EA funders and employers should pay more
- Your employees/grantees share your values
- So much better to give your employee $10k, compared than an unaligned vendor $10k
- Giving employees more money = taps into their local knowledge
- With political giving, it’s actually just important that individuals have enough money to donate themselves
- “Paying more” materializes better talent
- If you want for-profit quality you should compete on for-profit axes
- Churn is very expensive
- Onboarding costs are high, context is scarce
- You don’t want to lose people to sth as cheap as money
- You should care about their runway (?)
- Having good BATNAs and solid runway means that they do what’s most value-creating, rather than what pays the bills
- Budget to explore is super important
- “What about grift?” My thesis: paying people aligns their values to yours
- I sure feel much really warm and fuzzy towards everyone who’s ever funded me
EAs should negotiate their salaries
- Personal runway is important
- Ludicrous that longtime EA employees end up worried about money and being able to pay the bills
- Your ability to donate is important
- “Is there some group that you would feel strongly about?”
- The global poor? Chickens, shrimp? Future people? AIs?
- Your employer and your employer’s donors do not have the same values as yours
- So think of negotiation as a values trade
- Negotiation is a muscle, a skill
- Will need to negotiate with many other parties
- Grounding your value
- The amount you can negotiate for, informs you how valuable your work is
- Capitalistic heuristic of “work wherever you can get paid the most” does something valuable for the world of putting talent where it is needed
- Salaries in EA vs salaries in tech
- Observation: EAs I know seem to not care very much about their personal salaries
- Manifest: Rachel and Saul last year, vs Rach and David this year
- (maybe: falls out of greater trust all around)
- (next level argument: things like trust between professional connections is worth way more than $10k of salary)
- Levels.fyi
- (maybe good april fool’s joke)
- reveals.fyi
- reveal.fyi
Patio11 on Salary Negotiation
- More on tactics, but some of the good thinking on this
Contra Joey on not paying people a lot
- Imagine you’re buying a house, do you go to Craigslist and sort by lowest price?
- (maybe too strawman, sorry)