Lots of my favorite EA people seem to think this is a good idea, so I’ll provide a dissenting view: job security can be costly in hard-to-spot ways.
I notice that the places that provide the most job security are also the least productive per-person (think govt jobs, tenured professors, big tech companies). The typical explanation goes like “a competitive ecosystem, including the ability for upstarts to come in and senior folks to get fired, leads to better services provided by the competitors”
I think respondents on the EA Forum may think “oh of course I’d love to get money for 3 years instead of 1”. But y’all are pretty skewed in terms of response bias—if a funder has $300k and give that all to the senior EA person for 3 years, they are passing up on the chance to fund other potentially better upstarts for years 2 & 3.
Depending on which specific funder you’re talking about, they don’t actually have years of funding in the bank! Afaict, most funders (such as the LTFF and Manifund) get funds to disburse over the next year, and in fact get chastised by their donors if they seem to be holding on to funds for longer than that. Donors themselves don’t have years of foresight into how they would like to be spending their money (eg I’ve personally shifted my allocation from GHD to longtermist in-network opportunities)
One idea I’ve been toying with instead is the concept of default-recurring month-to-month grants, where a funder and grantee roughly outline what deliverables might look like, and then the grantee provides updates on what they’ve been up to. I generally like the concept of more feedback mechanisms/lower-stress touchpoints between funders and grantees than a full “grant application round”. To borrow a saying from agile software development: “if it hurts, do it more often”.
I would be surprised if people on freelancer marketplaces are exceptionally productive—I would guess they end up spending a lot more of their time trying to get jobs than actually doing the jobs.
I do think freelancers spend significant amounts of time on job searching, but I’m not sure that’s evidence for “low productivity”. Productivity isn’t a function of total hours worked but rather of output delivered. The one time I engaged a designer on a freelancer marketplace, I got decent results exceptionally quickly. Another “freelancer marketplace” I make heavy use of is uber, which provides good customer experiences.
Of course, there’s a question of whether such marketplaces are good for the freelancers themselves—I tend to think so (eg that the existence of uber is better for drivers than the previous taxi medallion system) but freelancing is not a good fit for many folks.
I notice that the places that provide the most job security are also the least productive per-person (think govt jobs, tenured professors, big tech companies). The typical explanation goes like “a competitive ecosystem, including the ability for upstarts to come in and senior folks to get fired, leads to better services provided by the competitors
Do you have evidence for this? Because there is lots of evidence to the contrary—suggesting that job insecurity negatively impacts people’s productivity as well as their physical, and mental health.[1][2][3].
I think respondents on the EA Forum may think “oh of course I’d love to get money for 3 years instead of 1”. But y’all are pretty skewed in terms of response bias—if a funder has $300k and give that all to the senior EA person for 3 years, they are passing up on the chance to fund other potentially better upstarts for years 2 & 3.
This goes both ways—yes, there is a chance to fund other potential better upstarts, but by only offering short-term grants, funders also miss out on applicants who want/need more security (eg. competitive candidates who prefer more secure options, parents, people supporting family members, people with big mortgages, etc).
Depending on which specific funder you’re talking about, they don’t actually have years of funding in the bank! Afaict, most funders (such as the LTFF and Manifund) get funds to disburse over the next year, and in fact get chastised by their donors if they seem to be holding on to funds for longer than that. Donors themselves don’t have years of foresight into how they would like to be spending their money (eg I’ve personally shifted my allocation from GHD to long-termist in-network opportunities)
I think there are options here that would help both funders and individuals. For example, longer grants could be given with a condition that either party can give a certain amount of notice to end the agreement (typical in many US jobs), and many funders could re-structure to allow for longer grants/a different structure for grants if they wanted to. As long as these changes were well-communicated with donors, I don’t see why we would be stuck to a 1-year cycle.
My experience: As someone who has been funded by grants in the past, job security was a huge reason for me transitioning away from this. It’s also a complaint I’ve heard frequently from other grantees, and something that not everyone can even afford to do in the first place. I’m not implying that donors need to hire people or keep them on indefinitely, but even providing grants for 2 or more years at a time would be a huge improvement to the 1-year status quo.
