I’ve heard that in the past 80k has sometimes reached out to employees at EA organizations asking if they’d like to leave and work for 80k, including in instances in which those organizations felt that it would be highly costly to lose that employee.
I now see that Habiba has joined 80k, and I had previously heard that it was a major win for FHI when she was able to get her role at Oxford. Was it costly to FHI for her to leave, and if so, how do you balance poaching employees for 80k with trying to help and fill those same roles at those organizations?
Hi anon, Michelle here. I work for 80k. I think 80k probably shouldn’t have a discussion about the career decisions of a particular staff member on the Forum, but I’m happy to share some thoughts on this general issue.
First off, I hate that our hiring sometimes makes things difficult for others, when we’re all aiming at the same thing and the stakes are so high. As you point out, this is an especially tricky issue for 80k because people are in the habit of listening to our career advice and because our whole mission is to fill roles at other organisations.
I’ll try to address a few different things your question might be gesturing at.
One issue is the fact that hiring an employee away from a high-impact org is in some ways a step away from our mission. The way I think about this is similar to how I think about 80k hiring somebody who doesn’t work at an EA org but is considering other high impact offers in addition to 80k’s. When a potential hire is considering their impact, they have to compare the value of filling a high-impact role themselves against the value of the roles they could cause to be filled while working at 80k. Someone considering leaving another EA org for 80k is in a similar position, just with the added transition cost from leaving their current role.
Another issue is that when we reach out to people, they might be influenced by the fact that we’re a career advising organisation and people are used to relying on our advice. They may interpret our interest in hiring them as us expressing a well-researched view that their impact would be higher working for us. I’d hate for this to happen and we’ve had many internal discussions about how to reduce its likelihood. Many staff try to frequently flag their own bias and uncertainty about the best option, avoid comparing the impact of working at 80k to their current or prospective job (especially if the potential hire hasn’t explicitly asked for this), and to be explicit about when we’re recruiting v. giving career advice.
Lastly, there’s a question about whether EA orgs more generally should not reach out to potential hires who are already working at high impact organisations.
My views on this have a lot to do with my own experience working at EA orgs.
While most of 80k’s employees did not previously work at other EA organisations, I’m one of the exceptions. Before 80k I spent ~6 years working for Giving What We Can and the Global Priorities Institute. While I was working at GPI, 80k asked me whether I knew any good candidates for an advising position, and I asked if I could apply. The job has been an incredible fit for me. While I don’t regret the previous jobs I’ve had, I think it’s a shame nobody ever suggested that I become an advisor at 80k earlier on. I think I can do more good in this role than in my last one because it’s so much better suited to me.
My experience makes me feel fairly strongly that people at EA orgs should periodically consider different options. If orgs who’d like to hire someone never reach out, that person will never learn what those options are. It’s in that spirit that I offered Habiba a role.
Greater transparency in the community about the job opportunities people have will allow people to find jobs which suit them better and they enjoy more. Deciding to leave your role at an EA org because you think a different role would have more impact or because you’d be happier elsewhere can be a really difficult decision. But I think it should be the employee’s decision and we shouldn’t have a norm that prevents them from finding out they even had the option. I do think that organisational stability is really important, but I think we should probably trust staff at EA orgs to incorporate this into their decision making.
I think its perfectly fine for EA orgs to be in competition for talent, if anything it’s a good thing.
It should not be 80k’s job to decide the counterfactuals from poaching great people from other organizations. That should be solely the job of the people they poach.
Presumably the people they hire do a thorough evaluation of the harm they’ll cause by leaving their former organization and the good they’ll do by joining a new one. If the calculation doesn’t look net positive they are not going to do it.
I’m unsure why this got downvoted, but I strongly agree with the sentiment in the parent. Although I understand the impulse of “We’re all roughly on the same team here, so we can try and sculpt something better than the typically competitive/adversarial relationships between firms, or employers and employees”, I think this is apt to mislead one into ideas which are typically economically short-sighted, often morally objectionable, and occasionally legally dubious.
