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.
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.