FWIW I can imagine being really happy under this system. Contingent on grantmaker/supervisor quality of course, and since those already seem to be seriously bottlenecked this doesn’t feel like an easy solution to me. But I’d love to see it work out.
I’m focused on how the best altruistic workers should be treated, and if you think that giving them job insecurity would create good incentives, I don’t agree. We need the best altruistic workers to be rewarded not just better than the less productive altruists, but also better than those pursuing non-altruistic endeavours. It would be hard to achieve this if they do not have job security.
I’m sympathetic to treating good altruistic workers well; I generally advocate for a norm of much higher salaries than is typically provided. I don’t think job insecurity per se is what I’m after per se, but rather allowing funders to fund the best altruistic workers next year, rather than being locked into their current allocations for 3 years.
The default in the for profit sector in the US is not multi-year guaranteed contracts but rather at will employment, where workers may leave a job or be fired for basically any reason. It may seem harsh in comparison to norms in other countries (eg the EU or Japan) but I also believe it leads to more productive allocation of workers to jobs.
Remember that effective altruism exists not to serve its workers, but rather to effectively help those in need (people in developing countries, suffering animals, people in the future!) There’s instrumental benefits in treating EA workers well in terms of morale, fairness, and ability to recruit, but keep in mind the tradeoffs of less effective allocation schemes.
I think there’s a big difference between “you are an at will employee, and we can fire you on two weeks notice, but the default is you will stay with us indefinitely” and “you have a one year contract and can re-apply at the end”. Legally the latter gives the worker 50 extra weeks of security, but in practice the former seems to be preferable to many people.
I agree that default employment seems preferred by most fulltime workers, and that’s why I’m interested in the concept of “default-recurring monthly grants”.
I will note that this employment structure is not the typical arrangement among founders trying to launch a startup, though. A broad class of grants in EA are “work on this thing and maybe turn it into a new research org”, and the equivalent funding norms in the tech sector at least are not “employment” but “apply for incubators, try to raise funding”.
For EAs trying to do research… academia is the typical model for research but I also think academia is extremely inefficient, so copying the payment model doesn’t seem like a recipe for success. FROs are maybe the closest thing I can think of to “multi-year stable grants”—but there’s only like 3 of those in existence and it’s very early to say if they produce good outcomes.
Yes, because when you are at at will employee, the chance that you will still have income in n years tends to be higher than if you had to apply to renew a contract, and you don’t need to think about that application. People are typically angry if asked to reapply for their own job, because it implies that their employer might want to terminate them.
Lots of my favorite EA people seem to think this is a good idea, so I’ll provide a dissenting view: job security can be costly in hard-to-spot ways.
I notice that the places that provide the most job security are also the least productive per-person (think govt jobs, tenured professors, big tech companies). The typical explanation goes like “a competitive ecosystem, including the ability for upstarts to come in and senior folks to get fired, leads to better services provided by the competitors”
I think respondents on the EA Forum may think “oh of course I’d love to get money for 3 years instead of 1”. But y’all are pretty skewed in terms of response bias—if a funder has $300k and give that all to the senior EA person for 3 years, they are passing up on the chance to fund other potentially better upstarts for years 2 & 3.
Depending on which specific funder you’re talking about, they don’t actually have years of funding in the bank! Afaict, most funders (such as the LTFF and Manifund) get funds to disburse over the next year, and in fact get chastised by their donors if they seem to be holding on to funds for longer than that. Donors themselves don’t have years of foresight into how they would like to be spending their money (eg I’ve personally shifted my allocation from GHD to longtermist in-network opportunities)
OpenPhil may be the exception here, but it’s also unclear to me if the commitment to stay in an area for multiple years is good—cf Nuno’s critique of OpenPhils’s criminal justice reform
One idea I’ve been toying with instead is the concept of default-recurring month-to-month grants, where a funder and grantee roughly outline what deliverables might look like, and then the grantee provides updates on what they’ve been up to. I generally like the concept of more feedback mechanisms/lower-stress touchpoints between funders and grantees than a full “grant application round”. To borrow a saying from agile software development: “if it hurts, do it more often”.
I would be surprised if people on freelancer marketplaces are exceptionally productive—I would guess they end up spending a lot more of their time trying to get jobs than actually doing the jobs.
