Like you, I also think it’s not-obvious that someone of Jason’s skillsets should be doing something other than earning-to-give. As a practical matter, most EA employers aren’t willing to pay >1M/year, except maybe in a few niche situations in ML/AI Safety or very successful EA fintech startups.
(I do vaguely think that if you just naively crunch the numbers about how great SWEs can contribute now vs. Open Phil’s last dollar, there probably exists opportunities somewhat above this bar however, including outside of AI Safety and weird crypto stuff).
There’s also a strong argument that someone like Jason has a clear comparative advantage relative to the rest of the movement in doing E2G stuff in BigTech, and maybe as a community this coordination problem is better solved with less career shuffles.
Like you, I also think it’s not-obvious that someone of Jason’s skillsets should be doing something other than earning-to-give. As a practical matter, most EA employers aren’t willing to pay >1M/year, except maybe in a few niche situations in ML/AI Safety or very successful EA fintech startups.
(I do vaguely think that if you just naively crunch the numbers about how great SWEs can contribute now vs. Open Phil’s last dollar, there probably exists opportunities somewhat above this bar however, including outside of AI Safety and weird crypto stuff).
There’s also a strong argument that someone like Jason has a clear comparative advantage relative to the rest of the movement in doing E2G stuff in BigTech, and maybe as a community this coordination problem is better solved with less career shuffles.
Ozzie’s post on opportunity costs of technical talent is related.