Good question, and I think this is definitely healthy discussion. In general, money is a sensitive issue, and I would encourage all parties to show nuance, this includes (but not limited to) when: “judging” someone’s salary, when asking for a salary, and when granting a salary.
Two steelmen for decent chunky grants 1) Bounded loss and unbounded wins—while theoretically salaries could be cut in half, impact could easily be 10-100x. I.e. the focus should be opportunity cost and not expenditure 2) many smart people in ea, and the people granting, may have previously been earning decent significant salaries as programmers/executives/consultants. You and I may see 80k USD as a lot of money, but its pretty normal for developers in Cali to earn hundreds of USD. Therefore, expecting people to earn 50k a year may effectively be asking them to donate 75% of their income.
And 2 steelmen for keeping salary low − 1) this is a movement about charity, helping others, and donating. We put a lot of effort and time into building health communities around these principles built on a heavy basis of trust. It’s important to feel like people are in it for the right reason, and high salaries can jeopardise that. 2) it’s pretty easy to justify a high salary with some of the above reasoning, perhaps too easy. As a community builder myself, it seems totally plausible we could attract people that are a poor fit for ea by being too relaxed around the money pedal.
For my own personal opinion, I think it’s far too easy to ignore opportunity cost, and concentrate on short term expenditure and salary. However, I can very much imagine myself leaving the community if I salaries became too inflated. And I am likely to feel less aligned with others who require large salaries (just being honest here). Looking at recent posted receipts, I don’t see anything that catches my eye in a bad way, although it could be said to be unfair that some community builders will be working 3x harder on a volunteer basis than other community builders on a competitive salary. I think this partially reflects the incentives which produced a world we currently live in (I.e. largely unaltruistic).
Whilst I find the arguments for working hard, and concentrating on impact, rather than earning little, pretty compelling—it’s worth pointing out that there’s some fantastic work coming out of Charity Entrepreneurship charities (who’s employees generally earn little) , so it’s not clear the tradeoff is always present.
Lastly, I would say its likely that I’ve made tradeoffs with my own salary, which have likely significantly negatively effected my social impact. I suspect this is easy to do, and would encourage people to avoid failing into this trap.
Good question, and I think this is definitely healthy discussion. In general, money is a sensitive issue, and I would encourage all parties to show nuance, this includes (but not limited to) when: “judging” someone’s salary, when asking for a salary, and when granting a salary.
Two steelmen for decent chunky grants 1) Bounded loss and unbounded wins—while theoretically salaries could be cut in half, impact could easily be 10-100x. I.e. the focus should be opportunity cost and not expenditure 2) many smart people in ea, and the people granting, may have previously been earning decent significant salaries as programmers/executives/consultants. You and I may see 80k USD as a lot of money, but its pretty normal for developers in Cali to earn hundreds of USD. Therefore, expecting people to earn 50k a year may effectively be asking them to donate 75% of their income.
And 2 steelmen for keeping salary low − 1) this is a movement about charity, helping others, and donating. We put a lot of effort and time into building health communities around these principles built on a heavy basis of trust. It’s important to feel like people are in it for the right reason, and high salaries can jeopardise that. 2) it’s pretty easy to justify a high salary with some of the above reasoning, perhaps too easy. As a community builder myself, it seems totally plausible we could attract people that are a poor fit for ea by being too relaxed around the money pedal.
For my own personal opinion, I think it’s far too easy to ignore opportunity cost, and concentrate on short term expenditure and salary. However, I can very much imagine myself leaving the community if I salaries became too inflated. And I am likely to feel less aligned with others who require large salaries (just being honest here). Looking at recent posted receipts, I don’t see anything that catches my eye in a bad way, although it could be said to be unfair that some community builders will be working 3x harder on a volunteer basis than other community builders on a competitive salary. I think this partially reflects the incentives which produced a world we currently live in (I.e. largely unaltruistic).
Whilst I find the arguments for working hard, and concentrating on impact, rather than earning little, pretty compelling—it’s worth pointing out that there’s some fantastic work coming out of Charity Entrepreneurship charities (who’s employees generally earn little) , so it’s not clear the tradeoff is always present.
Lastly, I would say its likely that I’ve made tradeoffs with my own salary, which have likely significantly negatively effected my social impact. I suspect this is easy to do, and would encourage people to avoid failing into this trap.