I personally feel much more funding constrained / management capacity constrained / team culture “don’t grow too quickly” constrained than I feel “I need more talented applicants” constrained. I definitely don’t feel a need to trade away hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in donations to get a good hire...
Something about this phrasing made me feel a bit ‘off’ when I first read this comment, like I’d just missed something important, but it took me a few days to pin down what it was.
I think this phrasing implicitly handles replaceability significantly differently to how I think the core orgs conventionally handle it. To illustrate with arbitrary numbers, let’s say you have two candidates A and B for a position at your org, and A you think would generate $500k a year of ‘value’ after accounting for all costs, while B would generate $400k.
Level 0 thinking suggests that A applying to your org made the world $100k per year better off; if they would otherwise earn to give for $50k they shouldn’t do that, but if they would otherwise EtG for $150k they should do that.
Level 0 thinking misses the fact that when A gets the job, B can go and do something else valuable. Right now I think the typical implicit level 1 assumption is that B will go and do something almost as valuable as the $400k, and so A should treat working for you as generating close to $500k value for the world, not $100k, since they free up a valuable individual.
In this world and with level 1 assumptions, your org doesn’t want to trade away any more than $100k to get A into the applicant pool, but the world should be willing to trade $500k to get A into the pool. So there can be a large disparity between ‘what EA orgs should recommend as a group’ and ‘what your org is willing to trade to get more talented applicants’, without any actual conflict or disagreement over values or pool quality, in the style of your (1) / (2) / (3).
That being said, I notice that I’m a lot less sold on the level 1 assumptions than I used to be. I hadn’t noticed that I now feel very differently to say 24 months ago until I was focusing on the question to write this reply, so I’m not sure exactly what has changed my mind about it, but I think it’s what I perceive as a (much) higher level of EA unemployment or under-employment. Where I used to find the default assumption of B going and doing something almost as directly valuable credible, I now assign high (>50%) probability that B will either end up unemployed for a significant period of time, or end up ‘keeping the day job’ and basically earning-to-give for some much lower amount than the numbers EA orgs generally talk about. I feel like there’s a large pool of standing applicants for junior posts already out there, and adding to the pool now is only worth the difference between the quality of the person added and the existing marginal person, and not the full amount as it was when the pool was much smaller.
How much this matters in practice obviously depends on what fraction of someone’s total value to an org is ‘excess’ value relative to the next marginal hire, but my opinion based on private information about just who is in the ‘can’t get a junior job at an EA org’ pool is that this pool is pretty high quality right now, and so I’m by-default sceptical that adding another person to it is hugely valuable. Which is a much more precise disagreement with the prevailing consensus than I previously had, so thanks for pointing me in a direction that helped me refine my thoughts here!
Where I used to find the default assumption of B going and doing something almost as directly valuable credible, I now assign high (>50%) probability that B will either end up unemployed for a significant period of time, or end up ‘keeping the day job’ and basically earning-to-give for some much lower amount than the numbers EA orgs generally talk about.
I agree here and think this is a very important concept and that you put it well. It seems like, unfortunately, in practice, that a next best candidate who just barely doesn’t make the cut has a risk of being a perennial EA job applicant who just barely doesn’t make the cut in a bunch of places.
To me, this seems like a standard issue of EA unemployment or underemployment that could be analyzed like any other market, looking at the supply of EA jobs to the supply of potential EA laborers. The “level-1” assumption that people who just barely don’t make it will find roughly equally valuable employment elsewhere doesn’t fully account for the additional costs of a prolonged search, the risk of getting discouraged, etc.
I’d love to try to use the 2019 EA Survey to analyze EA unemployment / underemployment and see if this is amenable to more analysis.
-
my opinion based on private information about just who is in the ‘can’t get a junior job at an EA org’ pool is that this pool is pretty high quality right now
Based at least on my recent hiring for Rethink Priorities, I can definitely confirm this is true, at least for us. We ended up completely overwhelmed with high-quality applicants beyond our wildest dreams. As a result we’re dramatically scaling up as fast as we can to hire as many great applicants as we can responsibly, taking on a bunch of risk to do so. Even with all of that additional effort, we still had to reject numerous high-quality candidates that we would’ve otherwise loved to work with, if only we had more funding / management capacity / could grow the team even faster without overwhelming everyone.
AGB can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d summarize it as:
EAs originally thought that replicability meant your value is only equal to how much better you are than the next best applicant, rather than your total value.
Now EAs think your value is equal to your full value, as the person you “replace” would go on to produce their full value somewhere else. Replaceability thus isn’t really the issue that we once thought it was.
