I’d really like to hear more about other EA orgs experience with hiring staff. I’ve certainly had no problem finding junior staff for Rethink Priorities, Rethink Charity, or Charity Science (Note: Rethink Priorities is part of Rethink Charity but both are entirely separate from Charity Science)… and so far we’ve been lucky enough to have enough strong senior staff applications that we’re still finding ourselves turning down really strong applicants we would otherwise really love to hire.
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 and I’m surprised that 80K/CEA has been flagging this issue for years now. …And experiences like this one suggest to me that I might not be alone in this regard.
So…
1.) Am I just less picky? (possible)
2.) Am I better at attracting the stronger applicants? (doubtful)
3.) Am I mistaken about the quality of our applicants such that they’re actually lower than they appear? (possible but doubtful)
Maybe my differences in cause prioritization (not overwhelmingly prioritizing the long-term future but still giving it a lot of credence) contributes toward getting a different and stronger applicant pool? …But how precise of a cause alignment do you need from hires, especially in ops, as long as people are broadly onboard?
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.
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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.
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.
TLYCS’s experience is very consistent with Peter’s. Money is overwhelmingly the constraining factor, with more funding we’re confident we can get high quality candidates.
Personally, I see large differences in the expected impact of potential new hires. I’m surprised you don’t, especially at the startup stage, and am not sure what’s going on there. I would guess you should be more picky for some of the reasons listed in Rob’s post.
I also feel very constrained by management capacity etc. This drives the value of past hires up even further, which is what the survey was about (as also in Rob’s post).
I do see large differences in expected impact of potential new hires, but I see a lot of hires who would be net positive additions (even after accounting all the various obvious costs enumerated by Rob) and even had to unfortunately turn away a few people I think would have been rather enormously net positive.
We’re not constrained by management capacity but we will be soon.
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 feel like part of the definition of “talented applicant” is that they don’t stretch your management capacity, don’t mess up your culture, etc. For example, if there was someone who had volunteered at Rethink for a while, you had a lot of trust in them, they knew your projects intimately and could hit the ground running etc., my guess is that you would value that person much more highly than someone who had “general” competency.
And the next level up would be candidates who not only don’t stretch your management capacity or culture but actually add to it.
My experience is that there are lots of people who are good at research or programming or whatever but fewer who have those skills and can add value to the organization without subtracting from other limited resources.
One possibility is because the EA organizations you hire for are focused on causes which also have a lot of representation in the non-profit sector outside of the EA movement, like global health and animal welfare, it’s easier to attract talent which is both very skilled and very dedicated. Since a focus on the far-future is more limited to EA and adjacent communities, there is just a smaller talent pool of both extremely skilled and dedicated potential employees to draw from.
Far-future-focused EA orgs could be constantly suffering from this problem of a limited talent pool, to the point they’d be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to find an extremely talented hire. In AI safety/alignment, this wouldn’t be weird as AI researchers can easily take a salary of hundreds of thousands at companies like OpenAI or Google. But this should only apply to orgs like MIRI or maybe FHI, which are far from the only orgs 80k surveyed.
So the data seems to imply leaders at EA orgs which already have a dozen staff would pay 20%+ of their budget for the next single marginal hire. So it still doesn’t make sense that year after year a lot of EA orgs apparently need talent so badly they’ll spend money they don’t have to get it.
there is just a smaller talent pool of both extremely skilled and dedicated potential employees to draw from
We have been screening fairly selectively on having an EA mindset, though, so I’m not sure how much larger our pool is compared to other EA orgs. In fact, you could maybe argue the opposite—given the prevalence of long-termism among the most involved EAs, it may be harder to convince them to work for us.
So the data seems to imply leaders at EA orgs which already have a dozen staff would pay 20%+ of their budget for the next single marginal hire.
From my vantage point, though, their actions don’t seem consistent with this view.
I’d really like to hear more about other EA orgs experience with hiring staff. I’ve certainly had no problem finding junior staff for Rethink Priorities, Rethink Charity, or Charity Science (Note: Rethink Priorities is part of Rethink Charity but both are entirely separate from Charity Science)… and so far we’ve been lucky enough to have enough strong senior staff applications that we’re still finding ourselves turning down really strong applicants we would otherwise really love to hire.
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 and I’m surprised that 80K/CEA has been flagging this issue for years now. …And experiences like this one suggest to me that I might not be alone in this regard.
So…
1.) Am I just less picky? (possible)
2.) Am I better at attracting the stronger applicants? (doubtful)
3.) Am I mistaken about the quality of our applicants such that they’re actually lower than they appear? (possible but doubtful)
Maybe my differences in cause prioritization (not overwhelmingly prioritizing the long-term future but still giving it a lot of credence) contributes toward getting a different and stronger applicant pool? …But how precise of a cause alignment do you need from hires, especially in ops, as long as people are broadly onboard?
I’m confused.
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.
TLYCS’s experience is very consistent with Peter’s. Money is overwhelmingly the constraining factor, with more funding we’re confident we can get high quality candidates.
Personally, I see large differences in the expected impact of potential new hires. I’m surprised you don’t, especially at the startup stage, and am not sure what’s going on there. I would guess you should be more picky for some of the reasons listed in Rob’s post.
I also feel very constrained by management capacity etc. This drives the value of past hires up even further, which is what the survey was about (as also in Rob’s post).
I do see large differences in expected impact of potential new hires, but I see a lot of hires who would be net positive additions (even after accounting all the various obvious costs enumerated by Rob) and even had to unfortunately turn away a few people I think would have been rather enormously net positive.
We’re not constrained by management capacity but we will be soon.
We’ve written a new post in part to address this question: Many EA orgs say they place a lot of financial value on their previous hire. What does that mean, if anything? And why aren’t they hiring faster?
I feel like part of the definition of “talented applicant” is that they don’t stretch your management capacity, don’t mess up your culture, etc. For example, if there was someone who had volunteered at Rethink for a while, you had a lot of trust in them, they knew your projects intimately and could hit the ground running etc., my guess is that you would value that person much more highly than someone who had “general” competency.
And the next level up would be candidates who not only don’t stretch your management capacity or culture but actually add to it.
My experience is that there are lots of people who are good at research or programming or whatever but fewer who have those skills and can add value to the organization without subtracting from other limited resources.
One possibility is because the EA organizations you hire for are focused on causes which also have a lot of representation in the non-profit sector outside of the EA movement, like global health and animal welfare, it’s easier to attract talent which is both very skilled and very dedicated. Since a focus on the far-future is more limited to EA and adjacent communities, there is just a smaller talent pool of both extremely skilled and dedicated potential employees to draw from.
Far-future-focused EA orgs could be constantly suffering from this problem of a limited talent pool, to the point they’d be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to find an extremely talented hire. In AI safety/alignment, this wouldn’t be weird as AI researchers can easily take a salary of hundreds of thousands at companies like OpenAI or Google. But this should only apply to orgs like MIRI or maybe FHI, which are far from the only orgs 80k surveyed.
So the data seems to imply leaders at EA orgs which already have a dozen staff would pay 20%+ of their budget for the next single marginal hire. So it still doesn’t make sense that year after year a lot of EA orgs apparently need talent so badly they’ll spend money they don’t have to get it.
We have been screening fairly selectively on having an EA mindset, though, so I’m not sure how much larger our pool is compared to other EA orgs. In fact, you could maybe argue the opposite—given the prevalence of long-termism among the most involved EAs, it may be harder to convince them to work for us.
From my vantage point, though, their actions don’t seem consistent with this view.
Yeah, I’m still left with more questions than answers.