Just to add, the fact that it sucks to invest in people and have them leave could lead long-term to organizations being less keen to invest in people in the first place, which would be ultimately bad for both employers and employees. That said, within the EA community, training someone and then watching them leave is less of a dead loss than it would be at a for-profit firm, because there’s a pretty good chance that they’re going to go do something that you’re also in favour of, even if it’s not the thing you chose to work on yourself. I’ve actually heard the funding pitch before of “you should fund us because we hire people previously unknown to the EA community and many of them go on to be hired by OpenPhil or etc. and cite their experience with us as helpful for that”.
I agree with you that the right way to deal with this is via flexible informal norms.
I don’t so much recommend more rigid / coercive / formal tools, but probably among the least bad of them I’ve seen is “here is a starting bonus, but if you leave before your first year or so, you have to pay it back”, or guaranteed pay rises after certain periods of time, etc.
Just to add, the fact that it sucks to invest in people and have them leave could lead long-term to organizations being less keen to invest in people in the first place, which would be ultimately bad for both employers and employees. That said, within the EA community, training someone and then watching them leave is less of a dead loss than it would be at a for-profit firm, because there’s a pretty good chance that they’re going to go do something that you’re also in favour of, even if it’s not the thing you chose to work on yourself. I’ve actually heard the funding pitch before of “you should fund us because we hire people previously unknown to the EA community and many of them go on to be hired by OpenPhil or etc. and cite their experience with us as helpful for that”.
I agree with you that the right way to deal with this is via flexible informal norms.
I don’t so much recommend more rigid / coercive / formal tools, but probably among the least bad of them I’ve seen is “here is a starting bonus, but if you leave before your first year or so, you have to pay it back”, or guaranteed pay rises after certain periods of time, etc.