I’m feeling a bit set upon here. I was talking about a different topic (why people hire slowly) and it seems like we got our wires crossed and are now debating the value of a marginal hire. Looking back, I see how my earlier comment led us off in a confusing direction.
If we’re discussing the value of a marginal hire, I totally agree that the survey figures DON’T include the costs of hiring someone in the first place. That’s why I brought up the ex-ante ex-post distinction in the first place.
This means that someone considering working at an EA org should use a lower figure for the estimate of their value-add (we agree). In particular, they should subtract the opportunity costs of the time spent hiring them. (This varies a lot on the situation, but one month of senior staff time seems like a reasonable ballpark to me.)
However, just to be clear, I don’t think they should subtract the opportunity costs of senior staff time spent on their on-going management, since I think the natural interpretation of the survey question includes these. (If a new hire could raise $1m of donations, but would take up management time that could have raised $800k otherwise and has a salary of $100k, it would be odd for the org say that they’d need to be compensated with $1m if the hire disappeared. Rather, the answer should be $100k. I expect most orgs were aiming to include these costs, though of course they might not have made a good estimate. This is what I thought you were talking about when I said I think orgs partially take opportunity costs into account.)
Where does this leave the survey figures? We could super roughly estimate the value of a month of senior staff time at an org is 5x the value of a month of junior staff time, so this would super roughly reduce the value of junior hires over three years by 5⁄36 = 14%.
Re. your first paragraph, I don’t know why you chose to reply to my comment specifically, since as far as I can tell I’ve never been asking ‘why do people hire slowly’.
I think I’ve already explained why I don’t agree with your later paragraphs and see little value in repeating myself, so we should probably just leave it there.
Hey Alex,
I’m feeling a bit set upon here. I was talking about a different topic (why people hire slowly) and it seems like we got our wires crossed and are now debating the value of a marginal hire. Looking back, I see how my earlier comment led us off in a confusing direction.
If we’re discussing the value of a marginal hire, I totally agree that the survey figures DON’T include the costs of hiring someone in the first place. That’s why I brought up the ex-ante ex-post distinction in the first place.
This means that someone considering working at an EA org should use a lower figure for the estimate of their value-add (we agree). In particular, they should subtract the opportunity costs of the time spent hiring them. (This varies a lot on the situation, but one month of senior staff time seems like a reasonable ballpark to me.)
However, just to be clear, I don’t think they should subtract the opportunity costs of senior staff time spent on their on-going management, since I think the natural interpretation of the survey question includes these. (If a new hire could raise $1m of donations, but would take up management time that could have raised $800k otherwise and has a salary of $100k, it would be odd for the org say that they’d need to be compensated with $1m if the hire disappeared. Rather, the answer should be $100k. I expect most orgs were aiming to include these costs, though of course they might not have made a good estimate. This is what I thought you were talking about when I said I think orgs partially take opportunity costs into account.)
Where does this leave the survey figures? We could super roughly estimate the value of a month of senior staff time at an org is 5x the value of a month of junior staff time, so this would super roughly reduce the value of junior hires over three years by 5⁄36 = 14%.
Re. your first paragraph, I don’t know why you chose to reply to my comment specifically, since as far as I can tell I’ve never been asking ‘why do people hire slowly’.
I think I’ve already explained why I don’t agree with your later paragraphs and see little value in repeating myself, so we should probably just leave it there.
Yes, I apologise for that, we were talking at cross purposes.