might not have clear well paying counterfactual salaries (e.g. in tech) but either could fairly quickly transition into those roles
or decided not to pursue those roles and instead pursued lower paying altruistically motivated work but could have earned a lot of money if they had made different choices early on.
I am pretty confused about how much you “should” pay this kind of person—particularly in the second case. It seems like many people can make the claim that they “could” be earning more money doing x, even if x wasn’t really an option for them. At the same time, I don’t want to punish people for making altruistic sacrifices early in their careers.
Similarly, I think there are roles where the only readily available benchmarks are in academia or the nonprofit sector—in these cases we can assume that those benchmarks are too low, but we don’t know by how much, so determining fair compensation is hard. Community building plausibly falls into this bucket.
(I agree with the above)
One thing worth noting is that some people either
might not have clear well paying counterfactual salaries (e.g. in tech) but either could fairly quickly transition into those roles
or decided not to pursue those roles and instead pursued lower paying altruistically motivated work but could have earned a lot of money if they had made different choices early on.
I am pretty confused about how much you “should” pay this kind of person—particularly in the second case. It seems like many people can make the claim that they “could” be earning more money doing x, even if x wasn’t really an option for them. At the same time, I don’t want to punish people for making altruistic sacrifices early in their careers.
Yeah, I agree this is a real and hard case.
Similarly, I think there are roles where the only readily available benchmarks are in academia or the nonprofit sector—in these cases we can assume that those benchmarks are too low, but we don’t know by how much, so determining fair compensation is hard. Community building plausibly falls into this bucket.
There are a lot of private sector community roles, some with salaries up to $180k—Here are some examples from a community manager job board.
TIL!
I think this strengthens my confidence in my original comment re: nearly all EA roles being paid under market rate.