How common do you think it is for an EA organisation to pay above market rate? I think of market rate as what someone might make doing a similar role in the private sector. I can think of one or two EA organisations that might pay above that, but not very many.
Yeah I think this is a good question. I can think of several of the main EA orgs that do this, in particular for roles around operations and research (which aren’t generally paid that well in the private sector, unless you’re doing it at a FAANG company etc). In addition, community-building pays much higher than other non-profit community building (in the absence of much private sector community building).
Some of these comparisons also feel hard because people often do roles at EA orgs they weren’t doing in the private sector e.g. going from consulting or software development to EA research, where you would be earning less than your previous market rate probably but not the market rate for your new job.
There’s one example comparison here and to clarify I think this is most true for more meta/longtermist organisations, as salaries within animal welfare (for example) are still quite low IMO. I can think of 3-4 different roles within the past 2 months that pay what is above market rate (in my opinion), some of which I’ll list below:
80K paying £58,400 for an operations specialist with one year of experience doing ops. For context, a friend of mine did project management for 2-3 years at a City law firm and was making £40-50k
Rethink Priorities paying $65,000 or £52k for a research assistant. This definitely feels higher than academic research assistants and probably private sector ones too (although not sure what a good reference class is)
Open Phil paying $100,000+ for an operations associate.
CEA expression of interest for a people operations specialist (sounds like a somewhat junior role, I could be wrong) - salary of £56-68,000. Similar to the 80K private sector comparison, I think market rate for this would be closer to £40k for a junior role.
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.
Speaking for Rethink Priorities, I’d just like to add that benchmarking to market rates is just one part of how we set compensation, and benchmarking to academia is just one part of how we might benchmark to market rates.
In general, academic salaries are notoriously low and I think this is harmful for building long-term relationships with talent that let them afford a life that we want them to be able to live. Also we want to be able to attract the top-tier of research assistant and a higher salary helps with that.
I totally agree—like I said above, I don’t think paying above market rate is necessarily erroneous, but I was just responding to Khorton’s question of how many EA orgs actually paid above market rate. And as you point out, attracting top talent to tackle important research questions is very important and I definitely agree that this is main perk of paying higher salaries.
In this case of research, I also agree! Academic salaries are far too low and benchmarking to academia isn’t even necessarily the best reference class (as one could potentially do research in the private sector and get paid much more).
There’s one example comparison here and to clarify I think this is most true for more meta/longtermist organisations, as salaries within animal welfare (for example) are still quite low IMO[...] Rethink Priorities
Please note that Rethink Priorities, where I work, has the same salary band across cause areas.
Ah yes that’s definitely fair, sorry if I was misrepresenting RP! I wasn’t referring to intra-organisation when I made that comment, but I was thinking more across organisations like The Humane League / ACE vs 80K/CEA.
How common do you think it is for an EA organisation to pay above market rate? I think of market rate as what someone might make doing a similar role in the private sector. I can think of one or two EA organisations that might pay above that, but not very many.
Yeah I think this is a good question. I can think of several of the main EA orgs that do this, in particular for roles around operations and research (which aren’t generally paid that well in the private sector, unless you’re doing it at a FAANG company etc). In addition, community-building pays much higher than other non-profit community building (in the absence of much private sector community building).
Some of these comparisons also feel hard because people often do roles at EA orgs they weren’t doing in the private sector e.g. going from consulting or software development to EA research, where you would be earning less than your previous market rate probably but not the market rate for your new job.
There’s one example comparison here and to clarify I think this is most true for more meta/longtermist organisations, as salaries within animal welfare (for example) are still quite low IMO. I can think of 3-4 different roles within the past 2 months that pay what is above market rate (in my opinion), some of which I’ll list below:
80K paying £58,400 for an operations specialist with one year of experience doing ops. For context, a friend of mine did project management for 2-3 years at a City law firm and was making £40-50k
Rethink Priorities paying $65,000 or £52k for a research assistant. This definitely feels higher than academic research assistants and probably private sector ones too (although not sure what a good reference class is)
Open Phil paying $100,000+ for an operations associate.
CEA expression of interest for a people operations specialist (sounds like a somewhat junior role, I could be wrong) - salary of £56-68,000. Similar to the 80K private sector comparison, I think market rate for this would be closer to £40k for a junior role.
As per Cynwit’s comment: Office Manager—New York EA Hub : $85,000 - $100,000 and Office Manager Salaries in New York from Glassdoor: ~$55,000
(not implying these are bad calls, but that I think they’re above market rate)
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.
Speaking for Rethink Priorities, I’d just like to add that benchmarking to market rates is just one part of how we set compensation, and benchmarking to academia is just one part of how we might benchmark to market rates.
In general, academic salaries are notoriously low and I think this is harmful for building long-term relationships with talent that let them afford a life that we want them to be able to live. Also we want to be able to attract the top-tier of research assistant and a higher salary helps with that.
I totally agree—like I said above, I don’t think paying above market rate is necessarily erroneous, but I was just responding to Khorton’s question of how many EA orgs actually paid above market rate. And as you point out, attracting top talent to tackle important research questions is very important and I definitely agree that this is main perk of paying higher salaries.
In this case of research, I also agree! Academic salaries are far too low and benchmarking to academia isn’t even necessarily the best reference class (as one could potentially do research in the private sector and get paid much more).
Please note that Rethink Priorities, where I work, has the same salary band across cause areas.
Ah yes that’s definitely fair, sorry if I was misrepresenting RP! I wasn’t referring to intra-organisation when I made that comment, but I was thinking more across organisations like The Humane League / ACE vs 80K/CEA.
Thanks, I strongly upvoted this comment because of the list of detailed examples.