Hi John,

[Context: I work in People Ops for CEA and have been involved in designing our compensation strategies.]

Thanks for posting about this. I can give more context on CEA's side, at least. 

With regards to the required level of skill/experience, I'd say we consider them different. We are aiming to hire for the content role as a specialist. We currently have four broad bands (excluding the ED/CEO whose salary is set by the board), and the specialist band is second to the top . "Junior" would be the bottom band for us. (That said, I'd still expect us to offer someone joining at the junior level 10-25% more than what's listed as the AMF salary above, if they were in the UK.)

Another potential factor that might contribute to the size of this pay gap is that I believe some orgs. also compensate their operational staff at lower rates than other staff. I don’t know whether this is true for AMF. CEA has chosen not to do this as a) we think their work is comparably valuable to non-operational staff b) deciding who was in an "operations" role is not as straightforward for as it might be for some organizations.

Another factor here might be location. We adjust salaries for location and it seems like AMF might not, although I’m not sure. If we were to hire someone in a place with a lower cost of living than the locations listed, we would offer a lower rate of pay than what's listed above.

In general, we aim to have salaries that allow us to attract top talent, with the goal that for most roles, people don't have to take a massive pay cut compared to their counterfactual options to join us. As we've wanted to attract more mid-career people, this has become increasingly important to us. Figuring where the balance point is between compensating sufficiently highly such that salaries aren't so low they are dissuasive and conservatively enough we're not wasting money or causing bad ecosystem effects is difficult and I'm not sure we're getting it right.

Against malaria foundation is an NGO which is EA affiliated, so would have a big market outside of EA where there is more expectation that working for an NGO means a lower salary. They may also consider a lower standard of applicant than the direct EA job.

Also they may just be very different jobs it's not clear.

This doesn't answer the conundrum in any way sorry!

Donors to AMF likely have different expectations about charitable spending than donors to CEA in that donors to the former likely care more about minimising overhead, while donors to CEA care more about the job being done well even if they have to pay more for it.

they do not seem to differ dramatically in expected level of expertise / experience

They don't? You didn't include job descriptions, but from the titles alone I would guess content specialist is the harder job to find good candidates for.

The following statement by the acting head of CEA Online (the branch which includes the CS) may help explain some of the difference:

As mentioned elsethread, these salaries are aimed at not being huge sacrifices for tech workers living in expensive american cities, while also not being egregiously luxurious in lower salary places like Oxford. I imagine some engineers might look at that number and think it’s low compared to their expectations, and some non-engineer Brits might think it’s quite high.

So I think the CS salary may be pulled upward by the need to keep people who live in expensive US cities in the applicant pool, and (possibly) by a desire to avoid significant disparities between tech and non-tech employees at CEA.

Are we sure the domains being compared are similar in supply and demand? Ex. Low expertise/experience swe make more than similarly experienced ui designers

Different organizations have different compensation philosophies and compensation strategies, which results in different tactics. It is hard to say anything with confidence unless we know all the details of each of these two roles, including the context they function in. If we believe that the world is a perfectly fair and just place, then there are probably various compensable factors present in one job that the other lacks (maybe it is higher stress, or has higher standards of performance, or requires a wider array of knowledge). But there is also a lot of 'noise' in reality, so there are probably some arbitrary factors that affect the pay also.

Compensation is a complicated topic that everyone has an opinion about and yet which very few people have done any research/reading about.^[1] I've only read a little bit about it so far. But if you would like to learn a bit more the book Pay, by Kevin F. Hallock is a very good introduction. The review article Compensation, Benefits, and Total Rewards: A Bird's-Eye (Re)View also gives a decent overview if you'd rather read 20 pages than 200.

1. ^{^}

   So in that sense it is similar to raising children, or finding love, or other topics that people have widely varying views on.

The funny thing is, (I don't have any inside info here, this is all pure speculation) I wouldn't be shocked if the AMF position ended up being more competitive of the two, despite the lower salary.

Normally non-profit salaries tend to be lower than for-profit salaries even when skills are equivalent because people are altruistic and therefore willing to work for less if the work is prosocial and meaningful and fits their interests. For example, the position of a professor is more competitive and has a higher skill requirement than industrial R&D jobs in the same field, but the latter is more compensated.

I believe that in the EA community this effect is much more pronounced. Some (not all) EA orgs are likely in a somewhat unique position where even if you offer 28-35k and less, you may still be getting applications from people with degrees from top schools who could be making double or triple or quadruple that on the open market, and at some point when you notice that your top applicants are mostly motivated by impact and not money you might become uncertain as to whether or not offering more money actually further improves the applicant pool.

In such an environment,  salaries aren't exactly set by market forces in the same way as a normal job. Instead, they are set by organizational culture and decision making. This is likely all the more true for remote roles, where lack of geography constraints makes expected pay among equally skilled candidates even more variable.

Some people see the situation and think "so let's spend less money and be more cost effective, leaving more money for the beneficiaries and the impact and attracting more donations from our reduced overhead". They aren't in it for money, and they figure all the truly committed candidates who make the best hires aren't either.

Other people see the situation and and think "nevertheless, let's pay people competitive rates, even if we could get away with less" either out of a sense of fair play (e.g. let's not underpay people doing such important work just because there are some people who are altruistic enough to accept that, that's not nice) or the golden rule (e.g. they themselves want a competitive salary and would feel weird offering an uncompetitive one) or or because they figure they will get better candidates or more long term career sustainability and personnel retention that way. 

One of these perspectives is probably the correct one for a given use-case, but I'm not sure which one and reasonable people seem to diverge.

(Of course it's not just personal preference - some organizations, and some positions inside organizations, have more star-power than others and so have this option more. And it's also a cause area thing - some cause areas perceive themselves as more funding-bottlenecked where every $2 in salary is one less mosquito net, while others aren't implicitly making that comparison as much, pouring extra money into their project wouldn't necessarily improve their project and the true bottleneck is something else.
 

Even if one believes they can make more impact at AMF, they would have to give up 20k pounds in salary to pass on the content specialist role. We learned recently to consider earning less, but this may still be quite the conundrum. What do you think?

As far as the personal conundrum goes, I guess you have to ask yourself how much you value earning more, and consider if you'd be willing to pay the difference to buy the greater impact that you'd achieve by taking the position you believe is higher impact to take.