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.
"In our own hiring, we haven't often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong)."
If your hiring structured in such a way that you would notice if it was?
By which I mean, if there are 40 people who would be a good fit for a role you are hiring for, and 90% of them aren't willing to earn less than $60k, do you have any way you would expect to find out about that fact? I'd sort of expect them to just not apply in the first place because they know they won't get paid that much (ironically, due to the commendable transparency and openness of most EA organisations). And so you only hear from the other 4, where salary might be a concern but it's not the primary concern.
That's a deliberately extreme set of numbers but hopefully demonstrates the point I'm trying to make.
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 sala... (read more)