canadian median salary, and it helps with increasing solidarity between Samaritans workers and the people they help. Donors love this.
EAs have this take that you should pay people well, and it’s a good take. It unfortunately also burns reputation.
Very interesting! I would want to see more evidence before concluding that EA salary practices affirmatively burn reputation, though. GiveWell and Open Phil look a bit higher than U.S. federal government to me, even after accounting for the fact that the feds don’t adjust salaries enough in very high COL areas. But I sense that most other orgs pay at a somewhat lower scale . . . so on the whole EA pay may be roughly similar to US Government employee pay? It’s not obvious to me how that rate of pay would affirmatively burn reputation.
Many, many people think of government workers as lazy parasites who are overpaid and hard to fire for no reason, so I’m not sure that’s a super useful comparison lol. I worked in the federal public service for a bit and experienced some of this firsthand :’)
Fair enough, although I think thats a function of their perception of employee quality and about of effort than the rates per se. I used it as a comparison point because the USG underpays at the high end of the talent market (so it’s under market rate for good talent) and because the pay scale is more uniform than the private sector and thus easier to compare with.