I have a little bit of a different perspective on that it doesn’t feel or appear good to label “only” earning 70k a “sacrifice”, even if it is technically correct. Maybe using language like “trade-off” or “tough choice” might feel a little better.
70k (OPs suggested salary) still puts you very close to the top 1 percent of global earners. Imagine being a Ugandan interested in effective altruism looking at this discussion. The idea that a salary of 70k US being a ‘sacrifice’ could seem grating and crass, even if the use of the word is correct. Everyone earning 70k doing a satisfying job that is making a difference in the world, is super fortunate with a whole lot of factors that have come together to make that possible.
Even just having the choice to be able to make the decision whether to earn to give or do direct work for “only” 60 or 70k is a privilege most of the world doesn’t have. I think it could be considered insensitive or even arrogant to talk in terms of sacrifice while being among the richest people around. To take it to the extreme (perhaps straw man tho) how would we feel about a sentence like “Bill Gates sacrificed an hour of his valuable time to serve in a soup kitchen”
Yes it may be psychologically hard to earn a while lot less than you could be doing something else, but I’m not sure “sacrifice” is the best terminology to be using.
I’ve seen a number of conversations about salary in EA where people talk past each other. Below is a list of what I think are some key cruxes- not everywhere people disagree, but where they are most likely to have different implicit assumptions, and most likely to have disagreements stemming only from definitions. I’d love if everyone arguing about salary in this thread would fill this out.
What salary are you proposing? (US$70k ?)
What living conditions do you expect this to buy people?
Housing?
Location?
Kids?
Food?
Savings rate?
What is your bar for “enough” money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Thriving?
What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
Some issues that might raise people’s expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
What do you expect to happen for people who can’t meet the condition set in question 3 with the salary set in question 1?
If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
What is your counterfactual for the money saved on salary?
What salary are you proposing? (US$70k ?) Obviously there’s lots of different countries, and lot’s of different cause areas. But just focusing on one in particular. I think CEA employees in the UK, could largely pay teacher salaries (24-30K GBP) and basically be fine, not lose lots of talent.
What living conditions do you expect this to buy people? Pretty good conditions. Good apartment, good savings.
What is your bar for “enough” money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Thriving? As soon as you’re saving for pension, you’re in a good spot I’d say.
What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
Some issues that might raise people’s expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
>85% I’d guess. Keep in mind median UK salary is 38k GBP, and median UK age of work force is significantly older than CEA employees (older people need more money).
What do you expect to happen for people who can’t meet the condition set in question 3 with the salary set in question 1?
The same as the for-profit world, if they’re good enough they’re paid more. But that there’s a downward pressure on people’s salaries, not just a upwards pressure (as I believe we currently have).
If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
For CEA, I’d likely guess they’d be indistinguishable for most roles most of the time.
What is your counterfactual for the money saved on salary?
Half of one more employee, and a marginal effect resulting in more of an agile ecosystem (i.e. more entrepreneurship, more commitment).
If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
For CEA, I’d likely guess they’d be indistinguishable for most roles most of the time.
I’m CEA’s main recruitment person and I’ve been involved with CEA’s hiring for 6+ years. I’ve also been involved in hiring rounds for other EA orgs.
I don’t remember a case where the top two candidates were “indistinguishable.” The gap very frequently seems quite large (e.g. our current guess is the top candidate might be twice as impactful, by some definition of expected impact). There have also been many cases where the gap is so large we don’t hire for the role at all and work we feel is important simply doesn’t happen. There have also, of course, been cases where we have two candidates we are similarly excited about. This is rare. If it does happen, we’d generally be happy to be transparent about the situation, and so if you have been offered a role and are wondering about your own replacability, I’d encourage you to just ask.