I do think freelancers spend significant amounts of time on job searching, but I’m not sure that’s evidence for “low productivity”. Productivity isn’t a function of total hours worked but rather of output delivered. The one time I engaged a designer on a freelancer marketplace, I got decent results exceptionally quickly. Another “freelancer marketplace” I make heavy use of is uber, which provides good customer experiences.
Of course, there’s a question of whether such marketplaces are good for the freelancers themselves—I tend to think so (eg that the existence of uber is better for drivers than the previous taxi medallion system) but freelancing is not a good fit for many folks.
Do you have evidence for this? Because there is lots of evidence to the contrary—suggesting that job insecurity negatively impacts people’s productivity as well as their physical, and mental health.[1][2][3].
This goes both ways—yes, there is a chance to fund other potential better upstarts, but by only offering short-term grants, funders also miss out on applicants who want/need more security (eg. competitive candidates who prefer more secure options, parents, people supporting family members, people with big mortgages, etc).
I think there are options here that would help both funders and individuals. For example, longer grants could be given with a condition that either party can give a certain amount of notice to end the agreement (typical in many US jobs), and many funders could re-structure to allow for longer grants/a different structure for grants if they wanted to. As long as these changes were well-communicated with donors, I don’t see why we would be stuck to a 1-year cycle.
My experience: As someone who has been funded by grants in the past, job security was a huge reason for me transitioning away from this. It’s also a complaint I’ve heard frequently from other grantees, and something that not everyone can even afford to do in the first place. I’m not implying that donors need to hire people or keep them on indefinitely, but even providing grants for 2 or more years at a time would be a huge improvement to the 1-year status quo.
FWIW I can imagine being really happy under this system. Contingent on grantmaker/supervisor quality of course, and since those already seem to be seriously bottlenecked this doesn’t feel like an easy solution to me. But I’d love to see it work out.
I’m focused on how the best altruistic workers should be treated, and if you think that giving them job insecurity would create good incentives, I don’t agree. We need the best altruistic workers to be rewarded not just better than the less productive altruists, but also better than those pursuing non-altruistic endeavours. It would be hard to achieve this if they do not have job security.
I’m sympathetic to treating good altruistic workers well; I generally advocate for a norm of much higher salaries than is typically provided. I don’t think job insecurity per se is what I’m after per se, but rather allowing funders to fund the best altruistic workers next year, rather than being locked into their current allocations for 3 years.
The default in the for profit sector in the US is not multi-year guaranteed contracts but rather at will employment, where workers may leave a job or be fired for basically any reason. It may seem harsh in comparison to norms in other countries (eg the EU or Japan) but I also believe it leads to more productive allocation of workers to jobs.
Remember that effective altruism exists not to serve its workers, but rather to effectively help those in need (people in developing countries, suffering animals, people in the future!) There’s instrumental benefits in treating EA workers well in terms of morale, fairness, and ability to recruit, but keep in mind the tradeoffs of less effective allocation schemes.
I think there’s a big difference between “you are an at will employee, and we can fire you on two weeks notice, but the default is you will stay with us indefinitely” and “you have a one year contract and can re-apply at the end”. Legally the latter gives the worker 50 extra weeks of security, but in practice the former seems to be preferable to many people.
I agree that default employment seems preferred by most fulltime workers, and that’s why I’m interested in the concept of “default-recurring monthly grants”.
I will note that this employment structure is not the typical arrangement among founders trying to launch a startup, though. A broad class of grants in EA are “work on this thing and maybe turn it into a new research org”, and the equivalent funding norms in the tech sector at least are not “employment” but “apply for incubators, try to raise funding”.
For EAs trying to do research… academia is the typical model for research but I also think academia is extremely inefficient, so copying the payment model doesn’t seem like a recipe for success. FROs are maybe the closest thing I can think of to “multi-year stable grants”—but there’s only like 3 of those in existence and it’s very early to say if they produce good outcomes.
What does FRO stand for?
“Focused Research Org”
Yes, because when you are at at will employee, the chance that you will still have income in n years tends to be higher than if you had to apply to renew a contract, and you don’t need to think about that application. People are typically angry if asked to reapply for their own job, because it implies that their employer might want to terminate them.