Thanks, Alex. For roles in organisations supported by impact-focussed funders like Open Philanthropy or EA Funds, do you have guesses for the difference between hired and best rejected candidates in $/​year donated to the organisation hiring? I understand this depends on the organisation and role, but any thoughts are welcome.
[...] If you forced me to in some hypothetical I’d guess X [the aforementioned difference] is quite low for many junior roles (<$10k), but higher for more mid/​senior roles (>$50k?). [...]
Taking all of this into account, I think a reasonable proxy would be around $1M per year donated to mid-stage/​AIM charities, which would be worthwhile versus one additional founder. However, I think the variance across cause areas is substantial (it could be half this for animals/​mental health and double for global health, or even four times higher for EA meta). I also think personal variance changes things a lot. For example, a top-third founder, I would say, would be twice as expensive as an average one.
It does indeed depend a lot. I think the critical thing to remember is that the figure should be the minimum of what it costs to get a certain type of talent and how valuable that talent is. Clean Water is worth thousands of dollars per year to me, but if you turned up on my doorstep with a one-year supply of water for $1k I’d tell you to stop wasting my time because I can get it far more cheaply than that.
When assessing the cost of acquiring talent, the hard thing to track is how many people aren’t in the pool of applicants at all due to funding constraints. That sounds like it’s Abraham’s position and I think it’s more common than often given credit for; there’s something very low-status in EA about saying ‘I could be doing this more impactful thing, but I won’t because it won’t pay me enough’.
Funding isn’t the only constraint on salaries of course; appearances matter too. Once your org is paying enough that you can’t really pay more without getting a lot of sideways glances you don’t want to get, that’s when I would mostly stop calling you funding-constrained* and then I imagine this number can get really really high; cost of talent becomes ~infinite and we’re back to looking at ‘value’. Open Phil’s hiring is perhaps in approximately that position.
If you are still in a position where you could raise salaries if it weren’t for funding constraints, I tend to think this number struggles to make it out of low six figures. Possible exceptions are positions that want a very specific combination of skills and experiences, like senior leadership at central EA orgs.
*Assuming you are mostly turning money into people into impact, rather than e.g. money into nets into impact.
Thanks, Alex. For roles in organisations supported by impact-focussed funders like Open Philanthropy or EA Funds, do you have guesses for the difference between hired and best rejected candidates in $/​year donated to the organisation hiring? I understand this depends on the organisation and role, but any thoughts are welcome.
Abraham Rowe said:
Joey Savoi said:
It does indeed depend a lot. I think the critical thing to remember is that the figure should be the minimum of what it costs to get a certain type of talent and how valuable that talent is. Clean Water is worth thousands of dollars per year to me, but if you turned up on my doorstep with a one-year supply of water for $1k I’d tell you to stop wasting my time because I can get it far more cheaply than that.
When assessing the cost of acquiring talent, the hard thing to track is how many people aren’t in the pool of applicants at all due to funding constraints. That sounds like it’s Abraham’s position and I think it’s more common than often given credit for; there’s something very low-status in EA about saying ‘I could be doing this more impactful thing, but I won’t because it won’t pay me enough’.
Funding isn’t the only constraint on salaries of course; appearances matter too. Once your org is paying enough that you can’t really pay more without getting a lot of sideways glances you don’t want to get, that’s when I would mostly stop calling you funding-constrained* and then I imagine this number can get really really high; cost of talent becomes ~infinite and we’re back to looking at ‘value’. Open Phil’s hiring is perhaps in approximately that position.
If you are still in a position where you could raise salaries if it weren’t for funding constraints, I tend to think this number struggles to make it out of low six figures. Possible exceptions are positions that want a very specific combination of skills and experiences, like senior leadership at central EA orgs.
*Assuming you are mostly turning money into people into impact, rather than e.g. money into nets into impact.