One way to think about it is that the aim of EA is to benefit the beneficiaries—the poorest people in the world, animals, future beings.
We should choose strategies that help the beneficiaries the most rather than strategies that help people that happen to be interested in EA (unless that also helps the beneficiaries—things like not burning out).
It makes sense to me that we should ask of those who have had the most privilege to give back the most, if you have more money you should give more of it away. If you have a stronger safety net and access to influence, you should use more of that to help others rather than helping yourself.
I think with the salaries, for most people, they could probably earn more in other sectors if they only cared about monetary gain rather than including impact in their career choice. If you’re coming from a charity/public service sector they may seem higher, if you’re coming from a private sector career they seem lower.
The most comparable example I can think of are software engineers, where EA positions generally compare poorly to tech. Even Lightcone admits it isn’t paying market salaries.
Interesting. Are there any examples of EA jobs which are more poorly-paid than their private-sector counterparts?
I think this is the great majority of EA jobs that aren’t in operations.
In our case (as an EA-adjacent biosecurity org), it’s simultaneously the case that (a) most of our staff are well-paid relative to academic and nonprofit benchmarks, and (b) most of our staff could make much more money working in the private sector. Several of our best (and best-compensated) performers took dramatic pay cuts to work for us. I think this is the norm for EA-adjacent organizations, and is roughly the correct norm to be pursuing.
In discussions of EA compensation, it’s very common to equivocate between “EA jobs are well-paid relative to nonprofit/academic benchmarks”, “EA jobs are well-paid relative to the average person” and “EA-jobs are well-paid relative to for-profit benchmarks”. I think only the last of these is actually cause for concern, and is quite rarely true.
That said, I have seen EA operations roles (primarily at EV orgs) that I think were significantly overpaid, so I’m not going to claim this never happens.
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.
One way to think about it is that the aim of EA is to benefit the beneficiaries—the poorest people in the world, animals, future beings.
We should choose strategies that help the beneficiaries the most rather than strategies that help people that happen to be interested in EA (unless that also helps the beneficiaries—things like not burning out).
It makes sense to me that we should ask of those who have had the most privilege to give back the most, if you have more money you should give more of it away. If you have a stronger safety net and access to influence, you should use more of that to help others rather than helping yourself.
I think with the salaries, for most people, they could probably earn more in other sectors if they only cared about monetary gain rather than including impact in their career choice. If you’re coming from a charity/public service sector they may seem higher, if you’re coming from a private sector career they seem lower.
Interesting. Are there any examples of EA jobs which are more poorly-paid than their private-sector counterparts?
It’s not necessarily that the “EA” jobs are more poorly paid, just that the people that take these roles could realistically earn much more elsewhere.
The most comparable example I can think of are software engineers, where EA positions generally compare poorly to tech. Even Lightcone admits it isn’t paying market salaries.
I think this is the great majority of EA jobs that aren’t in operations.
In our case (as an EA-adjacent biosecurity org), it’s simultaneously the case that (a) most of our staff are well-paid relative to academic and nonprofit benchmarks, and (b) most of our staff could make much more money working in the private sector. Several of our best (and best-compensated) performers took dramatic pay cuts to work for us. I think this is the norm for EA-adjacent organizations, and is roughly the correct norm to be pursuing.
In discussions of EA compensation, it’s very common to equivocate between “EA jobs are well-paid relative to nonprofit/academic benchmarks”, “EA jobs are well-paid relative to the average person” and “EA-jobs are well-paid relative to for-profit benchmarks”. I think only the last of these is actually cause for concern, and is quite rarely true.
That said, I have seen EA operations roles (primarily at EV orgs) that I think were significantly overpaid, so I’m not going to claim this never happens.
(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.