As someone who spends a fair amount of time on job boards out of curiosity, while I can’t speak to technical CS roles, this is definitely true for a lot entry-level research and operations roles and while I agree with your analysis of the implications, I think this may actually be a good thing. Outside of paying workers more being a good thing on principle, there are two main reasons why I think so:
When people hear that EA orgs pay more than market value, some of them may end up going into EA to get these roles. I personally know at least two people who enrolled in the online fellowship program because of the high wages in the EA job market. While there will probably be some people who end up LARPing EAness, some will become actual EAs. I personally think think the amount of resources expended on community building is a bigger issue in terms of effectiveness and optics, and that this may be a good organic way to get some people interested in EA.
More importantly, I think the focus on EA knowledge, experience and alignment in a lot of these roles is misguided. These things are very important for some roles (policy setting for orgs, community building, etc) somewhat important but not necessary for others (research roles come to mind; good researchers should be able to internalize and apply a framework to their work and work-related decisionmaking even if they were not previously aware of it or buy into it), and not important at all for some (like office management or strictly boots on the ground operations work). For the latter two categories, the idea that EA orgs should employ EA is most likely a significant a significant contributor to talent bottlenecks. If these high salaries were used to hire the best people regardless of their EA status would both just get the best people and help give some of the best non-EA people deep exposure to EA ideas and principles. Some screening for a degree of cultural fit for things like openness, interest in the work etc. would probably be enough to ensure extreme misalignment does not happen.
I realize that the goal to eventually promote up from the inside into leadership goals does present an important caveat to the second point; I think that that can be solved fairly easily by either a) not doing that if necessary, which is not great but not terrible, or b) transparently emphasizing that cultural fit with the principles guiding the mission of the org in the context of work is important in these decision is important to this during hiring and promotion and allowing employees to engage with and immerse themselves in these principles as part of their work.
As someone who spends a fair amount of time on job boards out of curiosity, while I can’t speak to technical CS roles, this is definitely true for a lot entry-level research and operations roles and while I agree with your analysis of the implications, I think this may actually be a good thing. Outside of paying workers more being a good thing on principle, there are two main reasons why I think so:
When people hear that EA orgs pay more than market value, some of them may end up going into EA to get these roles. I personally know at least two people who enrolled in the online fellowship program because of the high wages in the EA job market. While there will probably be some people who end up LARPing EAness, some will become actual EAs. I personally think think the amount of resources expended on community building is a bigger issue in terms of effectiveness and optics, and that this may be a good organic way to get some people interested in EA.
More importantly, I think the focus on EA knowledge, experience and alignment in a lot of these roles is misguided. These things are very important for some roles (policy setting for orgs, community building, etc) somewhat important but not necessary for others (research roles come to mind; good researchers should be able to internalize and apply a framework to their work and work-related decisionmaking even if they were not previously aware of it or buy into it), and not important at all for some (like office management or strictly boots on the ground operations work). For the latter two categories, the idea that EA orgs should employ EA is most likely a significant a significant contributor to talent bottlenecks. If these high salaries were used to hire the best people regardless of their EA status would both just get the best people and help give some of the best non-EA people deep exposure to EA ideas and principles. Some screening for a degree of cultural fit for things like openness, interest in the work etc. would probably be enough to ensure extreme misalignment does not happen.
I realize that the goal to eventually promote up from the inside into leadership goals does present an important caveat to the second point; I think that that can be solved fairly easily by either a) not doing that if necessary, which is not great but not terrible, or b) transparently emphasizing that cultural fit with the principles guiding the mission of the org in the context of work is important in these decision is important to this during hiring and promotion and allowing employees to engage with and immerse themselves in these principles as part of their work.