FWIW, my experience (hiring mostly operations roles) is often the opposite—I find for non-senior roles that I usually reach the end of a hiring process, and am making a pretty arbitrary choice between multiple candidates who both seem quite good on the (relatively weak) evidence from the hiring round. But, I also think RP filters a lot less heavily on culture fit / value alignment for ops roles than CEA does, which might be the relevant factor making this difference.
Thanks for clarifying, and I am certainly inclined to defer to you.
One concern I would have, is to what extent are these subjective estimations born-out by empirical data. Obviously you’d never deliberately hire the second best candidate, so we never really test our accuracy. I suspect this is particular bad with hiring, where the hiring process can be really comprehensive and it’s still possible to make a bad hire.
To add to what Caitlin said, my experience as a hiring manager and as a candidate is that this often is not the case.
When I was hired at CEA I took roles on two different teams (Head of US Operations at CEA and the Events Team role at EAO, which later merged into CEA). My understanding at the time is that they didn’t have second choice candidates with my qualifications, and I was told by the EAO hiring manager that they would have not filled the position if I didn’t accept (I don’t remember whether I checked this with the CEA role).
I should note that I was applying for these roles in 2015 and that the hiring pool has changed since then. But in my experience as a hiring manager (especially for senior/generalist positions), it can be really hard to find a candidate that fits the specific requirements. Part of this is that my team requires a fairly specific skillset (that includes EA context, execution ability, and fit with our high energy culture) but I wouldn’t be surprised if other hiring managers have similar experiences. I think as the team grows and more junior positions become available this might be more flexible, though I think “indistinguishable” is still not accurate.
Not Peter, but looking at the last ~20 roles I’ve hired for, I’d guess that during hiring, maybe 15 or so had an alternative candidate who seemed worth hiring (though perhaps did worse in some scoring system). These were all operations roles within an EA organization. For 2 more senior roles I hired for during that time, there appeared to be suitable alternatives. For other less senior roles there weren’t (though I think the opposite generally tends to be more true).
I do thing one consideration here is we are talking about who looked best during hiring. That’s different than who would be a better employee—we’re assuming our hiring process does a good job of assessing people’s fit / job performance, etc., and we know that the best predictors during hiring are only moderately correlated with later job performance, so it’s plausible that often we think there is a big gap between two candidates, but they’d actually perform equally well (or that someone who seems like the best candidate isn’t). Hiring is just a highly uncertain business, and predicting long-term job performance from like, 10 hours of sample work and interviews is pretty hard — I’m somewhat skeptical that looking at hiring data is even the right approach, because you’d also want to control for things like if those employees always meet performance expectations in the future, etc, and you never actually get counterfactual data on how good the person you didn’t hire was. I’m certain that many EA organizations have hired someone who appeared to be better than the alternative by a wide margin, and easily cleared a hiring bar, but who later turned out to have major performance issues, even if the organization was doing a really good job evaluating people.
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.).
Not a specific salary, there should definitely be ranges. I guess I would say the average EA salary should be ~60-80k/year right now. I think this is less than many could make in the private sector but not necessarily all. I acknowledge this is a sacrifice or reduction.
I think a reasonable condo/apartment. I think they would cook most of their own meals, could have kids, still save like 10% of income. I don’t think it’s necessary to live in London, NY, SF.
Able to live a ~middle class life. Not sure what peak productivity but miserable means.
Virtually all. This is above the median income in the richest country in the world.
I think a small ~5% or so may do work outside of EA on the side. I’m also not opposed to higher salaries than this. I don’t know what you mean I would expect to happen to them.
Usually I expect this to be not a lot of a drop. Maybe an average of 10%. Sometimes i realize this will be more.
Well, depends. I think a baseline reasonable counterfactual is Givewell Top Charities Fund.
I suppose 6 and 7 are for an individual hire and not for EA as a whole.
Suppose you want to hire Alice, but she won’t accept the salary, so you go to your second choice, Bob. How good is Bob, relative to Alice? Indistinguishable? 90% of impact? 50% of impact?
