But not, I suggest, that much salary. Moral saints aside, most people want to earn more than ‘graduate first job’ level salaries as a medium term plan.
My general worry is EA orgs keep offering junior roles which have middling career capital, no obvious path for career progression, and significantly below-par pay, and then (despite the ‘economicsy’ bent of many EA groups) are surprised that they have issues with recruitment and retention.
I think that’s a fair concern but it’s not quite as bad as you worry.
Wave is a for-profit, and pays market salaries. The other orgs pay typical non-profit salaries.
They’re all growing very fast, so I think the career progression is good. You also get a great network from these roles. (Exactly what you’ll do in the future is unclear though, so the career progression feels bad due to ambiguity aversion.) Salaries are also increasing at a decent rate.
I also think the career capital is strong—many of these are elite organisations, mostly YC-backed etc. I think most people would learn a lot from working at them.
In our own hiring, we haven’t often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong). Interestingly it seems to be more of an issue with engineers than others. I’m not sure exactly why that is—maybe just because the counterfactual is so obvious (even though engineers don’t actually earn as much as law and finance, which non-engineers working at these firms could pursue otherwise).
We’re pretty attentive to the importance of salary in hiring, and I plan to raise salaries if they do turn into a bottleneck (insofar as we’re able to raise funding). We increased salaries significantly in Dec 2014 for this reason.
These are also not junior roles for the most part. New Incentives and GiveDirectly and 80k are looking for a senior engineer, who would ideally lead the engineering team in the future.
Of course, much of this is predicated on future growth actually happening, but that’s the same at a for-profit startup.
“In our own hiring, we haven’t often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong).”
If your hiring structured in such a way that you would notice if it was?
By which I mean, if there are 40 people who would be a good fit for a role you are hiring for, and 90% of them aren’t willing to earn less than $60k, do you have any way you would expect to find out about that fact? I’d sort of expect them to just not apply in the first place because they know they won’t get paid that much (ironically, due to the commendable transparency and openness of most EA organisations). And so you only hear from the other 4, where salary might be a concern but it’s not the primary concern.
That’s a deliberately extreme set of numbers but hopefully demonstrates the point I’m trying to make.
It’s definitely a worry. The main way I’m judging this is how important salary seems in our final negotiations with the short-list of candidates.
Of course, if all the filtering occurs at an earlier stage, then we’ll never find out, but I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think people use salary as a “yes or no” filter (rather it’s one of many criteria that have a role at each stage of the process); we often advertise the roles without stating the salaries; when I talk to people about the roles early on they often aren’t aware of what the salaries are.
Another worry is that people care about salary much more than they’re willing to let on. It would be hard to pick this up.
One reason why salary is less important than you might first think is that “not caring about salary” is well correlated with “EA-ness” and that’s a trait we value very highly when hiring. So, usually the candidates who care a great deal about salary aren’t the ones we’re most excited to hire.
The point I was making about openness/transparency is that I suspect most people who have been around EA for a while have an ok idea of what (say) CEA employees earn because you can get a very rough idea of that very quickly from scanning any of the budgets. As you correctly pointed out, they’re also just fairly typical for the wider non-profit sector. Any for many engineers those impressions will amount to a 50%-ish pay cut.
Once they have that impression, I’m surprised you don’t think people use salary as a ‘yes or no’ filter. I definitely think people have an internal ‘minimum number’ or ‘maximum pay cut’ and then for everything after that number it becomes one of many considerations. My main concern is that large chunks of the EA meta space might be falling below that threshold for large chunks of dedicated EAs. But I don’t know of any way to settle that theory more definitively, so having stated my impression I’ll leave it at that.
In my experience, some people definitely use it as a yes/no filter, but many don’t.
Also if you’re considering a group of people, you’d expect everyone to have their minimum threshold at different points, which will create a continuum salary vs. talent tradeoff, so you’ll still be able to get a sense of how bad the tradeoff is.
