As a learning exercise, I’ve been working on a web scraper to compile this info from the FB group.
Doing this in spare time, so it will likely be another week or two before I have a post put together, but posting here in the meantime as an FYI and to potentially gain 5 karma so I can post once it’s ready :)
I appreciate this follow up as well. Peter and I seem to be of similar thinking here and in his comment on the other post, but just to add:
I don’t think the misunderstanding stems as much from the recent-hire valuations, as from terms like “talent bottleneck” and “talent constrained”. Especially “talent constrained” used alongside “funding constrained”. I could be mistaken, but it would seem odd to say you’re “funding constrained” but can’t use more funding at the moment. Whereas we are saying orgs are “talent constrained” but can’t make use of available talent. They evidently don’t function quite the same, so phrasing them in this matched sort of way invites erroneous comparison.
Similarly, I feel a “talent bottleneck” implies an insufficient supply of talent/applicants, which doesn’t seem to be the case. I guess it’s more that there’s insufficient talent actually working on the problems, but it’s not a matter of supply, so it’s more of a “hiring bottleneck” or an “organizational capacity bottleneck”.
EA orgs aren’t so much constrained by a lack of available talent as they are constrained by their capacity to deploy additional talent
I had the same thought that it might be more informative to know EA leaders answers to something like, “I’d rather have $X in additional donations than my next ideal hire.” Agree that it’s difficult to know how a future hire will work out, but maybe there’s still something to be learned from the value they’d place on an additional ideal hire, as it wouldn’t necessarily be the same as holding on to a recent successful hire. I’m admittedly out of my depth here.