“My default interpretation is that someone doesn’t value the role or my work very much.”
I think this is a pretty unfortunate norm that some EAs have. In practice, it results in EAs by far prioritizing the best-funded areas instead of the most impactful ones. I think the reality is that offered salaries have far more to do with funding availability and perceived counterfactuals of funding. At the end of the day, AMF can absorb more money, and thus there is a higher bar for spending in global health than there is in areas without clear benchmarks.
Can I ask how you settled on the salary range you did? I realize that applicants have some choice in the matter, but CE clearly has a lot of power with norm-setting such that I think it’s appropriate to ask.
Because I agree that it’s bad to overweight funders’ opinions (which is why I self-fund projects I care about), or to punish work with more measurable results. But CE has an opportunity, perhaps unique within EA, to set norms that value this work. Especially when highly-vetted people are using interventions you also vetted, which removes a lot of reasons to expect people to self-fund an experimental stage.
To be fair to CE, their salary scale appears generally consistent with the non-US, non-EA nonprofit sector as a whole. “Norms that value this work” feels a bit strong where it is the rest of EA, rather than CE, that has chosen not to follow the norms of the broader non-profit world. (There could of course be good reasons—or not—for EA’s divergence.)
Joey had written recently about challenges in finding funding for new orgs in years 2-4ish, so my guess is that CE has higher priorities in the funding realm than higher salary norms.
I think “aimed at people with low COL, and we accept that this is prohibitive for many people, including most Americans living in cities and people with dependents” is a pretty reasonable policy. I don’t know if it’s optimal, but CE has much more information and I defer to them on the trade-offs. I do wish that was said explicitly instead of obfuscated, given that ~1/3 of EAF is in the US, presumably more in other HCOL countries, and having kids is not that weird.
(I do think something is off about norming founder salaries against general-non-profit salaries, since founding is so much harder, but someone did say salaries often went up after the first year so that may not matter much).
“Norms that value this work” feels a bit strong where it is the rest of EA, rather than CE, that has chosen not to follow the norms of the broader non-profit world. ”
This is a strong point, be which I think should be given more weight in the “EA salary debate”
“My default interpretation is that someone doesn’t value the role or my work very much.”
I think this is a pretty unfortunate norm that some EAs have. In practice, it results in EAs by far prioritizing the best-funded areas instead of the most impactful ones. I think the reality is that offered salaries have far more to do with funding availability and perceived counterfactuals of funding. At the end of the day, AMF can absorb more money, and thus there is a higher bar for spending in global health than there is in areas without clear benchmarks.
Can I ask how you settled on the salary range you did? I realize that applicants have some choice in the matter, but CE clearly has a lot of power with norm-setting such that I think it’s appropriate to ask.
Because I agree that it’s bad to overweight funders’ opinions (which is why I self-fund projects I care about), or to punish work with more measurable results. But CE has an opportunity, perhaps unique within EA, to set norms that value this work. Especially when highly-vetted people are using interventions you also vetted, which removes a lot of reasons to expect people to self-fund an experimental stage.
To be fair to CE, their salary scale appears generally consistent with the non-US, non-EA nonprofit sector as a whole. “Norms that value this work” feels a bit strong where it is the rest of EA, rather than CE, that has chosen not to follow the norms of the broader non-profit world. (There could of course be good reasons—or not—for EA’s divergence.)
Joey had written recently about challenges in finding funding for new orgs in years 2-4ish, so my guess is that CE has higher priorities in the funding realm than higher salary norms.
I think “aimed at people with low COL, and we accept that this is prohibitive for many people, including most Americans living in cities and people with dependents” is a pretty reasonable policy. I don’t know if it’s optimal, but CE has much more information and I defer to them on the trade-offs. I do wish that was said explicitly instead of obfuscated, given that ~1/3 of EAF is in the US, presumably more in other HCOL countries, and having kids is not that weird.
(I do think something is off about norming founder salaries against general-non-profit salaries, since founding is so much harder, but someone did say salaries often went up after the first year so that may not matter much).
“Norms that value this work” feels a bit strong where it is the rest of EA, rather than CE, that has chosen not to follow the norms of the broader non-profit world. ”
This is a strong point, be which I think should be given more weight in the “EA salary debate”