(ironically, due to the commendable transparency and openness of most EA organisations)
It’s much better (for both prospective employees and the organization) for people not to apply then to apply, spend tons of time interviewing, and then realize the salary is lower than they’re willing to take. So (with some caveats I won’t get into), transparency benefits everyone here.
Short run I agree, but long run it’s not an obvious win if it means 80k, and other similar orgs, never even find out salary is the largest concern (in a hypothetical world that I’m not at all sure exists, but certainly could exist).
Respectfully, given the challenges in hiring, worries about ‘churn’, and the general assertion EA is ‘human capital constrained’, the market seems to disagree with you about how good jobs like these are. I won’t belabour which side the outside view would be on.
Of the available factors that may attract applicants most aren’t easily modifiable: how quickly they will grow, the likelihood of them gaining leadership responsibility, network quality and career capital, etc.. Salary is the exception to this, so I’m surprised it is not the first port of call.
Basically agree, but just an extra addition: Raising salary is not as helpful as it first looks for attracting talent, because the marginal people who get attracted by higher salaries are less EA aligned, which makes them less suitable for the role.
I also think the career capital is strong—many of these are elite organisations, mostly YC-backed etc. I think most people would learn a lot from working at them.
Again, you have to consider counterfactuals here. If I could work at either Google or 80K, will I learn as much from working at 80K as I would learn from Google? Probably not. Or if I prefer the sort of learning you get at a smaller company, I would do better to work at a good startup than at 80K.
Like what Gregory said, if you’re claiming that your job is great for software developers, but the actual software developers in this thread disagree with you, maybe you are mistaken about what developers find attractive.
In our own hiring, we haven’t often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong). Interestingly it seems to be more of an issue with engineers than others.
What jobs are you hiring people for where they would otherwise work in finance? I presume they have nothing to do with finance and probably tie into your core mission. Whereas you’re hiring software developers to do software development. So finance people take jobs at 80K to work on developing career strategy, whereas programmers just do programming, which they could do anywhere.
25-75% I think, though bear in mind the work is probably more intrinsically motivating day-to-day, which is worth a lot of salary.
But not, I suggest, that much salary. Moral saints aside, most people want to earn more than ‘graduate first job’ level salaries as a medium term plan.
My general worry is EA orgs keep offering junior roles which have middling career capital, no obvious path for career progression, and significantly below-par pay, and then (despite the ‘economicsy’ bent of many EA groups) are surprised that they have issues with recruitment and retention.
Hey Greg,
I think that’s a fair concern but it’s not quite as bad as you worry.
Wave is a for-profit, and pays market salaries. The other orgs pay typical non-profit salaries.
They’re all growing very fast, so I think the career progression is good. You also get a great network from these roles. (Exactly what you’ll do in the future is unclear though, so the career progression feels bad due to ambiguity aversion.) Salaries are also increasing at a decent rate.
I also think the career capital is strong—many of these are elite organisations, mostly YC-backed etc. I think most people would learn a lot from working at them.
In our own hiring, we haven’t often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong). Interestingly it seems to be more of an issue with engineers than others. I’m not sure exactly why that is—maybe just because the counterfactual is so obvious (even though engineers don’t actually earn as much as law and finance, which non-engineers working at these firms could pursue otherwise).
We’re pretty attentive to the importance of salary in hiring, and I plan to raise salaries if they do turn into a bottleneck (insofar as we’re able to raise funding). We increased salaries significantly in Dec 2014 for this reason.
These are also not junior roles for the most part. New Incentives and GiveDirectly and 80k are looking for a senior engineer, who would ideally lead the engineering team in the future.
Of course, much of this is predicated on future growth actually happening, but that’s the same at a for-profit startup.
“In our own hiring, we haven’t often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong).”
If your hiring structured in such a way that you would notice if it was?
