N.B. You may be interested to read our follow-up post: Many EA orgs say they place a lot of financial value on their previous hire. What does that mean, if anything? And why aren't they hiring faster?
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For the third year running we've surveyed leadership at EA organisations about a range of issues where their views might be relevant to EAs’ career decisions:
It complements the 2018 EA Survey which aims to collect information about everyone who says "they can, however loosely, be described as an effective altruist."
We asked leaders about:
- what skills and experience they most need;
- what skills and experience they think the community as a whole will need in the future;
- how many donations they'd be willing to forego for their latest hires;
- their view on the relative cost-effectiveness of the different EA Funds, and which new funds they'd like to see;
- how urgent their need for extra donations and staff is;
- and various other issues.
We also surveyed people who identify as members of the EA community and work directly on problems like animal welfare and poverty, to see how their views on some of these questions would compare.
Here are some of the findings:
- EA organisation leaders said experience with operations or management, and generalist researchers are what their organisations will need most of over the next five years.
- They said the community as a whole will most need more government and policy experts, operations experience, machine learning/AI technical expertise, and skilled managers.
- Most EA organisations continue to feel more 'talent constrained' than funding constrained, rating themselves as 2.8/4 talent constrained and 1.5/4 funding constrained.
- Leaders thought the key bottleneck for the community is to get More dedicated people (e.g. work at EA orgs, research in AI safety/biosecurity/economics, ETG over $1m) converted from moderate engagement. The second biggest is to increase impact of existing dedicated people through e.g. better research, coordination, decision-making.
- We asked leaders their views on the relative cost-effectiveness of donations to four funds operated by the community. The median view was that the Long-Term Future fund was twice as effective as the EA Community fund, which in turn was 10 times more cost-effective than the Animal Welfare fund, and twenty times as cost-effective as the Global Health and Development fund. Individual views on this question varied very widely, though 18/28 respondents thought the Long-Term Future fund was the most effective.
- In addition, we asked several community members working directly on animal welfare and global development for their views on the relative cost-effectiveness of donations to these funds. About half these staff thought the fund in their own cause area was best, and about half thought either the EA Community fund or Long-Term Future fund was best. The median respondent in that group thought that the Animal Welfare fund was about 33% more cost-effective than the Long-Term Future fund and the EA Community fund - which were rated equally cost-effective - while the Global Health and Development fund was 33% as cost effective as either of those two. However, there was also a wide range of views among this group.
- The organisations surveyed were usually willing to forego over a million dollars in additional donations to get the right person in a senior role 3 years earlier, or several hundred thousand dollars for a junior hire.
Continue reading for details of the method and results...
Most answers were similar to what we found in 2017, so next year we expect to either ask different questions or interview a smaller number of people in greater depth and see whether their responses change after further reflection.
One possibility is because the EA organizations you hire for are focused on causes which also have a lot of representation in the non-profit sector outside of the EA movement, like global health and animal welfare, it's easier to attract talent which is both very skilled and very dedicated. Since a focus on the far-future is more limited to EA and adjacent communities, there is just a smaller talent pool of both extremely skilled and dedicated potential employees to draw from.
Far-future-focused EA orgs could be constantly suffering from this problem of a limited talent pool, to the point they'd be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to find an extremely talented hire. In AI safety/alignment, this wouldn't be weird as AI researchers can easily take a salary of hundreds of thousands at companies like OpenAI or Google. But this should only apply to orgs like MIRI or maybe FHI, which are far from the only orgs 80k surveyed.
So the data seems to imply leaders at EA orgs which already have a dozen staff would pay 20%+ of their budget for the next single marginal hire. So it still doesn't make sense that year after year a lot of EA orgs apparently need talent so badly they'll spend money they don't have to get it.
We have been screening fairly selectively on having an EA mindset, though, so I'm not sure how much larger our pool is compared to other EA orgs. In fact, you could maybe argue the opposite -- given the prevalence of long-termism among the most involved EAs, it may be harder to convince them to work for us.
From my vantage point, though, their actions don't seem consistent with this view.