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.
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 have an internal 'minimum number' or 'maximum pay cut' and then for everything after that number it becomes one of many considerations. My main concern is that large chunks of the EA meta space might be falling below that threshold for large chunks of dedicated EAs. But I don't know of any way to settle that theory more definitively, so having stated my impression I'll leave it at that.
In my experience, some people definitely use it as a yes/no filter, but many don't.
Also if you're considering a group of people, you'd expect everyone to have their minimum threshold at different points, which will create a continuum salary vs. talent tradeoff, so you'll still be able to get a sense of how bad the tradeoff is.