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.
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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.
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.