So my salary would need to be 6* higher (per unit time) than the test task payment for this to be true.
Strictly speaking your salary is the wrong number here. At a minimum, you want to use the cost to the org of your work, which is your salary + other costs of employing you (and Iâve seen estimates of the other costs at 50-100% of salary). In reality, the org of course values your work more highly than the amount they pay to acquire it (otherwise⌠why would they acquire it at that rate) so your value per hour is higher still. Keeping in mind that the pay for work tasks generally isnât that high, it seems pretty plausible to me that the assessment cost is primarily staff time and not money.
I see a dynamic playing out here, where a user has made a falsifiable claim, I have attempted to falsify it, and youâve attempted to deny that the claim is falsifiable at all.
I recognise itâs easy to stumble into these dynamics, but we must acknowledge that this is epistemically destructive.
Strictly speaking your salary is the wrong number here.
I donât think we should dismiss empirical data so quickly when itâs brought to the tableâthat sets a bad precedent.
other costs of employing you (and Iâve seen estimates of the other costs at 50-100% of salary
I can also provide empirical data on this if that is the crux here?
Notice that we are discussing a concrete empirical data point, that represents a 600% difference, while youâve given a theoretical upper bound of 100%. That leaves a 500% delta.
Keeping in mind that the pay for work tasks generally isnât that high
Would you be able to provide any concrete figures here?
In reality, the org of course values your work more highly than the amount they pay to acquire it
I view pointing to opportunity cost in the abstract as essentially an appeal to ignorance.
Not to say that opportunity costs do not exist, but youâve failed to concretise them in a way, and that makes it hard to find the truth here.
I could make similar appeals to ignorance in support of my argument, like the idea the benefit of getting a better candidate is very high, as candidate performance is fat-tailed ect. - but I believe this is similarly epistemically destructive. If I were to make a similar claim, I would likely attempt to concretise it.
I see a dynamic playing out here, where a user has made a falsifiable claim, I have attempted to falsify it, and youâve attempted to deny that the claim is falsifiable at all.
My claim is that the org values your time at a rate that is significantly higher than the rate they pay you for it, because the cost of employment is higher than just salary and because the employer needs to value your work above its cost for them to want to hire you. I donât see how this is unfalsifiable. Mostly you could falsify them by asking orgs how they think about the cost of staff time, though I guess some wouldnât model it as explicitly as this.
They do mean that weâre forced to estimate the relevant threshold instead of having a precise number, but a precise wrong number isnât better than an imprecise (closer to) correct number.
Notice that we are discussing a concrete empirical data point, that represents a 600% difference, while youâve given a theoretical upper bound of 100%. That leaves a 500% delta.
No, if youâre comparing the cost of doing 10 minutes of work at salary X and 60 minutes of work compensated by Y, but I argue that salary X underestimates the cost of your work by a factor of 2, your salary now only needs to be more than 3 times larger than the work trial compensation, not 5 times.
When it comes to concretising âhow much does employee value exceed employee costsâ, it probably varies a lot from organisation to organisation. I think there are several employers in EA who believe that after a point, paying more doesnât really get you better people. This allows their estimates of value of staff time to exceed employee costs by enormous margins, because thereâs no mechanism to couple the two together. I think when these differences are very extreme we should be suspicious if theyâre really true, but as someone who has multiple times had to compare earning to give with direct work, Iâve frequently asked an org âhow much in donations would you need to prefer the money over hiring me?â and for difficult-to-hire roles they frequently say numbers dramatically larger than the salary they are offering.
This means that your argument is not going to be uniform across organisations, but I donât know why youâd expect it to be: surely you werenât saying that no organisation should ever pay for a test task, but only that organisations shouldnât pay for test tasks when doing so increases their costs of assessment to the point where they choose to assess fewer people.
My expectation is that if you asked orgs about this, they would say that they already donât choose to assess fewer people based on cost of paying them. This seems testable, and if true, it seems to me that it makes pretty much all of the other discussion irrelevant.
Strictly speaking your salary is the wrong number here. At a minimum, you want to use the cost to the org of your work, which is your salary + other costs of employing you (and Iâve seen estimates of the other costs at 50-100% of salary). In reality, the org of course values your work more highly than the amount they pay to acquire it (otherwise⌠why would they acquire it at that rate) so your value per hour is higher still. Keeping in mind that the pay for work tasks generally isnât that high, it seems pretty plausible to me that the assessment cost is primarily staff time and not money.
I see a dynamic playing out here, where a user has made a falsifiable claim, I have attempted to falsify it, and youâve attempted to deny that the claim is falsifiable at all.
I recognise itâs easy to stumble into these dynamics, but we must acknowledge that this is epistemically destructive.
I donât think we should dismiss empirical data so quickly when itâs brought to the tableâthat sets a bad precedent.
I can also provide empirical data on this if that is the crux here?
Notice that we are discussing a concrete empirical data point, that represents a 600% difference, while youâve given a theoretical upper bound of 100%. That leaves a 500% delta.
Would you be able to provide any concrete figures here?
I view pointing to opportunity cost in the abstract as essentially an appeal to ignorance.
Not to say that opportunity costs do not exist, but youâve failed to concretise them in a way, and that makes it hard to find the truth here.
I could make similar appeals to ignorance in support of my argument, like the idea the benefit of getting a better candidate is very high, as candidate performance is fat-tailed ect. - but I believe this is similarly epistemically destructive. If I were to make a similar claim, I would likely attempt to concretise it.
My claim is that the org values your time at a rate that is significantly higher than the rate they pay you for it, because the cost of employment is higher than just salary and because the employer needs to value your work above its cost for them to want to hire you. I donât see how this is unfalsifiable. Mostly you could falsify them by asking orgs how they think about the cost of staff time, though I guess some wouldnât model it as explicitly as this.
They do mean that weâre forced to estimate the relevant threshold instead of having a precise number, but a precise wrong number isnât better than an imprecise (closer to) correct number.
No, if youâre comparing the cost of doing 10 minutes of work at salary X and 60 minutes of work compensated by Y, but I argue that salary X underestimates the cost of your work by a factor of 2, your salary now only needs to be more than 3 times larger than the work trial compensation, not 5 times.
When it comes to concretising âhow much does employee value exceed employee costsâ, it probably varies a lot from organisation to organisation. I think there are several employers in EA who believe that after a point, paying more doesnât really get you better people. This allows their estimates of value of staff time to exceed employee costs by enormous margins, because thereâs no mechanism to couple the two together. I think when these differences are very extreme we should be suspicious if theyâre really true, but as someone who has multiple times had to compare earning to give with direct work, Iâve frequently asked an org âhow much in donations would you need to prefer the money over hiring me?â and for difficult-to-hire roles they frequently say numbers dramatically larger than the salary they are offering.
This means that your argument is not going to be uniform across organisations, but I donât know why youâd expect it to be: surely you werenât saying that no organisation should ever pay for a test task, but only that organisations shouldnât pay for test tasks when doing so increases their costs of assessment to the point where they choose to assess fewer people.
My expectation is that if you asked orgs about this, they would say that they already donât choose to assess fewer people based on cost of paying them. This seems testable, and if true, it seems to me that it makes pretty much all of the other discussion irrelevant.