We looked at the number of upvotes on LessWrong and the list of people who Alexei thought might have benefited during their own job searches. We contacted a handful of these people and asked about how much the post helped them. The sample was not random, and Alexei’s list was clearly not exhaustive.
Our impression is that the largest benefits were from:
Gaining confidence and pursuing a career search in a more wholehearted way.
Increasing the number of interviews that people took, which probably improved their offers and decreased time unemployed.
Modestly improving people’s ability to perform well on interviews
Modestly improving people’s willingness to negotiate.
Most of these effects have somewhat ambiguous signs, i.e. people made tradeoffs differently and it’s not obvious that they made improvements. Although we have some reservations with some of the advice in this post, the biggest effects seemed to be improving people’s understanding of the recruitment process, and we expect that effect to be positive.
Our extremely rough estimate was that this effect amounted to $200k in total increased (pre-tax) earnings. We guess that on the order of 5-15 people benefited significantly from the post, that the per individual benefits were on the order of $5-10k / year, and that these benefits probably persist anywhere from one to a few years (in many cases the benefit was finding a similarly good job faster, which seems to have a comparably large impact concentrated in one year). This is the crux of our estimate, but it isn’t very well informed.
Based on the individuals who benefited we’d guess that about 10% of this money is used to cost-effectively make the future better (and probably somewhat more), and we are valuing the intervention at about $20k EA dollars moved.
We are generally inclined to count financial benefits beyond the fraction that is donated, and our 10% reduction is not motivated entirely by this estimate for donations (which we think is a bit low, and which we haven’t adjusted to account for the fact that beneficiaries were disproportionately likely to support causes that we like rather than other EA causes). In this case there are a number of considerations that justify the discount to 10%:
Much of the salary gains reflect zero sum competition amongst applicants or between applicants and employers, though there are some increases in allocative efficiency.
Much of the credit for any positive impact of the advice is reserved for the people who actually made changes on its basis.
Related to both of the above, to the extent that taking more interviews, being more likely to pursue a job, and negotiating more aggressively create value, they also have costs that claw back some of the benefits.
Submission: Alexei Andreev’s blog post Maximizing donations via a job
Our very rough evaluation:
We looked at the number of upvotes on LessWrong and the list of people who Alexei thought might have benefited during their own job searches. We contacted a handful of these people and asked about how much the post helped them. The sample was not random, and Alexei’s list was clearly not exhaustive.
Our impression is that the largest benefits were from:
Gaining confidence and pursuing a career search in a more wholehearted way.
Increasing the number of interviews that people took, which probably improved their offers and decreased time unemployed.
Modestly improving people’s ability to perform well on interviews
Modestly improving people’s willingness to negotiate.
Most of these effects have somewhat ambiguous signs, i.e. people made tradeoffs differently and it’s not obvious that they made improvements. Although we have some reservations with some of the advice in this post, the biggest effects seemed to be improving people’s understanding of the recruitment process, and we expect that effect to be positive.
Our extremely rough estimate was that this effect amounted to $200k in total increased (pre-tax) earnings. We guess that on the order of 5-15 people benefited significantly from the post, that the per individual benefits were on the order of $5-10k / year, and that these benefits probably persist anywhere from one to a few years (in many cases the benefit was finding a similarly good job faster, which seems to have a comparably large impact concentrated in one year). This is the crux of our estimate, but it isn’t very well informed.
Based on the individuals who benefited we’d guess that about 10% of this money is used to cost-effectively make the future better (and probably somewhat more), and we are valuing the intervention at about $20k EA dollars moved.
We are generally inclined to count financial benefits beyond the fraction that is donated, and our 10% reduction is not motivated entirely by this estimate for donations (which we think is a bit low, and which we haven’t adjusted to account for the fact that beneficiaries were disproportionately likely to support causes that we like rather than other EA causes). In this case there are a number of considerations that justify the discount to 10%:
Much of the salary gains reflect zero sum competition amongst applicants or between applicants and employers, though there are some increases in allocative efficiency.
Much of the credit for any positive impact of the advice is reserved for the people who actually made changes on its basis.
Related to both of the above, to the extent that taking more interviews, being more likely to pursue a job, and negotiating more aggressively create value, they also have costs that claw back some of the benefits.
Please post this analysis as a comment on the original article.
Done.