I’m not asking for survey data and suspect EA is too weird to make normal surveys applicable. So personal anecdotes or at best the experiencing of people involved in lots of hiring is the most we can hope for.
I know we are moving to absurdity now a little, but I feel like at 70,000 dollars in a position where people are doing meaningful work that aligns with their values, 90 percent Bob is probably there.
I have a little bit of a different perspective on that I don’t really consider earning “only” 70k a “sacrifice”. Maybe it could be considered a “relative sacrifice”? But even that language makes me uncomfortable.
Any sacrifice is relative. You can only sacrifice something if you had or could have had it in the first place.
Yes I agree with this, Jeff used the words “relative sacrifice”, and I was wondering if it would be better words to use, as it somewhat softens the “sacrifice” terminology. But I think I’m wrong about this. Have deleted it from the comment.
The sense in which I’m using “sacrifice” is just “giving something up”: it’s not saying anything about how the situation post-sacrifice compares to other people’s. For example, I could talk about how big or small a sacrifice it would be for me go vegan, even if as a vegan I would still be spending more on food and having a wider variety of options than most people globally. I think this is pretty standard, and looking through various definitions of “sacrifice” online I don’t see anyone seeming to use it the way you are suggesting?
Yes I’ve googled and I think you are right, the word sacrifice is mainly used in the way you were using it in your comment. I’ve edited my comment to reflec t this.
I still think using the concept of sacrifice, when we are talking people at the absolute top of the chain deciding between a range of amazing life options doesn’t feel great and perhaps could not look great externally either. I would rather talk positively about choosing the best option we have, or perhaps talking about “trade offs” rather than “sacrifices”.
EDITED HEAVILY RESPONDING TO COMMENTS BELOW
I have a little bit of a different perspective on that it doesn’t feel or appear good to label “only” earning 70k a “sacrifice”, even if it is technically correct. Maybe using language like “trade-off” or “tough choice” might feel a little better.
70k (OPs suggested salary) still puts you very close to the top 1 percent of global earners. Imagine being a Ugandan interested in effective altruism looking at this discussion. The idea that a salary of 70k US being a ‘sacrifice’ could seem grating and crass, even if the use of the word is correct. Everyone earning 70k doing a satisfying job that is making a difference in the world, is super fortunate with a whole lot of factors that have come together to make that possible.
Even just having the choice to be able to make the decision whether to earn to give or do direct work for “only” 60 or 70k is a privilege most of the world doesn’t have. I think it could be considered insensitive or even arrogant to talk in terms of sacrifice while being among the richest people around. To take it to the extreme (perhaps straw man tho) how would we feel about a sentence like “Bill Gates sacrificed an hour of his valuable time to serve in a soup kitchen”
Yes it may be psychologically hard to earn a while lot less than you could be doing something else, but I’m not sure “sacrifice” is the best terminology to be using.
I’ve seen a number of conversations about salary in EA where people talk past each other. Below is a list of what I think are some key cruxes- not everywhere people disagree, but where they are most likely to have different implicit assumptions, and most likely to have disagreements stemming only from definitions. I’d love if everyone arguing about salary in this thread would fill this out.
What salary are you proposing?(US$70k ?)What living conditions do you expect this to buy people?
Housing?
Location?
Kids?
Food?
Savings rate?
What is your bar for “enough” money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Thriving?
What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
Some issues that might raise people’s expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
What do you expect to happen for people who can’t meet the condition set in question 3 with the salary set in question 1?
If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
What is your counterfactual for the money saved on salary?
What salary are you proposing?(US$70k ?)Obviously there’s lots of different countries, and lot’s of different cause areas. But just focusing on one in particular. I think CEA employees in the UK, could largely pay teacher salaries (24-30K GBP) and basically be fine, not lose lots of talent.
What living conditions do you expect this to buy people?
Pretty good conditions. Good apartment, good savings.
What is your bar for “enough” money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Thriving?
