What are the minimum skills or experience necessary to get hired as a full time web developer?
impala
It’s tricky as I’m just starting to consider this career, so may not be familiar enough with it or far enough along with my planning to be usefully concrete. It partly depends on where sensible places to start are with my level of professional experience and knowledge (not negligible, but never fulltime webdev). Pick an example: a junior job at a webdev agency which builds websites for hire. The requirements for that might be illuminating.
Wow weird.
No, not static WordPress sites—more like the second, or something in between, though as a junior webdev I wouldn’t be the one taking care of the scaling (setting up the server with varnish, etc.), apart from avoiding direct database queries where possible.
Maybe if you gave a salary target that might help us calibrate.
Again I run into the problem of not knowing enough about the industry, but how about €35,000 in a place where you could relatively quickly head up towards €50,000?
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I think a big issue here is whether businesses or social movements are the right reference class. I think it’s the second, and social movement don’t usually try to do the sort of brand management of what other activists or groups do that I see in effective altruism.
“What guides your moral decisions? (the consequences of my actions/the rules i’m following” wouldn’t distinguish between people with consequentialist or non-consequentialist intuitions, if they weren’t familiar with philosophy.
The complication is that the distinctive aspect of consequetialism is that it makes this the only motive or consideration, and it’s hard to discover what the general public think about this as they’re not used to breaking morality down into all its component factors to find an exhaustive list of their motives or considerations.
Regarding the topic of how to learn, I am not such a fan of the online courses relative to simply reading a book or website which lists all a language’s syntax, or a long list of functions. If that’s enough for you to grasp it, it’s certainly faster. Many of the main websites for languages contain these lists.
What’s the definition of frontend and backend here, which is relevant to earning-to-give potential? If you’re writing database-driven Ruby or PHP code which generates HTML, are you a frontend or backend developer in this sense?
I wonder if when GWWC opened the pledge, many people already giving 10% joined, as now they don’t feel constrained by cause area.
That seems clearly what’d happen, and from what I hear is what most people think. People who’d favoured non-poverty causes and who join in the months after that change are unlikely to be giving as a result of GWWC’s work in those months after all, going out and convincing people to give to them from scratch. (Not to say that it’s not valuable for them to record their giving, or that the moves away from poverty have been a mistake.)
Thanks for sticking your head out with this post, I’ve heard a lot of people express similar or stronger concerns but say they’re too frightened about prompting a pile-on (or in some cases organised and tactical retaliation). One thing some of these people have said is that internal knowledge at and research by CEA reveals unflattering facts about the issues you’ve raised, but that CEA hides this from impact evaluations and isn’t honest about it with donors. For example, people not donating and staying on the member lists, including prominent EAs.
Oh, does the GWWC central team know how many of these members were non-poverty people? What was Ravi’s work, was it something the GWWC team did to follow up changing the pledge?
I absolutely agree, like I suggested when complementing Dale for sticking his head out. (If that is the phrase? Google is ambiguous between “head” and “neck”.) I like to think I would state them myself, given the anonymity this forum allows, and I wouldn’t pay much social cost anyway as I don’t talk to EAs much any more now that I’m distant from the main EA centers. But like I said I’ve heard them second hand from a lot of people who wouldn’t want the sources to be guessed at. I’ll ask them if there’s anything I can post on their behalf in this thread.
The one thing I have heard from people other than these people is about some of the EAs who don’t donate but stay on the member lists. That was still second hand however, from other people who weren’t criticising but might not like the implication that they were. I’m not sure it’s right to name individuals in this venue either, beyond identifying classes like “employees or trustees of organisations”. Ambiguity about what counts as a donation vs. self-serving may also be at play.
Like I said to Gregory, I am limited in what I can say without violating confidences, but I personally wouldn’t find saying other things scary if it’s anonymous. Is there an anonymous way to send messages to you which doesn’t reveal my email (which contains the username I use around the Web)?
The point at which you hit diminishing returns to funding an org may actually be pretty low. I’d be skeptical about the marginal value of budget increases of much more than a factor of 2 per year unless the org had demonstrated really impressive traction.
This isn’t incompatible with what you’re saying, but they may diminish well before that also. Taking the present example of Giving What We Can, the people who worked there or are involved with it thought that applied to it. They thought most of the value came from the existence of the organisation and a pledge people could sign if they wanted to commit to giving 10%, and other things which were done even before they started paying staff. So that would be diminish returns right at the $ 0 mark!
There are also signaling issues with only donating to metacharities, so if you’re public about your giving it might not be a great idea (“guys, look at how much I donate to these organizations that promote donating to themselves!”).
There are even less positive ways to frame that also, like giving to one another, and having organisations which heavily focus on promoting themselves (including by promoting the idea of metacharity, and making it a central concept in the movement). Even aside from signalling, we should see others’ discomfort with that as a reason to be wary of it ourselves.
The confidence interval for GWWC’s leverage ratio plausibly already includes numbers below 1
This is what those people I talked to from GWWC thought, due to their various experiences and observations. And GiveWell too as you say; they had had conversations with people at GiveWell who thought that GWWC’s future fundraising ratio was below 1.
Doesn’t every organization/social movement that efficiently allocates resources have diminishing returns beginning with the first dollar?
That will be the case very often, except in cases like that which you have mentioned. In these comments Michelle Hutchinson came up with a few other possibilities, like economies of scale.
The signalling issue is complicated, and I’m open to suggestions. As I’m a consequentialist, I’m open simply to lying.
This wouldn’t address the non-signalling concern that I raised though (as I’m sure you’re aware of course).
duplicate comment
How would one tell the difference between extra members which came for “capitalising on the media attention around Effective Altruism over the summer”, and 10% donors who simply got rustled up by this attention? Has GWWC publicly advertised conditions in which the money spent on this wouldn’t have been worthwhile and shouldn’t have been diverted to it?
Oh I meant how you distinguished between people who signed up to the pledge after seeing GWWC mentioned in the media attention or book (or elsewhere), and people who were a result of the efforts capitalising on this that EA donors are funding. For the question you answered I agree, I can’t think of any better (or other) data to get about individual pledgers and the only thing to compare it to is an overall estimate of the extra donations a pledge could lead to.
Charity Science used to do this by going to local atheist meetups and talking to people there and by going to atheist conferences.
That seems totally unquantifiable—were they actually going to track how many donations it led to, or just say that one in X people (for some high value of X) seemed like they were/”must” be convinced of effective charities and then mark down a guess at their whole lifetime giving to them as impact?
That would explain how concerned people mostly come from these places, and why they have unusually high concern for a social movement.