In the extreme case, it’s obviously unacceptable for Org X to not hire candidate A (their best applicant), because they believe its better they stay at Org Y. Not only (per the parent) that A is probably a better judge of where they are best placed,[1] but Org X screws over not only itself (they now appoint someone they think are not quite as good) and A themselves (who doesn’t get the job they want), for the benefit of Org Y.
These sort of oligosponic machinations are at best a breach of various fiduciary duties (e.g. Org X to their donors to use their money to get the best staff rather than opaque de facto transfer contributions of labour to another organisation), and at least colourably illegal in many jurisdictions due to labour law around anti-trust, non-discrimination, etc. (see)
Similar sentiments apply to less extreme examples, such as ‘not proactively ‘poaching″ (the linked case above was about alleged “no cold call” agreements). The typical story for why these practices are disliked is a mix of econ efficiency arguments (e.g. labour market liquidity, competition over conditions is a mechanism for higher performing staff to match into higher performing orgs) and worker welfare ones (e.g. the net result typically disadvantages workers by suppressing their pay, conditions, and reducing their ability to change to roles they prefer).
I think these rationales apply roughly as well to EA-land as anywhere else-land. Orgs should accept that staff may occasionally leave to other orgs for a variety of reasons. If they find that they consistently lose out for familiar reasons, they should either get better or accept the consequences for remaining worse.
[1]: Although, for the avoidance of doubt, I think it is wholly acceptable for people to switch EA jobs for wholly ‘non-EA’ reasons—e.g. “Yeah, I expect I’d do less good at Org X than Org Y, but Org X will pay me 20% more and I want a higher standard of living.” Moral sainthood is scarce as well as precious. It is unrealistic that all candidates are saintly in this sense, and mutual pretence to the contrary unhelpful.
If anything, ‘no poaching’ (etc.) practices are even worse in these cases than the more saintly ‘moving so I can do even more good!’ rationale. In the latter case, Orgs are merely being immodest in presuming to know better than applicants what their best opportunity to contribute is; in the former, Orgs conspire to make their employees’ lives worse than they could otherwise be.
I’ve heard that in the past 80k has sometimes reached out to employees at EA organizations asking if they’d like to leave and work for 80k, including in instances in which those organizations felt that it would be highly costly to lose that employee.
I now see that Habiba has joined 80k, and I had previously heard that it was a major win for FHI when she was able to get her role at Oxford. Was it costly to FHI for her to leave, and if so, how do you balance poaching employees for 80k with trying to help and fill those same roles at those organizations?
Hi anon, Michelle here. I work for 80k. I think 80k probably shouldn’t have a discussion about the career decisions of a particular staff member on the Forum, but I’m happy to share some thoughts on this general issue.
First off, I hate that our hiring sometimes makes things difficult for others, when we’re all aiming at the same thing and the stakes are so high. As you point out, this is an especially tricky issue for 80k because people are in the habit of listening to our career advice and because our whole mission is to fill roles at other organisations.
I’ll try to address a few different things your question might be gesturing at.
One issue is the fact that hiring an employee away from a high-impact org is in some ways a step away from our mission. The way I think about this is similar to how I think about 80k hiring somebody who doesn’t work at an EA org but is considering other high impact offers in addition to 80k’s. When a potential hire is considering their impact, they have to compare the value of filling a high-impact role themselves against the value of the roles they could cause to be filled while working at 80k. Someone considering leaving another EA org for 80k is in a similar position, just with the added transition cost from leaving their current role.
Another issue is that when we reach out to people, they might be influenced by the fact that we’re a career advising organisation and people are used to relying on our advice. They may interpret our interest in hiring them as us expressing a well-researched view that their impact would be higher working for us. I’d hate for this to happen and we’ve had many internal discussions about how to reduce its likelihood. Many staff try to frequently flag their own bias and uncertainty about the best option, avoid comparing the impact of working at 80k to their current or prospective job (especially if the potential hire hasn’t explicitly asked for this), and to be explicit about when we’re recruiting v. giving career advice.
Lastly, there’s a question about whether EA orgs more generally should not reach out to potential hires who are already working at high impact organisations.
