[Context: I work in People Ops for CEA and have been involved in designing our compensation strategies.]
Thanks for posting about this. I can give more context on CEA’s side, at least.
With regards to the required level of skill/experience, I’d say we consider them different. We are aiming to hire for the content role as a specialist. We currently have four broad bands (excluding the ED/CEO whose salary is set by the board), and the specialist band is second to the top . “Junior” would be the bottom band for us. (That said, I’d still expect us to offer someone joining at the junior level 10-25% more than what’s listed as the AMF salary above, if they were in the UK.)
Another potential factor that might contribute to the size of this pay gap is that I believe some orgs. also compensate their operational staff at lower rates than other staff. I don’t know whether this is true for AMF. CEA has chosen not to do this as a) we think their work is comparably valuable to non-operational staff b) deciding who was in an “operations” role is not as straightforward for as it might be for some organizations.
Another factor here might be location. We adjust salaries for location and it seems like AMF might not, although I’m not sure. If we were to hire someone in a place with a lower cost of living than the locations listed, we would offer a lower rate of pay than what’s listed above.
In general, we aim to have salaries that allow us to attract top talent, with the goal that for most roles, people don’t have to take a massive pay cut compared to their counterfactual options to join us. As we’ve wanted to attract more mid-career people, this has become increasingly important to us. Figuring where the balance point is between compensating sufficiently highly such that salaries aren’t so low they are dissuasive and conservatively enough we’re not wasting money or causing bad ecosystem effects is difficult and I’m not sure we’re getting it right.
Hi John,
[Context: I work in People Ops for CEA and have been involved in designing our compensation strategies.]
Thanks for posting about this. I can give more context on CEA’s side, at least.
With regards to the required level of skill/experience, I’d say we consider them different. We are aiming to hire for the content role as a specialist. We currently have four broad bands (excluding the ED/CEO whose salary is set by the board), and the specialist band is second to the top . “Junior” would be the bottom band for us. (That said, I’d still expect us to offer someone joining at the junior level 10-25% more than what’s listed as the AMF salary above, if they were in the UK.)
Another potential factor that might contribute to the size of this pay gap is that I believe some orgs. also compensate their operational staff at lower rates than other staff. I don’t know whether this is true for AMF. CEA has chosen not to do this as a) we think their work is comparably valuable to non-operational staff b) deciding who was in an “operations” role is not as straightforward for as it might be for some organizations.
Another factor here might be location. We adjust salaries for location and it seems like AMF might not, although I’m not sure. If we were to hire someone in a place with a lower cost of living than the locations listed, we would offer a lower rate of pay than what’s listed above.
In general, we aim to have salaries that allow us to attract top talent, with the goal that for most roles, people don’t have to take a massive pay cut compared to their counterfactual options to join us. As we’ve wanted to attract more mid-career people, this has become increasingly important to us. Figuring where the balance point is between compensating sufficiently highly such that salaries aren’t so low they are dissuasive and conservatively enough we’re not wasting money or causing bad ecosystem effects is difficult and I’m not sure we’re getting it right.
(Looking at AMF, it appears the bulk of their staff have “operations” in their job title or appear to be operations-oriented.)