However, when considering additional costs, underemployment factors, other market dynamics, etc., it looks like the EA employment market is very saturated and the next best applicant actually doesn’t end up producing their full value somewhere else. So perhaps our original naive analysis of replaceability ends up being closer to the truth.
I agree with this summary. Thanks Peter and sorry for the wordiness Milan, that comment ended up being more of a stream of consciousness that I’d intended.
Something about this phrasing made me feel a bit ‘off’ when I first read this comment, like I’d just missed something important, but it took me a few days to pin down what it was.
I think this phrasing implicitly handles replaceability significantly differently to how I think the core orgs conventionally handle it. To illustrate with arbitrary numbers, let’s say you have two candidates A and B for a position at your org, and A you think would generate $500k a year of ‘value’ after accounting for all costs, while B would generate $400k.
Level 0 thinking suggests that A applying to your org made the world $100k per year better off; if they would otherwise earn to give for $50k they shouldn’t do that, but if they would otherwise EtG for $150k they should do that.
Level 0 thinking misses the fact that when A gets the job, B can go and do something else valuable. Right now I think the typical implicit level 1 assumption is that B will go and do something almost as valuable as the $400k, and so A should treat working for you as generating close to $500k value for the world, not $100k, since they free up a valuable individual.
In this world and with level 1 assumptions, your org doesn’t want to trade away any more than $100k to get A into the applicant pool, but the world should be willing to trade $500k to get A into the pool. So there can be a large disparity between ‘what EA orgs should recommend as a group’ and ‘what your org is willing to trade to get more talented applicants’, without any actual conflict or disagreement over values or pool quality, in the style of your (1) / (2) / (3).
That being said, I notice that I’m a lot less sold on the level 1 assumptions than I used to be. I hadn’t noticed that I now feel very differently to say 24 months ago until I was focusing on the question to write this reply, so I’m not sure exactly what has changed my mind about it, but I think it’s what I perceive as a (much) higher level of EA unemployment or under-employment. Where I used to find the default assumption of B going and doing something almost as directly valuable credible, I now assign high (>50%) probability that B will either end up unemployed for a significant period of time, or end up ‘keeping the day job’ and basically earning-to-give for some much lower amount than the numbers EA orgs generally talk about. I feel like there’s a large pool of standing applicants for junior posts already out there, and adding to the pool now is only worth the difference between the quality of the person added and the existing marginal person, and not the full amount as it was when the pool was much smaller.
How much this matters in practice obviously depends on what fraction of someone’s total value to an org is ‘excess’ value relative to the next marginal hire, but my opinion based on private information about just who is in the ‘can’t get a junior job at an EA org’ pool is that this pool is pretty high quality right now, and so I’m by-default sceptical that adding another person to it is hugely valuable. Which is a much more precise disagreement with the prevailing consensus than I previously had, so thanks for pointing me in a direction that helped me refine my thoughts here!
You’re welcome!
I agree here and think this is a very important concept and that you put it well. It seems like, unfortunately, in practice, that a next best candidate who just barely doesn’t make the cut has a risk of being a perennial EA job applicant who just barely doesn’t make the cut in a bunch of places.
To me, this seems like a standard issue of EA unemployment or underemployment that could be analyzed like any other market, looking at the supply of EA jobs to the supply of potential EA laborers. The “level-1” assumption that people who just barely don’t make it will find roughly equally valuable employment elsewhere doesn’t fully account for the additional costs of a prolonged search, the risk of getting discouraged, etc.
I’d love to try to use the 2019 EA Survey to analyze EA unemployment / underemployment and see if this is amenable to more analysis.
-
Based at least on my recent hiring for Rethink Priorities, I can definitely confirm this is true, at least for us. We ended up completely overwhelmed with high-quality applicants beyond our wildest dreams. As a result we’re dramatically scaling up as fast as we can to hire as many great applicants as we can responsibly, taking on a bunch of risk to do so. Even with all of that additional effort, we still had to reject numerous high-quality candidates that we would’ve otherwise loved to work with, if only we had more funding / management capacity / could grow the team even faster without overwhelming everyone.
Perhaps add a tl;dr?
AGB can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d summarize it as:
EAs originally thought that replicability meant your value is only equal to how much better you are than the next best applicant, rather than your total value.
Now EAs think your value is equal to your full value, as the person you “replace” would go on to produce their full value somewhere else. Replaceability thus isn’t really the issue that we once thought it was.
However, when considering additional costs, underemployment factors, other market dynamics, etc., it looks like the EA employment market is very saturated and the next best applicant actually doesn’t end up producing their full value somewhere else. So perhaps our original naive analysis of replaceability ends up being closer to the truth.
I agree with this summary. Thanks Peter and sorry for the wordiness Milan, that comment ended up being more of a stream of consciousness that I’d intended.