This is a cool post, thank you for laying out your thought process. I especially like the section on (not using) cost of living adjustments.
One thing I would bring up is it seems you have focused a lot on the demand side, and not so much the supply side, of the equation. In the ‘type of work’ section you discuss equally valuing all these different skillsets, but they might not all be equally scarce. There are some roles when you might want to hire non-EAs (e.g. accounting, IT, HR, legal), in which case you might need to pay more for rarer skills—and conversely if you wanted to hire a cleaner, or someone to do data entry, it might seem wasteful to pay them as much as your researchers and programmers. It would be a shame to have experienced staff wasting their time on low-skill work just because you couldn’t justify spending an above-market wage on hiring someone.
Hi Larks, Thanks for your comment. While our current formula does not take into consideration the type or field of work, it does differentiate between different levels of skill that are needed. So, for example, if we did want to hire someone to do data entry, we might classify that a level 1 position (or maybe we’d need to re-number all of our levels so that that position could be below research associates).
Regarding scarcity, it’s true that our current formula does not take that into consideration. If we find in the future that we have difficulty hiring for a certain position, we may need to seek additional funding in order to raise the base wages for every position or else make adjustments to the structure of our formula.
This is a cool post, thank you for laying out your thought process. I especially like the section on (not using) cost of living adjustments.
One thing I would bring up is it seems you have focused a lot on the demand side, and not so much the supply side, of the equation. In the ‘type of work’ section you discuss equally valuing all these different skillsets, but they might not all be equally scarce. There are some roles when you might want to hire non-EAs (e.g. accounting, IT, HR, legal), in which case you might need to pay more for rarer skills—and conversely if you wanted to hire a cleaner, or someone to do data entry, it might seem wasteful to pay them as much as your researchers and programmers. It would be a shame to have experienced staff wasting their time on low-skill work just because you couldn’t justify spending an above-market wage on hiring someone.
Hi Larks, Thanks for your comment. While our current formula does not take into consideration the type or field of work, it does differentiate between different levels of skill that are needed. So, for example, if we did want to hire someone to do data entry, we might classify that a level 1 position (or maybe we’d need to re-number all of our levels so that that position could be below research associates).
Regarding scarcity, it’s true that our current formula does not take that into consideration. If we find in the future that we have difficulty hiring for a certain position, we may need to seek additional funding in order to raise the base wages for every position or else make adjustments to the structure of our formula.