As soon as you’re saving for pension, you’re in a good spot I’d say.
What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
Some issues that might raise people’s expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
>85% I’d guess. Keep in mind median UK salary is 38k GBP, and median UK age of work force is significantly older than CEA employees (older people need more money).
What do you expect to happen for people who can’t meet the condition set in question 3 with the salary set in question 1?
The same as the for-profit world, if they’re good enough they’re paid more. But that there’s a downward pressure on people’s salaries, not just a upwards pressure (as I believe we currently have).
If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
For CEA, I’d likely guess they’d be indistinguishable for most roles most of the time.
What is your counterfactual for the money saved on salary?
Half of one more employee, and a marginal effect resulting in more of an agile ecosystem (i.e. more entrepreneurship, more commitment).
I’m CEA’s main recruitment person and I’ve been involved with CEA’s hiring for 6+ years. I’ve also been involved in hiring rounds for other EA orgs.
I don’t remember a case where the top two candidates were “indistinguishable.” The gap very frequently seems quite large (e.g. our current guess is the top candidate might be twice as impactful, by some definition of expected impact). There have also been many cases where the gap is so large we don’t hire for the role at all and work we feel is important simply doesn’t happen. There have also, of course, been cases where we have two candidates we are similarly excited about. This is rare. If it does happen, we’d generally be happy to be transparent about the situation, and so if you have been offered a role and are wondering about your own replacability, I’d encourage you to just ask.
FWIW, my experience (hiring mostly operations roles) is often the opposite—I find for non-senior roles that I usually reach the end of a hiring process, and am making a pretty arbitrary choice between multiple candidates who both seem quite good on the (relatively weak) evidence from the hiring round. But, I also think RP filters a lot less heavily on culture fit / value alignment for ops roles than CEA does, which might be the relevant factor making this difference.
Thanks for clarifying, and I am certainly inclined to defer to you.
One concern I would have, is to what extent are these subjective estimations born-out by empirical data. Obviously you’d never deliberately hire the second best candidate, so we never really test our accuracy. I suspect this is particular bad with hiring, where the hiring process can be really comprehensive and it’s still possible to make a bad hire.
To add to what Caitlin said, my experience as a hiring manager and as a candidate is that this often is not the case.
When I was hired at CEA I took roles on two different teams (Head of US Operations at CEA and the Events Team role at EAO, which later merged into CEA). My understanding at the time is that they didn’t have second choice candidates with my qualifications, and I was told by the EAO hiring manager that they would have not filled the position if I didn’t accept (I don’t remember whether I checked this with the CEA role).
I should note that I was applying for these roles in 2015 and that the hiring pool has changed since then. But in my experience as a hiring manager (especially for senior/generalist positions), it can be really hard to find a candidate that fits the specific requirements. Part of this is that my team requires a fairly specific skillset (that includes EA context, execution ability, and fit with our high energy culture) but I wouldn’t be surprised if other hiring managers have similar experiences. I think as the team grows and more junior positions become available this might be more flexible, though I think “indistinguishable” is still not accurate.
I definitely had roles I’ve hired for this year where the top candidate was significantly better than the second place candidate by a large margin
How senior was this position? or, can you say more about how this varies across different roles and experience levels?
Based on some other responses to this question I think replaceability may be a major crux, so the more details the better.
Not Peter, but looking at the last ~20 roles I’ve hired for, I’d guess that during hiring, maybe 15 or so had an alternative candidate who seemed worth hiring (though perhaps did worse in some scoring system). These were all operations roles within an EA organization. For 2 more senior roles I hired for during that time, there appeared to be suitable alternatives. For other less senior roles there weren’t (though I think the opposite generally tends to be more true).
I do thing one consideration here is we are talking about who looked best during hiring. That’s different than who would be a better employee—we’re assuming our hiring process does a good job of assessing people’s fit / job performance, etc., and we know that the best predictors during hiring are only moderately correlated with later job performance, so it’s plausible that often we think there is a big gap between two candidates, but they’d actually perform equally well (or that someone who seems like the best candidate isn’t). Hiring is just a highly uncertain business, and predicting long-term job performance from like, 10 hours of sample work and interviews is pretty hard — I’m somewhat skeptical that looking at hiring data is even the right approach, because you’d also want to control for things like if those employees always meet performance expectations in the future, etc, and you never actually get counterfactual data on how good the person you didn’t hire was. I’m certain that many EA organizations have hired someone who appeared to be better than the alternative by a wide margin, and easily cleared a hiring bar, but who later turned out to have major performance issues, even if the organization was doing a really good job evaluating people.
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.).
Happy to answer these
Not a specific salary, there should definitely be ranges. I guess I would say the average EA salary should be ~60-80k/year right now. I think this is less than many could make in the private sector but not necessarily all. I acknowledge this is a sacrifice or reduction.
I think a reasonable condo/apartment. I think they would cook most of their own meals, could have kids, still save like 10% of income. I don’t think it’s necessary to live in London, NY, SF.
Able to live a ~middle class life. Not sure what peak productivity but miserable means.
Virtually all. This is above the median income in the richest country in the world.
I think a small ~5% or so may do work outside of EA on the side. I’m also not opposed to higher salaries than this. I don’t know what you mean I would expect to happen to them.
Usually I expect this to be not a lot of a drop. Maybe an average of 10%. Sometimes i realize this will be more.
Well, depends. I think a baseline reasonable counterfactual is Givewell Top Charities Fund.
I suppose 6 and 7 are for an individual hire and not for EA as a whole.
Thanks Elizabeth can you clarify what you mean by no. 6?
Suppose you want to hire Alice, but she won’t accept the salary, so you go to your second choice, Bob. How good is Bob, relative to Alice? Indistinguishable? 90% of impact? 50% of impact?
In many cases you just don’t end up hiring anyone. There is no Bob.
Can you elaborate on this? What’s your data source?
To come back to this, this podcast has an argument sort of adjacent to the conversation here.
No data source, just personal experience.
Maybe a more common outcome is eventually you find Bob but it’s 18 months later and you had to do without Alice for that time.
rephrase: where is your personal experience from?
I’m not asking for survey data and suspect EA is too weird to make normal surveys applicable. So personal anecdotes or at best the experiencing of people involved in lots of hiring is the most we can hope for.
Sorry Elizabeth, I hope you’ll understand if I don’t want to share more about this in a public forum. Happy to speak privately if you like.
I know we are moving to absurdity now a little, but I feel like at 70,000 dollars in a position where people are doing meaningful work that aligns with their values, 90 percent Bob is probably there.
Any sacrifice is relative. You can only sacrifice something if you had or could have had it in the first place.
Yes I agree with this, Jeff used the words “relative sacrifice”, and I was wondering if it would be better words to use, as it somewhat softens the “sacrifice” terminology. But I think I’m wrong about this. Have deleted it from the comment.
The sense in which I’m using “sacrifice” is just “giving something up”: it’s not saying anything about how the situation post-sacrifice compares to other people’s. For example, I could talk about how big or small a sacrifice it would be for me go vegan, even if as a vegan I would still be spending more on food and having a wider variety of options than most people globally. I think this is pretty standard, and looking through various definitions of “sacrifice” online I don’t see anyone seeming to use it the way you are suggesting?
Yes I’ve googled and I think you are right, the word sacrifice is mainly used in the way you were using it in your comment. I’ve edited my comment to reflec t this.
I still think using the concept of sacrifice, when we are talking people at the absolute top of the chain deciding between a range of amazing life options doesn’t feel great and perhaps could not look great externally either. I would rather talk positively about choosing the best option we have, or perhaps talking about “trade offs” rather than “sacrifices”.