- I sometimes hear prospective employees feel like they are "overqualified" for EA positions by trying to compare relevant metrics. E.g. "you don't need a product manager if you have less than 5,000 page views per day." I think this is misunderstanding a key difference between altruistic and profit-motivated organizations.
- Many companies only capture a small fraction of the value they produce. Nordhaus 2004 estimates that companies capture about 2% of the value they create through innovation.
- This means that companies underinvest their products (relative to the social optimum), because they can't capture the value from improved products.
- Therefore, altruistic organizations should invest substantially more into their products than comparable for-profit organizations do.
- As a concrete example: Reddit has approximately one employee per 600,000 users, whereas this Forum has approximately one employee per 13,000.[1] Interestingly, this is almost exactly the 50x multiple Nordhaus would predict.[2]
- I would further argue that it's multiple orders of magnitude more valuable to attract a user to the EA Forum than to Reddit, so the 50x multiple should be even higher, though obviously I have a bias.
- I think this adjustment for externalities is still not actually the right way to make career decisions – you should think more about the impact you have, not how some arbitrary metric compares – but if you are going to consider arbitrary metrics, I think you should consider adjusting by a large amount.
Some of these ideas are also referenced in the tech entrepreneurship 80 K article.
CEA Online, the team supporting this forum, has current openings for for UI, UX, or Graphic Designer, Product Manager, Full-Stack Engineer.
- ^
Reddit data taken from https://backlinko.com/reddit-users. There are four people who work full-time on the Forum (JP, Sarah, Clifford, Lizka); without evidence I will claim that the portion of operational staff who support them add up to a 5th FTE. Forum MAU count from Google analytics, trailing 28 days ending May 17, 2022.
- ^
Of course, this is oversimplified. For example, presumably there are diminishing returns to labor, so naïvely multiplying employees by 50 is too simplistic.
Ah I see — thanks!