âIn our own hiring, we havenât often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong).â
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 arenât willing to earn less than $60k, do you have any way you would expect to find out about that fact? Iâd sort of expect them to just not apply in the first place because they know they wonât 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 itâs not the primary concern.
Thatâs a deliberately extreme set of numbers but hopefully demonstrates the point Iâm trying to make.
Itâs definitely a worry. The main way Iâm 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 weâll never find out, but I donât think thatâs the case. I donât think people use salary as a âyes or noâ filter (rather itâs 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 arenât aware of what the salaries are.
Another worry is that people care about salary much more than theyâre 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 ânot caring about salaryâ is well correlated with âEA-nessâ and thatâs a trait we value very highly when hiring. So, usually the candidates who care a great deal about salary arenât the ones weâre most excited to hire.
The point I was making about openness/âtransparency 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, theyâre 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, Iâm surprised you donât think people use salary as a âyes or noâ filter. I definitely think people have an internal âminimum numberâ or âmaximum pay cutâ 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 donât know of any way to settle that theory more definitively, so having stated my impression Iâll leave it at that.
In my experience, some people definitely use it as a yes/âno filter, but many donât.
Also if youâre considering a group of people, youâd expect everyone to have their minimum threshold at different points, which will create a continuum salary vs. talent tradeoff, so youâll 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)
Itâs 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 theyâre willing to take. So (with some caveats I wonât get into), transparency benefits everyone here.
Short run I agree, but long run itâs 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 Iâm not at all sure exists, but certainly could exist).
âIn our own hiring, we havenât often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong).â
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 arenât willing to earn less than $60k, do you have any way you would expect to find out about that fact? Iâd sort of expect them to just not apply in the first place because they know they wonât 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 itâs not the primary concern.
Thatâs a deliberately extreme set of numbers but hopefully demonstrates the point Iâm trying to make.
Itâs definitely a worry. The main way Iâm 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 weâll never find out, but I donât think thatâs the case. I donât think people use salary as a âyes or noâ filter (rather itâs 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 arenât aware of what the salaries are.
Another worry is that people care about salary much more than theyâre 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 ânot caring about salaryâ is well correlated with âEA-nessâ and thatâs a trait we value very highly when hiring. So, usually the candidates who care a great deal about salary arenât the ones weâre most excited to hire.
The point I was making about openness/âtransparency 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, theyâre 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, Iâm surprised you donât think people use salary as a âyes or noâ filter. I definitely think people have an internal âminimum numberâ or âmaximum pay cutâ 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 donât know of any way to settle that theory more definitively, so having stated my impression Iâll leave it at that.
In my experience, some people definitely use it as a yes/âno filter, but many donât.
Also if youâre considering a group of people, youâd expect everyone to have their minimum threshold at different points, which will create a continuum salary vs. talent tradeoff, so youâll still be able to get a sense of how bad the tradeoff is.
Itâs 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 theyâre willing to take. So (with some caveats I wonât get into), transparency benefits everyone here.
Short run I agree, but long run itâs 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 Iâm not at all sure exists, but certainly could exist).
As was in fact the issue under discussion.