I wanted to stay very far on the right side of having all our activities clearly relate to our charitable purpose. I know cash indirectly achieves this, but it leaves more room for interpretation, has some arguable optics problems, and potentially leads to unexpected reward hacking. The so far lackluster reception to the program is solid evidence against the latter two concerns.
I think a general career grant would be better and will consider changing it to that. Thanks for raising this question and getting me there!
I thought it might be something like this, and FWIW am pretty sympathetic to this kind of concern :) I’m on board with being over-cautious about (e.g.) both corruption and the appearance of corruption.
I’m not dying on the hill of “all incentives should be cash”, but it sure is difficult to come up with other incentives that are universally desirable.
Of course, the other optics / reward-hacking evasion possibility is to offer absolutely trivial incentives. Give me a bronze pin for 1 referral, a silver pin for 5 referrals, and a gold pin for 20 :) This seems likely to work best if you think that “people who will bring us great referrals” and “people who are already on board with helping 80k being a good and rewarding thing” are heavily overlapping, and works less well if you’re particularly trying to reach people further outside of the usual 80k audience who wouldn’t otherwise be interested or involved.
To that last point, I’m particularly excited about fans of 80k being referrers for talented people with very little context. If you think a classmate/colleague is incredibly capable, but you don’t back yourself to have a super productive conversation about impactful work with them, outsource that to us!
I wanted to stay very far on the right side of having all our activities clearly relate to our charitable purpose. I know cash indirectly achieves this, but it leaves more room for interpretation, has some arguable optics problems, and potentially leads to unexpected reward hacking. The so far lackluster reception to the program is solid evidence against the latter two concerns.
I think a general career grant would be better and will consider changing it to that. Thanks for raising this question and getting me there!
I thought it might be something like this, and FWIW am pretty sympathetic to this kind of concern :) I’m on board with being over-cautious about (e.g.) both corruption and the appearance of corruption.
I’m not dying on the hill of “all incentives should be cash”, but it sure is difficult to come up with other incentives that are universally desirable.
Of course, the other optics / reward-hacking evasion possibility is to offer absolutely trivial incentives. Give me a bronze pin for 1 referral, a silver pin for 5 referrals, and a gold pin for 20 :) This seems likely to work best if you think that “people who will bring us great referrals” and “people who are already on board with helping 80k being a good and rewarding thing” are heavily overlapping, and works less well if you’re particularly trying to reach people further outside of the usual 80k audience who wouldn’t otherwise be interested or involved.
To that last point, I’m particularly excited about fans of 80k being referrers for talented people with very little context. If you think a classmate/colleague is incredibly capable, but you don’t back yourself to have a super productive conversation about impactful work with them, outsource that to us!