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 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.
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 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.