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This seems interesting, but I'm confused as to what the point of this is over "work at an EA org". It seems like most EA orgs, are bottlenecked a lot more on talent than money, and if you're doing high-talent work for an EA organization than your marginal hour is likely more valuable than $60/hr. I wonder what subset of the population would benefit substantially from this advice—it seems like earning to give and direct work cover most of the space that earning to volunteer might.
What kind of person is this advice targeted at, and why do you think that this is better than direct work for those people?
"If you're doing high-talent work for an EA organization than your marginal hour is likely more valuable than $60/hr." And yet, few EA orgs pay $60-$90 per hour for non-programming jobs? Seems reasonable to me that someone might want to tutor or program for cash while writing EA content on the side, rather than getting paid a low writer's wage to produce said content -- the latter has comparable income, less total work, but also less flexibility to work when you want. Plus if you're volunteering, you can more easily hop between organizations to always focus on the projects that seem highest-impact to you.
Another advantage of earning-to-volunteer is to build skills in a large market where you're sure of your long-term prospects. Versus jumping into an EA career might seem riskier, since you are putting more of your life's eggs into the EA basket.
I think this strategy might be suitable for some people, enabling them to have a nice (if busy) lifestyle while also having fun contributing a lot to EA. But of course I don't think EA should try to market it widely because it might come dangerously close to sounding like we are advocating for people to slack off on their day job and rip off their employers. That message would be terrible for EA's reputation.
Regarding bottleneck, some areas are massively funding constrained e.g. I'm not sure I could name a single mental EA mental health charity that is talent constrained. People who graduate with firsts from the world's top 3 or so neuroscience/psychology departments, with a ton of work experience, are passionate enough to be willing to volunteer 20Hs per week but one can't hire and train them up as there simply isn't enough funding.
This advice is targeted at:
- people who want to work for a funding constrained organisation
- people who aren't sure what they want to do yet and want to test out a wide range of different options without having to commit yourself to any given one for the length of the typical employment contract.
- people who want to work directly but the salary is to low and they want to supplement it.
- People who want to be able to work on whatever they feel is important without having to spend their time convincing people it's worth paying them for. -Peoole earning to give in fields where you can make much more per hour as a freelancer (albeit perhaps less overall due to lower volume) who are considering transitioning to working directly.
- people who aren't sufficiently 'elite' to get paid to work on an area they care about in the role they want to work in.
- etc
Regarding bottleneck, some areas are massively funding constrained e.g. I'm not sure I could name a single mental EA mental health charity that is talent constrained. People who graduate with firsts from the world's top 3 or so neuroscience/psychology departments, with a ton of work experience, are passionate enough to be willing to volunteer 20Hs per week but one can't hire and train them up as there simply isn't enough funding.
This advice is targeted at: