I’ve thought about similar things to this before. Thanks for writing it out for the community. I think there are few reasons for this change.
The average EA today is far less “committed” to EA than in 2016. By committed, I mean making personal sacrifices for altruism. Here is a website I found for Jeff Kauffman and Julia Wise where you can see them giving 50% of their income since ~2012. If I’m not mistaken, they’ve had a family for most of that time. This behavior is significantly less common nowadays, particularly as a proportion of people in the movement where I suspect a good fraction of people in the community donate relatively little, let alone 50% of their income.
Salaries at EA organizations have grown a lot. People used to take massive pay cuts to do EA non-profit work. Hopefully people from the early days can fill in some numbers here but there is a picture here of an office in the basement of an estate agent, salaries being 15k/year pre-tax and lunch being the same every day. In the OP, Abraham talks about a $500 donation allowing him to hire a contractor and being able to hire staff after ~75k of donations. Apart from a select few CE incubated charities, 75k doesn’t even cover a single person’s salary for a year at most EA orgs. Most salaries I see today for EA positions are 100k+, particularly at longtermist organizations.
There are a few solutions to this:
EA gets more frugal. We might not go back to 15k (20k or so with CPI adjustment) but a typical salary could become 50-60k. Catered lunches, generous expense policies, large benefits packages and ample + flexible + paid time off become a pot luck once a week, basic healthcare coverage and 2 weeks of vacation. All of a sudden, running a 10 person organization takes $1M instead of $10M and it becomes much more feasible to get 30 x $10-30k with a couple of 50-100k donations to cover the cost of the organization.
A general decentralization of the funding landscape. Open Phil (and maybe SFF) get divided into ~5 orgs. A significant amount of regranting gets done on the order of ~100k-1M per regrantor who otherwise do other things.
I think there are costs to both approaches. There will be a lot less work done by “less committed” EAs if sacrifices compared to the private sector become expected. Furthermore, there are many efficiency gains to be had by not having several grantmaking orgs duplicate the same work + a bunch of less skilled and trained regrantors might on average make worse grants.
It’s definitely true that, holding everything equal, spending less on salaries means it’s easier to fundraise, and organizations can get more done for a given amount of money. But of course if you ask someone who could be earning $500k to work for $50k most of them (including me!) will say no, and even people who say yes initially are more likely to burn out and decide this is not what they want to do with their life.
There are also other costs to pushing hard on frugality: people will start making tradeoffs that don’t really make sense given how valuable their time is to the organization. For example, in 2015 when our first child was refusing to eat at daycare it would have been possible for us to hire someone to watch them, but this would have been expensive. Instead, we chose a combination of working unusual hours and working fewer hours so she wouldn’t need to be in daycare. We were both earning to give then, so this was fine, but if we had been doing work that was directly valuable I think it would probably have been a false economy.
if sacrifices compared to the private sector become expected
I think this general area is quite subtle and confusing, where people have really different impressions depending on their background. From my perspective, as someone making about 1⁄3 as much in a direct work job as I was making (and expect I could still make) in industry, this is already a relative sacrifice. On the other hand, I also know people at EA orgs who would be making less money outside of EA. I don’t at all have a good sense of which of these is more typical? And then the longer someone spends within EA, developing EA-specific career capital and foregoing more conventional career capital, the lower a sacrifice it looks like they are making (relative to the highest comp job they could get right now) but also the higher a sacrifice there actually making (relative to a career in which they had optimized for income).
(And, as always, when people give us as examples of people making large sacrifices, I have to point out that the absolute amount of money we have kept has been relatively high. I expect most EAs who spent a similar period in direct work were living on less and have much lower savings than we can. And I think this would still be true even if current direct work compensation had been in place since 2012.)
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”.
The average EA today is far less “committed” to EA than in 2016. By committed, I mean making personal sacrifices for altruism. Here is a website I found for Jeff Kauffman and Julia Wise where you can see them giving 50% of their income since ~2012. If I’m not mistaken, they’ve had a family for most of that time. This behavior is significantly less common nowadays, particularly as a proportion of people in the movement where I suspect a good fraction of people in the community donate relatively little, let alone 50% of their income.
Given how much the community has grown, isn’t this just what you’d expect? There are way more people than there were in 2016, which pushes down how weird the community is on average due to regression to the mean. The obvious solution is that EA should just be smaller and more selected for altruism (which I think would be an error).
