Thanks for adding the context! I think your specific points are factually correct regarding wide variations of pay in the software industry, though I don’t think that actually refutes the point that salary ranges and comp expectations are well-known and easy to look up—certainly much more so than in EA or most other for-profit sectors. (Government/academic work is the exception here, where you can often find eg specific teacher salaries posted publicly)
If you eg look at https://www.levels.fyi/ for Google, you can directly see what an L3 (fresh grad), L4 (1-2 years of experience), L5 (“Senior”, typically 3-4 years) make in the industry. RSU/equity/vesting schedule does complicate things, but they are likewise shared on the site, here’s Stripe’s (note their L3 corresponds to Google L5)
I acknowledge the point made in Morrison’s comment, but just think that it’s a bad norm that favors employers, who tend to have an informational advantage over employees in the first place, and am unsure why EA orgs and especially EA individuals/employees should want to perpetuate this norm.
On an optics level, I think you should just be up front and confident in your valuations. If someone asks why, you can mention something like “this ML researchers makes $1m in salary because they would otherwise make $2m at Deepmind”.
FWIW I agree with Charles that tech industry salaries have high ranges and aren’t very transparent, compared to EA orgs.
If you look at the salary ranges posted by EA orgs (here’s Rethink’s ranges, here’s a job posting by Open Phil) the ranges are substantially narrower. This substantially limits the room for negotiation/favoritism.
The ranges are posted by the orgs themselves. In tech, the numbers are posted (often against a company’s will) by employees and job candidates. This is a pretty adversarial dynamic. I’m tentatively glad EA does not have this (though I’m uncertain).
Hm so the subject of salary range is actually quite different than transparency—I mostly think large ranges would be good because it allows for EA to pay market rates to highly skilled/in demand workers. Imo the current ethos of artificial/sacrificial wages in EA is pennywise, pound foolish, and leads to the problem of having very mission-aligned but not extremely competent people in EA orgs. I think it’s a major reason EA struggles to attract mid to late career talent, especially leadership/managers/mentors.
Re: adversarial, I don’t have the sense that either 1) employers care about having their pay ranges publicized on levels.fyi or similar services, nor that 2) companies have a right to keep such information private.
I’m also not sure how much work is being covered by the word “range” here—it’s true that eg Google would hire one engineer for 200k and another for 800k, but the roles and responsibilities and day to day work of both would look completely different.
Thanks for adding the context! I think your specific points are factually correct regarding wide variations of pay in the software industry, though I don’t think that actually refutes the point that salary ranges and comp expectations are well-known and easy to look up—certainly much more so than in EA or most other for-profit sectors. (Government/academic work is the exception here, where you can often find eg specific teacher salaries posted publicly)
If you eg look at https://www.levels.fyi/ for Google, you can directly see what an L3 (fresh grad), L4 (1-2 years of experience), L5 (“Senior”, typically 3-4 years) make in the industry. RSU/equity/vesting schedule does complicate things, but they are likewise shared on the site, here’s Stripe’s (note their L3 corresponds to Google L5)
I acknowledge the point made in Morrison’s comment, but just think that it’s a bad norm that favors employers, who tend to have an informational advantage over employees in the first place, and am unsure why EA orgs and especially EA individuals/employees should want to perpetuate this norm.
On an optics level, I think you should just be up front and confident in your valuations. If someone asks why, you can mention something like “this ML researchers makes $1m in salary because they would otherwise make $2m at Deepmind”.
FWIW I agree with Charles that tech industry salaries have high ranges and aren’t very transparent, compared to EA orgs.
If you look at the salary ranges posted by EA orgs (here’s Rethink’s ranges, here’s a job posting by Open Phil) the ranges are substantially narrower. This substantially limits the room for negotiation/favoritism.
The ranges are posted by the orgs themselves. In tech, the numbers are posted (often against a company’s will) by employees and job candidates. This is a pretty adversarial dynamic. I’m tentatively glad EA does not have this (though I’m uncertain).
Hm so the subject of salary range is actually quite different than transparency—I mostly think large ranges would be good because it allows for EA to pay market rates to highly skilled/in demand workers. Imo the current ethos of artificial/sacrificial wages in EA is pennywise, pound foolish, and leads to the problem of having very mission-aligned but not extremely competent people in EA orgs. I think it’s a major reason EA struggles to attract mid to late career talent, especially leadership/managers/mentors.
Re: adversarial, I don’t have the sense that either 1) employers care about having their pay ranges publicized on levels.fyi or similar services, nor that 2) companies have a right to keep such information private.
I’m also not sure how much work is being covered by the word “range” here—it’s true that eg Google would hire one engineer for 200k and another for 800k, but the roles and responsibilities and day to day work of both would look completely different.