GiveWell has internal documentation about our compensation philosophy. I’m not going to quote it directly, but the gist is: “We don’t want to overpay because that would be financially irresponsible and we don’t want to underpay because that would inhibit our ability to execute our mission.” Like Coefficient Giving (see Sam Anschell’s comment), we benchmark our compensation to organizations that we think (1) do similar work and (2) try to hire similar talent. Our policy as written doesn’t consider the spillover effects of our approach to compensation (e.g. its effects on the optimality of talent allocation between impact-focused organizations).
It’s also worth noting that the unique setup of our retirement benefits (we increase salaries in lieu of offering e.g. a % match on 401k contributions) makes total compensation a better cross-org comparator than salary. But, I’m just making a pedantic point here, not trying to sneakily imply that GiveWell’s total compensation isn’t higher than many impact-focused organizations—it is!
GiveWell has internal documentation about our compensation philosophy. I’m not going to quote it directly, but the gist is: “We don’t want to overpay because that would be financially irresponsible and we don’t want to underpay because that would inhibit our ability to execute our mission.” Like Coefficient Giving (see Sam Anschell’s comment), we benchmark our compensation to organizations that we think (1) do similar work and (2) try to hire similar talent. Our policy as written doesn’t consider the spillover effects of our approach to compensation (e.g. its effects on the optimality of talent allocation between impact-focused organizations).
It’s also worth noting that the unique setup of our retirement benefits (we increase salaries in lieu of offering e.g. a % match on 401k contributions) makes total compensation a better cross-org comparator than salary. But, I’m just making a pedantic point here, not trying to sneakily imply that GiveWell’s total compensation isn’t higher than many impact-focused organizations—it is!
Thanks for this useful insider perspective, Calum, and I agree the conversation should be about total compensation, not specifically salary.