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.
It's definitely a worry. The main way I'm judging this is how important salary seems in our final negotiations with the short-list of candidates.
Of course, if all the filtering occurs at an earlier stage, then we'll never find out, but I don't think that's the case. I don't think people use salary as a "yes or no" filter (rather it's one of many criteria that have a role at each stage of the process); we often advertise the roles without stating the salaries; when I talk to people about the roles early on they often aren't aware of what the salaries are.
Another worry is that people care about salary much more than they're willing to let on. It would be hard to pick this up.
One reason why salary is less important than you might first think is that "not caring about salary" is well correlated with "EA-ness" and that's a trait we value very highly when hiring. So, usually the candidates who care a great deal about salary aren't the ones we're most excited to hire.
The point I was making about openness/transparency is that I suspect most people who have been around EA for a while have an ok idea of what (say) CEA employees earn because you can get a very rough idea of that very quickly from scanning any of the budgets. As you correctly pointed out, they're also just fairly typical for the wider non-profit sector. Any for many engineers those impressions will amount to a 50%-ish pay cut.
Once they have that impression, I'm surprised you don't think people use salary as a 'yes or no' filter. I definitely think people ha... (read more)