We recently released a rough blog post on this topic, which has been discussed quite a bit on this Forum in the past:
Our 2018 survey found that for a second year, a significant fraction of organisations reported that they’d want to be compensated hundreds of thousands or sometimes millions of dollars for the loss of a recent hire for three years.
There was some debate last October about whether those figures could be accurate, why they were so high, and what they mean. In the current post, I outline some rough notes summarising the different explanations for why people in the survey estimated that the value of recent hires might be high, though I don’t seek firm conclusions about which considerations are playing the biggest role.
In short, we consider four explanations:
- The estimates might be wrong.
- There might be large differences in the value-add of different hires.
- The organisations might be able to fundraise easily.
- Retaining a recent hire allows the organisation to avoid running a hiring process.
Overall, we take the figures as evidence that leaders of the effective altruism community, when surveyed, think the value-add of recent hires at these organisations is very high -- plausibly more valuable than donating six figures (or possible even more) per year to the same organisations. However, we do not think the precise numbers are a reliable answer to decision-relevant questions for job seekers, funders, or potential employers. We think it’s likely that mistakes are driving up these estimates. Even ignoring the high probability of mistakes, the implications of the data depend heavily on exactly what is driving the results. We are very uncertain about the magnitude of various considerations, so we recommend against leaning on these numbers when making career decisions.
Independently of this data, we believe that these jobs are sometimes very high-impact for some people. This suggests that finding out whether or not you’re a good fit can be valuable, even if most people won’t turn out to be. At the end, we sketch out some (weak) implications for job seekers. We hope to write about our overall views on the current job market in the effective altruism community in the future.
These are just rough notes and not a polished article, but I hope they’ll help to sum up the discussion and let the debate move forward...
Thanks for clarifying your thinking! It’s great to see you being responsive to community feedback in this way; for instance, the discussion about low acceptance rates should help give job seekers a more accurate picture of the landscape.
I’ve got a few thoughts to share in the spirit of offering more constructive criticism that will hopefully driving further improvements.
1. After a lot of time spent by 80K and the EA community trying to interpret the results of this question, we’re at a place where:
So why not just ditch this question in favor of something more helpful, instead of continuing to pour more resources into it? If you look at things from a cost-benefit perspective, this question clearly has a high cost due to all the clarification its required. Is the benefit high enough to warrant that? Even if you worked out all the kinks and knew all the respondents were thinking about the question the same way, and investing the time to produce an answer they trusted, what do we really learn by asking: “For a typical recent Senior/Junior hire, how much financial compensation would you need to receive today, to make you indifferent about that person having to stop working for you or anyone for the next 3 years?” Which parties would take which different actions on the margins because of that information?
2. I suspect one of the reasons why people are having trouble interpreting this question is because it doesn’t correspond to a real world decision people have to make. Confusing hypothetical questions are likely to produce non-actionable results. I suggest thinking carefully about exactly what you’re trying to capture (the value of an employee? The urgency and/or difficulty of hiring?) and looking at whether you can measure that dynamic via a clearly labeled Likert scale (e.g. a 1-7 scale rating with values like “employee is transformative in allowing us to do important new things”, “employee lets us do what we currently do, but a tiny bit better”, “it would be very easy to replace an employee of this type”, etc.) I’ve posted some specific suggestions in a separate comment.
And relatedly, I’d recommend as strongly as possible not using this question (or any question involving genies). I think its very likely to lead to the same sorts of interpretation problems.
In addition to asking EA organizations more questions about their talent wants/needs, it’d be nice to get more information about their funding gaps. I suggest asking organizations how much they’d like to raise over 1,3, and 5 year timeframes, and also asking them to rate how difficult they found their last fundraising round.
Great to hear you’re considering new questions for the talent survey! I’ve suggested some specific questions to help get a better understanding of how much EA organizations are paying.
Possible ambiguity in the survey question: If the person stops working "for you or anyone for 3 years" that plausibly negates most of their life's impact, unless they find a great way to build career capital without working for anyone. So with this interpretation, the answers would be something close to the NPV of their life's impact divided by 3 (ignoring discounting).
Also, did you control for willingness to accept vs pay?
Sorry if this addressed, I skimmed the post.