When you have a job X, then looking at other jobs with the title X is a heuristic for knowing the value of the skills involved. But this heuristic breaks down in the cases you mention. The skillset required for community-building in EA is very different from regular non-profit community-building. In operations roles, EA orgs prefer to hire people who are unusually engaged on various intellectual questions in a way that is rare in operations staff at large, so that they fit with the culture, can get promoted, and so on.
There are better ways to analyse the question:
Look at people’s career planning documents. I do a lot of this. Usually, people have comparably high-paying options outside of EA as inside it. The EA job offers more impact, for slightly less pay, which seems roughly as it should be!
Look at hiring. I’ve done a fair bit of this too. Often, the folks you actually want to hire have very solid and lucrative alternative options, like FAANG, consulting, finance roles.
Compare the salaries of ETG EAs with non-ETG EAs that are otherwise as similar as possible, e.g. a quant researcher at Jane Street vs one at Redwood Research. Usually, I think the ETG EAs have more disposable income, even after their donations. (I don’t see this as a bad thing necessarily, just as a reality.)
Compare what EAs are able to earn in startups, to what they earn at EA orgs. The median is probably similar, but the mean is way higher in startups.
All these analyses point in the same direction. Although it’s a popular idea that EA orgs are paying unusually much for staff’s skillsets, it’s simply false.
Yeah this is a useful way of thinking about this issue of market rate so thanks for this! I guess I think people having the ability to earn more in non-EA orgs relative to EA roles is true for some people, and potentially most people, but also think it’s context dependent.
For example, I’ve spoken with a reasonable number of early career EAs (in the UK) for whom working at EA orgs is actually probably the highest paying options available to them (or very close), relative to what they could reasonably get hired for. So whilst I think it’s true for some EAs that EA jobs offer less* pay relative to their other options, I don’t think it’s universal. I can imagine you might agree so the question might be—how much of the community does it represent? and is it uniform? So maybe to clarify, I think that EA orgs are paying more than I would expect for certain skillsets, e.g. junior-ish ops people, rather than across the board.
I think the reasoning is sound. One caveat on the specific numbers/phrasing:
So whilst I think it’s true for some EAs that EA jobs offer slightly less pay [emphasis mine] relative to their other options
To be clear, many of us originally took >>70% pay cuts to do impactful work, including at EA orgs. EA jobs pay more now, but I imagine being paid <50% of what you’d otherwise earn elsewhere is still pretty normal for a fair number of people in meta and longtermist roles.
Thanks for the correction—I’ll edit this in the comment above as I agree my phrasing was too weak. Apologies as I didn’t mean to underplay the significance of the pay cut and financial sacrifice yourself and others took—I think it’s substantial (and inspiring).
I don’t know how much credit/inspiration this should really give people. As you note, the other conditions for EA org work is often better than external jobs (though this is far from universal). And as you allude to in your post, there are large quality of life improvements from working on something that genuinely aligns with my values. At least naively, for many people (myself included) it is selfishly worth quite a large salary cut to do this. Many people both in and outside of EA also take large salary cuts to work in government and academia as well, sometimes with less direct alignment with their values, and often with worse direct working conditions.
I agree it’s reasonable to ask where (if anywhere) EA is paying too much, and that UK EA has been offering high salaries to junior ops talent. But even then, there are some good reasons for it, so it’s not obvious to me that this is excessive.
One hypothesis would be that some EA orgs are in-general overpaying junior staff, relative to executive staff, due to being “nice”. But that, really, is pure speculation.
I agree with the rest of your comparisons but I think this one is suspect:
Compare the salaries of ETG EAs with non-ETG EAs that are otherwise as similar as possible, e.g. a quant researcher at Jane Street vs one at Redwood Research. Usually, I think the ETG EAs earn more.
“Pure” ETG positions are optimized for earning potential, so we should expect them to be systematically more highly paid than other options.
When you have a job X, then looking at other jobs with the title X is a heuristic for knowing the value of the skills involved. But this heuristic breaks down in the cases you mention. The skillset required for community-building in EA is very different from regular non-profit community-building. In operations roles, EA orgs prefer to hire people who are unusually engaged on various intellectual questions in a way that is rare in operations staff at large, so that they fit with the culture, can get promoted, and so on.
There are better ways to analyse the question:
Look at people’s career planning documents. I do a lot of this. Usually, people have comparably high-paying options outside of EA as inside it. The EA job offers more impact, for slightly less pay, which seems roughly as it should be!
Look at hiring. I’ve done a fair bit of this too. Often, the folks you actually want to hire have very solid and lucrative alternative options, like FAANG, consulting, finance roles.
Compare the salaries of ETG EAs with non-ETG EAs that are otherwise as similar as possible, e.g. a quant researcher at Jane Street vs one at Redwood Research. Usually, I think the ETG EAs have more disposable income, even after their donations. (I don’t see this as a bad thing necessarily, just as a reality.)
Compare what EAs are able to earn in startups, to what they earn at EA orgs. The median is probably similar, but the mean is way higher in startups.
All these analyses point in the same direction. Although it’s a popular idea that EA orgs are paying unusually much for staff’s skillsets, it’s simply false.
Yeah this is a useful way of thinking about this issue of market rate so thanks for this! I guess I think people having the ability to earn more in non-EA orgs relative to EA roles is true for some people, and potentially most people, but also think it’s context dependent.
For example, I’ve spoken with a reasonable number of early career EAs (in the UK) for whom working at EA orgs is actually probably the highest paying options available to them (or very close), relative to what they could reasonably get hired for. So whilst I think it’s true for some EAs that EA jobs offer less* pay relative to their other options, I don’t think it’s universal. I can imagine you might agree so the question might be—how much of the community does it represent? and is it uniform? So maybe to clarify, I think that EA orgs are paying more than I would expect for certain skillsets, e.g. junior-ish ops people, rather than across the board.
*edited due to comment below
I think the reasoning is sound. One caveat on the specific numbers/phrasing:
To be clear, many of us originally took >>70% pay cuts to do impactful work, including at EA orgs. EA jobs pay more now, but I imagine being paid <50% of what you’d otherwise earn elsewhere is still pretty normal for a fair number of people in meta and longtermist roles.
Thanks for the correction—I’ll edit this in the comment above as I agree my phrasing was too weak. Apologies as I didn’t mean to underplay the significance of the pay cut and financial sacrifice yourself and others took—I think it’s substantial (and inspiring).
I don’t know how much credit/inspiration this should really give people. As you note, the other conditions for EA org work is often better than external jobs (though this is far from universal). And as you allude to in your post, there are large quality of life improvements from working on something that genuinely aligns with my values. At least naively, for many people (myself included) it is selfishly worth quite a large salary cut to do this. Many people both in and outside of EA also take large salary cuts to work in government and academia as well, sometimes with less direct alignment with their values, and often with worse direct working conditions.
I agree it’s reasonable to ask where (if anywhere) EA is paying too much, and that UK EA has been offering high salaries to junior ops talent. But even then, there are some good reasons for it, so it’s not obvious to me that this is excessive.
One hypothesis would be that some EA orgs are in-general overpaying junior staff, relative to executive staff, due to being “nice”. But that, really, is pure speculation.
I agree with the rest of your comparisons but I think this one is suspect:
“Pure” ETG positions are optimized for earning potential, so we should expect them to be systematically more highly paid than other options.