I sometimes hear of people not wanting to work for EA organizations out of a fear that they are "overqualified". I believe the reasoning is something like:
- In the for-profit sector, projects with some characteristics (e.g. building a website with less than 100k pageviews/day) are usually done by more junior people.
- This is presumably because it's not cost-effective to hire more senior staff (i.e. the value senior staff add to the project is less than the extra cost of hiring them).
- Projects in EA organizations have these characteristics.
- Therefore, there is not enough benefit for it to be worth having senior people do these tasks in EA organizations over having junior people do them.
I think (3) is not justified for a few reasons.
The most important is that it equivocates between "an analogous profit maximizing entity might not hire a senior person" and "senior people don't provide much benefit". It's basically always possible to do things faster/cheaper/with fewer errors/with a better user experience/etc. I don't think it's possible for any mortal to be "overqualified" in the sense of "could not perform the task better than someone who was less skilled," for all but the most trivial of tasks.
Often, the reason it's not profitable to hire more senior people is more about leverage than about their ability to perform better. E.g. maybe a senior software engineer makes any website they work on 10% better than a junior engineer would – they can make a small website 10% better just as easily as they can make a large website 10% better. But they will still only get hired to work on the large website because a 10% increase in a large website is a greater absolute return than a 10% increase in a small website.
Startups often have their early success boosted by "overqualified" founders doing all the work – customers are impressed that they get to speak to the brilliant founders instead of normal salespeople so they are more likely to purchase the product, bugs get fixed more quickly because there are extremely talented engineers working on fixing them, etc. It's common for startups to hit problems once they grow and have "correctly qualified" people in their positions, because they no longer benefit from those advantages.
Smaller EA organizations are somewhat like these startups whose success can be boosted by "overqualified" employees.
A secondary reason is that the intuition that EA organizations are "small" seems to often be based on comparing inputs rather than outputs. It's true that this forum is read by many fewer people than, say, view the home and garden section on Amazon.com, but I suspect that global welfare is more easily increased by improving this site than Amazon (both because there is lower hanging fruit, and because the value generated per viewer is higher).
Finally, something I underestimated before working at an EA organization is the extent to which the novelty of EA work meant that similar tasks are more challenging. I've created a software product used by most hospitals in the US, started a successful company, and am now managing one of the smallest teams I've ever managed, but am not at all finding it easy. Things like impact analysis have received ~0% as much focus from experts as for-profit analogs like fiscal accounting have, making it much more challenging to answer basic questions like "was our project successful?"
A better argument for believing that one is overqualified
Often when employers speak of someone as being "overqualified", what they mean is "this person might get bored with the work or dissatisfied with the low pay and quit to work somewhere else." Expecting to be bored with a job is a very good reason to not take it, but I would encourage people to ask prospective employers about this issue directly, instead of not applying or being worried about being "overqualified".
80,000 Hours has written about how passions are more malleable than most people expect, but briefly I will say that working at EA organizations has provided me with a lot of value I did not get in the for-profit sector: e.g. my social network is well integrated with EA, so at social gatherings I regularly hear how projects I worked on help someone get a job or pass a law or something else that's cool, which basically never happened when I was at a for-profit.
In CEA’s most recent hiring round, we offered candidates a "tour of duty" format, where they would join us for one or two years, after which we would support them transitioning to other employers. I'm not sure if we will do this in the future (it might have been more confusing than helpful), but I would encourage anyone who's worried about being overqualified for some EA position to consider a "tour of duty" approach and join the EA organization for a year or two.
Charity work is valued at ~0 in many career paths, meaning that there is an opportunity cost from pursuing it but it’s not actively harmful. Exploring alternative career paths is valuable for your own planning, even ignoring the good you would do, and I expect that for many people the benefit of exploring additional paths outweighs the opportunity cost.
I’d like to thank Aaron Gertler, Julia Wise, and Michelle Hutchinson for reading a draft of this, and Michelle for suggesting I write about it.
Another point I've heard made a few times (and at-least-a-little agree with):
Let's say Bob transitions from COO at a mid-sized org to finance manager at a small org. Bob has done finances before, and within a few months has set up some excellent systems. He now only needs to spend 10 hours a week on finances, and tells his manager (Alice) that he's interested in taking on other projects.
Alice doesn't currently have projects for Bob, but Alice and Bob saw this coming and set clear expectations that Bob would sometimes run out of things to do. Bob was fine with this, he's happy to spend his extra time at home with the kids.
But also... Bob notices that their HR systems could use an upgrade. He writes up a plan and shares it at the next team meeting. Some people think this is a good idea, but the HR manager doesn't want to implement the plan and Alice doesn't want to put Bob in charge of HR systems.
Bob is a little confused but shrugs and goes back to building a chicken coop.
This happens a few more times, and it's taking up more and more of Alice's time to review Bob's proposals. She likes Bob's ideas and wants to find ways to implement them, but doesn't like Bob's leadership style so doesn't want to put him in a leadership position. A couple other people in the org do like Bob's style, and are confused about why he isn't put in charge of more projects.
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So the takeaway is something like: even if you are hiring an experienced person to a junior role, you are essentially hiring them to a senior role because they think like a senior hire. If their work and ideas are not given the space to thrive (which means basically treating them as senior staff), then it'll likely be a source of tension.
It's harder to carve out a senior-shaped-hole at an organization and higher stakes to hire someone with more seniority (which in my mind means autonomy over a budget and maybe a report or two). Organizations do this successfully all the time but it's a much more significant effort than hiring a junior role.
Or put another way: the more agent-y the person you hire, the more you'll need to be careful about principal-agent problems.
There is a bunch of nuance in here and various solutions, but I think it contributes to some hesitance around senior>junior transitions.
Ah - maybe your post is making the point "if they would make a good senior hire, it seems fine to hire them in a junior position". Maybe I was getting confused by the term, I've seen people labelled 'overqualified' when they are above average on a few dimensions but not all of them.
I'd have a harder time steel-manning a counterpoint to that. Maybe something about it not being stimulating enough so risking turnover... but that doesn't hold much water in my mind.