Thanks for responding, it has really helped me clarify my understanding of your views.
I do think the comparison to teacher wages is a little unfair. In the US teaching jobs are incredibly stable, and stable things pay less. Unless the UK is very different, I expect that EA jobs would need to pay more just to have people end up with the same financial situation over time, because instability is expensive. But this is maybe a 10% difference, not so not that important in the scheme of things.
I think a big area of contention (in all the salary discussions, not just this one) stems from a disagreement on questions 6 and 7. For fields like alignment research, the answers may be “replacement is 1/10th as good” and “there is nothing else to spend on the money on”. But for fields like globally health and poverty, salary trades off directly against work”. So it’s not surprising those fields look very different.
I’m not sure where CEA falls in this spectrum. In a sister comment Cait says that for CEA their number two candidate is often half as impactful as their top choice, and sometimes they choose to forego filling a role entirely if the top choice is unvailable. I’m surprised by that and a little skeptical that it’s unfixable, but I also expect they’ve put a lot of thought into recruitment. If CEA is regularly struggling to fill roles, that certainly explains some of the salary explanation.
Cait didn’t mention this but I believe I read elsewhere that CEA didn’t want too big a gap between programmers and non-programmers, and solved this by ~overpaying non-programmers. I don’t know how I feel about this. I guess tentatively I think that it was awfully convenient to solve the problem by overpaying people rather than expecting people to become comfortable with a salary gap, and it might have been good to try harder at that, or divide the orgs such that it wasn’t so obvious. My understanding is that CEA struggled to find programmers[1], so paying less is a nonstarter.
There was a long LW thread on this that left me with the impression that CEA’s main problem was it was looking for the wrong thing, and the thing it was looking for was extremely expensive. But I imagine that even if they were looking for the cheaper right thing, they couldn’t get it with teacher wages.
In the US teaching jobs are incredibly stable, and stable things pay less. Unless the UK is very different, I expect that EA jobs would need to pay more just to have people end up with the same financial situation over time, because instability is expensive
I agree that there should be a premium for instability.
I’m not sure where CEA falls in this spectrum. In a sister comment Cait says that for CEA their number two candidate is often half as impactful as their top choice
I agree this is a crux. To the extent you’re paying more for better candidates, I am pretty happy.
Cait didn’t mention this but I believe I read elsewhere that CEA didn’t want too big a gap between programmers and non-programmers, and solved this by ~overpaying non-programmers.
Related to this, I have an intuition that salaries get inflated by EA’s being too nice.
Also related to this point, a concern I have with paying little, or paying competitive salaries in workplaces which have an ideologically driven supply/demand mismatch (i.e. the game industry, or NGOs) often leads to toxic workplaces. If paying a premium avoids these, it could definitely be worth it. Although I am sceptical how much it helps, over other things (like generally creating a nice place to work, making people feel safe, hiring the right people ect.).
Thanks for responding, it has really helped me clarify my understanding of your views.
I do think the comparison to teacher wages is a little unfair. In the US teaching jobs are incredibly stable, and stable things pay less. Unless the UK is very different, I expect that EA jobs would need to pay more just to have people end up with the same financial situation over time, because instability is expensive. But this is maybe a 10% difference, not so not that important in the scheme of things.
I think a big area of contention (in all the salary discussions, not just this one) stems from a disagreement on questions 6 and 7. For fields like alignment research, the answers may be “replacement is 1/10th as good” and “there is nothing else to spend on the money on”. But for fields like globally health and poverty, salary trades off directly against work”. So it’s not surprising those fields look very different.
I’m not sure where CEA falls in this spectrum. In a sister comment Cait says that for CEA their number two candidate is often half as impactful as their top choice, and sometimes they choose to forego filling a role entirely if the top choice is unvailable. I’m surprised by that and a little skeptical that it’s unfixable, but I also expect they’ve put a lot of thought into recruitment. If CEA is regularly struggling to fill roles, that certainly explains some of the salary explanation.
Cait didn’t mention this but I believe I read elsewhere that CEA didn’t want too big a gap between programmers and non-programmers, and solved this by ~overpaying non-programmers. I don’t know how I feel about this. I guess tentatively I think that it was awfully convenient to solve the problem by overpaying people rather than expecting people to become comfortable with a salary gap, and it might have been good to try harder at that, or divide the orgs such that it wasn’t so obvious. My understanding is that CEA struggled to find programmers[1], so paying less is a nonstarter.
There was a long LW thread on this that left me with the impression that CEA’s main problem was it was looking for the wrong thing, and the thing it was looking for was extremely expensive. But I imagine that even if they were looking for the cheaper right thing, they couldn’t get it with teacher wages.
I agree that there should be a premium for instability.
I agree this is a crux. To the extent you’re paying more for better candidates, I am pretty happy.
Related to this, I have an intuition that salaries get inflated by EA’s being too nice.
Also related to this point, a concern I have with paying little, or paying competitive salaries in workplaces which have an ideologically driven supply/demand mismatch (i.e. the game industry, or NGOs) often leads to toxic workplaces. If paying a premium avoids these, it could definitely be worth it. Although I am sceptical how much it helps, over other things (like generally creating a nice place to work, making people feel safe, hiring the right people ect.).