Salaries at EA organizations have grown a lot. People used to take massive pay cuts to do EA non-profit work. Hopefully people from the early days can fill in some numbers here but there is a picture here of an office in the basement of an estate agent, salaries being 15k/year pre-tax and lunch being the same every day. In the OP, Abraham talks about a $500 donation allowing him to hire a contractor and being able to hire staff after ~75k of donations. Apart from a select few CE incubated charities, 75k doesn’t even cover a single person’s salary for a year at most EA orgs. Most salaries I see today for EA positions are 100k+, particularly at longtermist organizations.
I think the simplest explanation for this is that there are just more roles with well-paying counterfactuals e.g. ml engineering. Excluding those roles, after you adjust for the cost of living, most EA roles aren’t particularly well paid e.g. Open Phil salaries aren’t much higher than the median in SF and maybe less than the BART (Bay Area metro) police.
Given how much the community has grown, isn’t this just what you’d expect? There are way more people than there were in 2016, which pushes down how weird the community is on average due to regression to the mean. The obvious solution is that EA should just be smaller and more selected for altruism (which I think would be an error).
Sure, I’m not suggesting we become smaller but I don’t think it’s completely either or. A bit more altruistic pressure/examples seems good.
I think the simplest explanation for this is that there are just more roles with well-paying counterfactuals e.g. ml engineering. Excluding those roles, after you adjust for the cost of living, most EA roles aren’t particularly well paid e.g. Open Phil salaries aren’t much higher than the median in SF and maybe less than the BART (Bay Area metro) police.
SF is among the most expensive cities in the world. Above median salary in the most expensive parts of the world seems quite high for non-profits. I think the actual simplest explanation is that EA got billions of dollars (a lot of which is now gone) and that had upward pressure on salaries.
Again, my comment mainly answered the question of why we don’t have a robust earning to give ecosystem in EA. Not nearly enough people make enough money to give the type of sums that EA organizations spend.
To clarify, I don’t think salaries are anywhere near $1M. I do think there are a lot of people at EA organizations who make $150-200k per year or so. When you add benefits, lunches, office space, expense policies, PTO, full Healthcare packages/benefits, staff retreats, events, unnecessary software packages, taxes etc. a typical organization might be spending 1/3rd of their budget on salaries so something like $5-6M, not $10M. I wasn’t being exact with numbers and I should have been.
I think many EA organizations could reduce their budgets by ~50%, drastically turn up the frugality and creativity and remain approximately as effective.
I’m not sure the effects this would have. I suspect less “exodus from EA” than people think.
I’m also just speaking to what happened as to why we don’t have a robust earning to give ecosystem. It’s much different having 50 people fund a 100-500k org than a 5M org.
Minor downvoted because this comment seems to take Marcus’s comment out of context / misread it:
Catered lunches, generous expense policies, large benefits packages and ample + flexible + paid time off become a pot luck once a week, basic healthcare coverage and 2 weeks of vacation. All of a sudden, running a 10 person organization takes $1M instead of $10M and it becomes much more feasible to get 30 x $10-30k with a couple of 50-100k donations to cover the cost of the organization.
I don’t think the numbers are likely exactly right, but I think the broad point is correct. I think that likely an organization starting with say 70% market rate salaries in the longtermist space could, if it pursued fairly aggressive cost savings, reduce their budget by much more than 30%.
As an example, I was once quoted on office space in the community that cost around $14k USD / month for a four person office, including lunch every day. For a 10 person organization, that is around $420k/year for office and food. Switching to a $300/person/mo office, and not offering the same perks, which is fairly easily findable, including in large cities (though it won’t be Class A office space) would save $384k, which is like, 4 additional staff at $70k/year, if that’s our benchmark.
FWIW, I feel uncertain about frugality of this sort being desirable — but I definitely believe there are major cost savings on the table.
Downvoted because this comment seems to take Marcus’s comment out of context / misread it … I don’t think the numbers are likely exactly right, but I think the broad point is correct.
I think it depends a lot on whether you think the difference between 10x ($10M vs $1M) and 1.4x (30% savings) is a big deal? (I think it is)
The main out of context bit is that Elizabeth’s comment seemed to interpret Marcus as only referring to salary, when the full comment makes it very clear that it wasn’t just about that, which seemed like a strong misreading to me, even if the 10x factor was incorrect.
I suspect the actual “theoretically maximally frugal core EA organization with the same number of staff” is something like 2x-3x cheaper than current costs, if salaries moved to the $50k-$70k range.
Elizabeth’s comment seemed to interpret Marcus as only referring to salary
I see Elizabeth as saying “all expenses are staff expenses”, which is broader than salary and includes things like office and food?