My views on this have a lot to do with my own experience working at EA orgs.
While most of 80k’s employees did not previously work at other EA organisations, I’m one of the exceptions. Before 80k I spent ~6 years working for Giving What We Can and the Global Priorities Institute. While I was working at GPI, 80k asked me whether I knew any good candidates for an advising position, and I asked if I could apply. The job has been an incredible fit for me. While I don’t regret the previous jobs I’ve had, I think it’s a shame nobody ever suggested that I become an advisor at 80k earlier on. I think I can do more good in this role than in my last one because it’s so much better suited to me.
My experience makes me feel fairly strongly that people at EA orgs should periodically consider different options. If orgs who’d like to hire someone never reach out, that person will never learn what those options are. It’s in that spirit that I offered Habiba a role.
Greater transparency in the community about the job opportunities people have will allow people to find jobs which suit them better and they enjoy more. Deciding to leave your role at an EA org because you think a different role would have more impact or because you’d be happier elsewhere can be a really difficult decision. But I think it should be the employee’s decision and we shouldn’t have a norm that prevents them from finding out they even had the option. I do think that organisational stability is really important, but I think we should probably trust staff at EA orgs to incorporate this into their decision making.
I think its perfectly fine for EA orgs to be in competition for talent, if anything it’s a good thing.
It should not be 80k’s job to decide the counterfactuals from poaching great people from other organizations. That should be solely the job of the people they poach.
Presumably the people they hire do a thorough evaluation of the harm they’ll cause by leaving their former organization and the good they’ll do by joining a new one. If the calculation doesn’t look net positive they are not going to do it.
[Own views etc.]
I’m unsure why this got downvoted, but I strongly agree with the sentiment in the parent. Although I understand the impulse of “We’re all roughly on the same team here, so we can try and sculpt something better than the typically competitive/adversarial relationships between firms, or employers and employees”, I think this is apt to mislead one into ideas which are typically economically short-sighted, often morally objectionable, and occasionally legally dubious.
In the extreme case, it’s obviously unacceptable for Org X to not hire candidate A (their best applicant), because they believe its better they stay at Org Y. Not only (per the parent) that A is probably a better judge of where they are best placed,[1] but Org X screws over not only itself (they now appoint someone they think are not quite as good) and A themselves (who doesn’t get the job they want), for the benefit of Org Y.
These sort of oligosponic machinations are at best a breach of various fiduciary duties (e.g. Org X to their donors to use their money to get the best staff rather than opaque de facto transfer contributions of labour to another organisation), and at least colourably illegal in many jurisdictions due to labour law around anti-trust, non-discrimination, etc. (see)
Similar sentiments apply to less extreme examples, such as ‘not proactively ‘poaching″ (the linked case above was about alleged “no cold call” agreements). The typical story for why these practices are disliked is a mix of econ efficiency arguments (e.g. labour market liquidity, competition over conditions is a mechanism for higher performing staff to match into higher performing orgs) and worker welfare ones (e.g. the net result typically disadvantages workers by suppressing their pay, conditions, and reducing their ability to change to roles they prefer).
I think these rationales apply roughly as well to EA-land as anywhere else-land. Orgs should accept that staff may occasionally leave to other orgs for a variety of reasons. If they find that they consistently lose out for familiar reasons, they should either get better or accept the consequences for remaining worse.
[1]: Although, for the avoidance of doubt, I think it is wholly acceptable for people to switch EA jobs for wholly ‘non-EA’ reasons—e.g. “Yeah, I expect I’d do less good at Org X than Org Y, but Org X will pay me 20% more and I want a higher standard of living.” Moral sainthood is scarce as well as precious. It is unrealistic that all candidates are saintly in this sense, and mutual pretence to the contrary unhelpful.
If anything, ‘no poaching’ (etc.) practices are even worse in these cases than the more saintly ‘moving so I can do even more good!’ rationale. In the latter case, Orgs are merely being immodest in presuming to know better than applicants what their best opportunity to contribute is; in the former, Orgs conspire to make their employees’ lives worse than they could otherwise be.