By which I mean, if there are 40 people who would be a good fit for a role you are hiring for, and 90% of them aren’t willing to earn less than $60k, do you have any way you would expect to find out about that fact? I’d sort of expect them to just not apply in the first place because they know they won’t get paid that much (ironically, due to the commendable transparency and openness of most EA organisations). And so you only hear from the other 4, where salary might be a concern but it’s not the primary concern.
That’s a deliberately extreme set of numbers but hopefully demonstrates the point I’m trying to make.
It’s definitely a worry. The main way I’m judging this is how important salary seems in our final negotiations with the short-list of candidates.
Of course, if all the filtering occurs at an earlier stage, then we’ll never find out, but I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think people use salary as a “yes or no” filter (rather it’s one of many criteria that have a role at each stage of the process); we often advertise the roles without stating the salaries; when I talk to people about the roles early on they often aren’t aware of what the salaries are.
Another worry is that people care about salary much more than they’re willing to let on. It would be hard to pick this up.
One reason why salary is less important than you might first think is that “not caring about salary” is well correlated with “EA-ness” and that’s a trait we value very highly when hiring. So, usually the candidates who care a great deal about salary aren’t the ones we’re most excited to hire.
The point I was making about openness/transparency is that I suspect most people who have been around EA for a while have an ok idea of what (say) CEA employees earn because you can get a very rough idea of that very quickly from scanning any of the budgets. As you correctly pointed out, they’re also just fairly typical for the wider non-profit sector. Any for many engineers those impressions will amount to a 50%-ish pay cut.
Once they have that impression, I’m surprised you don’t think people use salary as a ‘yes or no’ filter. I definitely think people have an internal ‘minimum number’ or ‘maximum pay cut’ and then for everything after that number it becomes one of many considerations. My main concern is that large chunks of the EA meta space might be falling below that threshold for large chunks of dedicated EAs. But I don’t know of any way to settle that theory more definitively, so having stated my impression I’ll leave it at that.
In my experience, some people definitely use it as a yes/no filter, but many don’t.
Also if you’re considering a group of people, you’d expect everyone to have their minimum threshold at different points, which will create a continuum salary vs. talent tradeoff, so you’ll still be able to get a sense of how bad the tradeoff is.
It’s much better (for both prospective employees and the organization) for people not to apply then to apply, spend tons of time interviewing, and then realize the salary is lower than they’re willing to take. So (with some caveats I won’t get into), transparency benefits everyone here.
Short run I agree, but long run it’s not an obvious win if it means 80k, and other similar orgs, never even find out salary is the largest concern (in a hypothetical world that I’m not at all sure exists, but certainly could exist).
As was in fact the issue under discussion.
Respectfully, given the challenges in hiring, worries about ‘churn’, and the general assertion EA is ‘human capital constrained’, the market seems to disagree with you about how good jobs like these are. I won’t belabour which side the outside view would be on.
Of the available factors that may attract applicants most aren’t easily modifiable: how quickly they will grow, the likelihood of them gaining leadership responsibility, network quality and career capital, etc.. Salary is the exception to this, so I’m surprised it is not the first port of call.
Basically agree, but just an extra addition: Raising salary is not as helpful as it first looks for attracting talent, because the marginal people who get attracted by higher salaries are less EA aligned, which makes them less suitable for the role.
Again, you have to consider counterfactuals here. If I could work at either Google or 80K, will I learn as much from working at 80K as I would learn from Google? Probably not. Or if I prefer the sort of learning you get at a smaller company, I would do better to work at a good startup than at 80K.
Like what Gregory said, if you’re claiming that your job is great for software developers, but the actual software developers in this thread disagree with you, maybe you are mistaken about what developers find attractive.
What jobs are you hiring people for where they would otherwise work in finance? I presume they have nothing to do with finance and probably tie into your core mission. Whereas you’re hiring software developers to do software development. So finance people take jobs at 80K to work on developing career strategy, whereas programmers just do programming, which they could do anywhere.