For what it’s worth, I also share the intuitive aversion. Reading Habryka’s comment, I’m not sure that the aversion would stand up to reflection. But I could imagine it doing so after I thought more about it, e.g., if poaching employees would lead to unequal or loopsided mentoring or hiring costs, or if headhunters were paid per person and not less for people from organizations which are already doing valuable work.
Yeah, I think the strongest arguments against headhunting is training/cultural-onboarding costs.
I do think there is a thing where hiring someone right out of college is often net-negative, but if you train them, they become net-positive after a year or two. I think it would suck to invest so much in training someone, just for them to walk away to an organization that offered a better experience because they had to spend fewer resources training others.
I do think it makes sense to have norms here. At Lightcone we have some norms that if you do accept an offer after a 3-month trial period that you do really try to make things work out for 2 years, though if you find something that seems genuinely more impactful you should do it (and the organization would encourage you to go and do it).
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.
For what it’s worth, I also share the intuitive aversion. Reading Habryka’s comment, I’m not sure that the aversion would stand up to reflection. But I could imagine it doing so after I thought more about it, e.g., if poaching employees would lead to unequal or loopsided mentoring or hiring costs, or if headhunters were paid per person and not less for people from organizations which are already doing valuable work.
Yeah, I think the strongest arguments against headhunting is training/cultural-onboarding costs.
I do think there is a thing where hiring someone right out of college is often net-negative, but if you train them, they become net-positive after a year or two. I think it would suck to invest so much in training someone, just for them to walk away to an organization that offered a better experience because they had to spend fewer resources training others.
I do think it makes sense to have norms here. At Lightcone we have some norms that if you do accept an offer after a 3-month trial period that you do really try to make things work out for 2 years, though if you find something that seems genuinely more impactful you should do it (and the organization would encourage you to go and do it).
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.