I think why Elizabeth was pointing out that the calculation implies only staff costs contribute to the overall budget because if you have expenses for things other than staff (ex: in my current org we spend money on lab reagents and genetic sequencing, which don’t go down if we decide to compensate more frugally) then your overall costs will drop less than your staff costs.
I’m not just talking about salaries when I talk about the costs of orgs (as i said, my original comment is a diagnosis, not a prescription). To use the example of lab reagents and genetic sequencing, I’ve worked in several chemistry labs and they operate very differently depending on how much money is available. When money is abundant (and frugality is not a concern), things like buying expensive laptops/computers (vs. thinking about what is actually necessary) to run equipment, buying more expensive chemicals, re-use of certain equipment (vs. discarding on single use), celebrations of accomplishments, etc. all are different.
The way I see it, from 2016 to 2022, EA (and maybe specifically longtermism) got a bunch of billionaire money that grew the movements “money” resource faster than the other resource like talent and time etc. and so money could be used more liberally, especially when trading it off vs. time, talent, ingenuity, creativity, etc.
I’ve thought about similar things to this before. Thanks for writing it out for the community. I think there are few reasons for this change.
The average EA today is far less “committed” to EA than in 2016. By committed, I mean making personal sacrifices for altruism. Here is a website I found for Jeff Kauffman and Julia Wise where you can see them giving 50% of their income since ~2012. If I’m not mistaken, they’ve had a family for most of that time. This behavior is significantly less common nowadays, particularly as a proportion of people in the movement where I suspect a good fraction of people in the community donate relatively little, let alone 50% of their income.
Salaries at EA organizations have grown a lot. People used to take massive pay cuts to do EA non-profit work. Hopefully people from the early days can fill in some numbers here but there is a picture here of an office in the basement of an estate agent, salaries being 15k/year pre-tax and lunch being the same every day. In the OP, Abraham talks about a $500 donation allowing him to hire a contractor and being able to hire staff after ~75k of donations. Apart from a select few CE incubated charities, 75k doesn’t even cover a single person’s salary for a year at most EA orgs. Most salaries I see today for EA positions are 100k+, particularly at longtermist organizations.
There are a few solutions to this:
EA gets more frugal. We might not go back to 15k (20k or so with CPI adjustment) but a typical salary could become 50-60k. Catered lunches, generous expense policies, large benefits packages and ample + flexible + paid time off become a pot luck once a week, basic healthcare coverage and 2 weeks of vacation. All of a sudden, running a 10 person organization takes $1M instead of $10M and it becomes much more feasible to get 30 x $10-30k with a couple of 50-100k donations to cover the cost of the organization.
A general decentralization of the funding landscape. Open Phil (and maybe SFF) get divided into ~5 orgs. A significant amount of regranting gets done on the order of ~100k-1M per regrantor who otherwise do other things.
I think there are costs to both approaches. There will be a lot less work done by “less committed” EAs if sacrifices compared to the private sector become expected. Furthermore, there are many efficiency gains to be had by not having several grantmaking orgs duplicate the same work + a bunch of less skilled and trained regrantors might on average make worse grants.
Still something to consider.
It’s definitely true that, holding everything equal, spending less on salaries means it’s easier to fundraise, and organizations can get more done for a given amount of money. But of course if you ask someone who could be earning $500k to work for $50k most of them (including me!) will say no, and even people who say yes initially are more likely to burn out and decide this is not what they want to do with their life.
There are also other costs to pushing hard on frugality: people will start making tradeoffs that don’t really make sense given how valuable their time is to the organization. For example, in 2015 when our first child was refusing to eat at daycare it would have been possible for us to hire someone to watch them, but this would have been expensive. Instead, we chose a combination of working unusual hours and working fewer hours so she wouldn’t need to be in daycare. We were both earning to give then, so this was fine, but if we had been doing work that was directly valuable I think it would probably have been a false economy.
I think this general area is quite subtle and confusing, where people have really different impressions depending on their background. From my perspective, as someone making about 1⁄3 as much in a direct work job as I was making (and expect I could still make) in industry, this is already a relative sacrifice. On the other hand, I also know people at EA orgs who would be making less money outside of EA. I don’t at all have a good sense of which of these is more typical? And then the longer someone spends within EA, developing EA-specific career capital and foregoing more conventional career capital, the lower a sacrifice it looks like they are making (relative to the highest comp job they could get right now) but also the higher a sacrifice there actually making (relative to a career in which they had optimized for income).
(And, as always, when people give us as examples of people making large sacrifices, I have to point out that the absolute amount of money we have kept has been relatively high. I expect most EAs who spent a similar period in direct work were living on less and have much lower savings than we can. And I think this would still be true even if current direct work compensation had been in place since 2012.)
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”.
Given how much the community has grown, isn’t this just what you’d expect? There are way more people than there were in 2016, which pushes down how weird the community is on average due to regression to the mean. The obvious solution is that EA should just be smaller and more selected for altruism (which I think would be an error).
I think the simplest explanation for this is that there are just more roles with well-paying counterfactuals e.g. ml engineering. Excluding those roles, after you adjust for the cost of living, most EA roles aren’t particularly well paid e.g. Open Phil salaries aren’t much higher than the median in SF and maybe less than the BART (Bay Area metro) police.
Sure, I’m not suggesting we become smaller but I don’t think it’s completely either or. A bit more altruistic pressure/examples seems good.
SF is among the most expensive cities in the world. Above median salary in the most expensive parts of the world seems quite high for non-profits. I think the actual simplest explanation is that EA got billions of dollars (a lot of which is now gone) and that had upward pressure on salaries.
Again, my comment mainly answered the question of why we don’t have a robust earning to give ecosystem in EA. Not nearly enough people make enough money to give the type of sums that EA organizations spend.
Do you mean these numbers literally? You think people are being paid $1m a year, and all expenses are staff expenses?
To clarify, I don’t think salaries are anywhere near $1M. I do think there are a lot of people at EA organizations who make $150-200k per year or so. When you add benefits, lunches, office space, expense policies, PTO, full Healthcare packages/benefits, staff retreats, events, unnecessary software packages, taxes etc. a typical organization might be spending 1/3rd of their budget on salaries so something like $5-6M, not $10M. I wasn’t being exact with numbers and I should have been.
I think many EA organizations could reduce their budgets by ~50%, drastically turn up the frugality and creativity and remain approximately as effective.
I’m not sure the effects this would have. I suspect less “exodus from EA” than people think.
I’m also just speaking to what happened as to why we don’t have a robust earning to give ecosystem. It’s much different having 50 people fund a 100-500k org than a 5M org.
Minor downvoted because this comment seems to take Marcus’s comment out of context / misread it:
I don’t think the numbers are likely exactly right, but I think the broad point is correct. I think that likely an organization starting with say 70% market rate salaries in the longtermist space could, if it pursued fairly aggressive cost savings, reduce their budget by much more than 30%.
As an example, I was once quoted on office space in the community that cost around $14k USD / month for a four person office, including lunch every day. For a 10 person organization, that is around $420k/year for office and food. Switching to a $300/person/mo office, and not offering the same perks, which is fairly easily findable, including in large cities (though it won’t be Class A office space) would save $384k, which is like, 4 additional staff at $70k/year, if that’s our benchmark.
FWIW, I feel uncertain about frugality of this sort being desirable — but I definitely believe there are major cost savings on the table.
I think it depends a lot on whether you think the difference between 10x ($10M vs $1M) and 1.4x (30% savings) is a big deal? (I think it is)
The main out of context bit is that Elizabeth’s comment seemed to interpret Marcus as only referring to salary, when the full comment makes it very clear that it wasn’t just about that, which seemed like a strong misreading to me, even if the 10x factor was incorrect.
I suspect the actual “theoretically maximally frugal core EA organization with the same number of staff” is something like 2x-3x cheaper than current costs, if salaries moved to the $50k-$70k range.
I see Elizabeth as saying “all expenses are staff expenses”, which is broader than salary and includes things like office and food?
I think why Elizabeth was pointing out that the calculation implies only staff costs contribute to the overall budget because if you have expenses for things other than staff (ex: in my current org we spend money on lab reagents and genetic sequencing, which don’t go down if we decide to compensate more frugally) then your overall costs will drop less than your staff costs.
I’m not just talking about salaries when I talk about the costs of orgs (as i said, my original comment is a diagnosis, not a prescription). To use the example of lab reagents and genetic sequencing, I’ve worked in several chemistry labs and they operate very differently depending on how much money is available. When money is abundant (and frugality is not a concern), things like buying expensive laptops/computers (vs. thinking about what is actually necessary) to run equipment, buying more expensive chemicals, re-use of certain equipment (vs. discarding on single use), celebrations of accomplishments, etc. all are different.
The way I see it, from 2016 to 2022, EA (and maybe specifically longtermism) got a bunch of billionaire money that grew the movements “money” resource faster than the other resource like talent and time etc. and so money could be used more liberally, especially when trading it off vs. time, talent, ingenuity, creativity, etc.