It often seems like software engineering is the most over-represented career in the community. On this ground, at 80,000 Hours we've discouraged more people from going into the area, in order to increase the diversity of skills in the community.
However, recently the following organisations have been trying to hire EA-aligned software engineers:
- Wave
- New Incentives (given a seed grant by GiveWell)
- GiveDirectly
- 80,000 Hours
- CEA
And I don't think any of these groups have found it particularly easy.
Might this mean we're actually short of software engineers after all? It's a bit hard to tell at this point, but if these positions continue to be unfilled, then it'll look that way.
If we are short of engineers, what's the explanation? Some ideas:
- Lots of people in the community have entered the path, but few have become skilled enough to take these positions. In our hiring, it seemed like the choice was between an experienced non-EA or an EA with under a year of experience.
- A large fraction of the community are in the path, but the skill is so useful that we're still short of it.
- Lots of people are in the path, but they prefer to earn to give, either because they believe it's higher impact, or switching to direct work would involve too much sacrifice.
Are you an engineer with over 2yr experience who's involved in effective altruism, and interested in switching to direct work? Get in touch with these organisations.
Would hiring non-EA programmers be better because the counterfactuals are lower? It doesn't seem obvious to me that value-alignment of software engineers is as (or more) important as experience. On the other hand, it could build career capital for the EA developers (but their counterfactual job might be better for career capital, depending on what it is).
Value-alignment of the team is super important, so non-EA team members are risky, less motivated, and usually don't work out.
Also EA engineers are going to stick around in the movement, so if you train them up and get to know them the community will benefit in the future, whereas non-EAs will go elsewhere.
Finally, because you have to pay the non-EAs more, I think much of the benefits get used up.
Consider: Option 1: Hire a non-EA at $100k per year, who generates $200k of value -> surplus of $100k. If they hadn't worked for you, they would have donated $0... (read more)