Apologies, I did think you were speaking for CE in an official capacity.

I don't know what the right salary for founders is. But I feel like your statement has a missing mood. From your tone I expected a salary range similar to lightcone- a substantial haircut from free market wages, but not a dramatic shift in the kind of life you're able to have. But $25k-$45k is a major sacrifice, prohibitively so for many very reasonable circumstances.

 Maybe you're okay with losing those founders and the benefits make up for it, but I think the appropriate mood is "it's sad funders won't cover more, and we accept that this will lose us a lot of people". And in practice it seems like you're not getting enough applicants 

And I suspect it is costing you a lot of people, who either you're not sampling or aren't accurately reporting their preferences. I personally wouldn't rule out working at those wages in absolutely every circumstance (and I'm currently working at 1/10th of my normal fee, because I care about the project), but my default interpretation is someone doesn't value the role or my work very much. And the potential of earning up to $80k, with no compensation for the risk, doesn't change that. 

I still don't know what the right salary is. I suspect there are a lot of other factors that haven't been brought up yet that make the salary more reasonable, like an expectation founders will live in very low COL areas. But I would like the sacrifice level of the salary to be explicit common knowledge. 

 

aspirational inclusiveness

Oh I like this phrase a lot

That post says opens with

If we don't find more potential founders we may not be able to launch charities in Tobacco Taxation and Fish Welfare

This is apparently a pattern

In recent years we have had more charity ideas than we have been able to find founders for.

Seems pretty plausible they value a marginal new charity at $100k, or even $1m, given the amount of staff time and seed funding that go into each participant. 

I also suspect they're more limited by applicant quality than number of spaces.

That post further says

it is true that we get a lot of applicants (~3 thousand). But, and it’s a big but, ~80% of the applications are speculative, from people outside the EA community and don’t even really understand what we do. Of the 300 relevant candidates we receive, maybe 20 or so will make it onto the program.

If you assume that the late applicants recruited by posting on EAF are in the "relevant" pool, those aren't terrible odds.^[1] And they provide feedback even to first round applicants, which is a real service to applicants and cost to CE.

I don't know if they're doing the ideal thing here, but they are doing way better than I imagined from your comment. 

1. ^{^}

   I don't love treating relevant and "within EA" as synonyms, but my guess is this that the real point is "don't even really understand what we do", and EA is a shorthand for the group that does.

Oops, should have read more carefully, sorry about that.

There's a thing in EA where encouraging someone to apply for a job or grant gets coded as "supportive", maybe even a very tiny gift. But that's only true when [chance of getting job/grant] x [value of job/grant over next best alternative] > [cost of applying].

One really clear case was when I was encouraged to apply for a grant my project wasn't a natural fit for,  because "it's quick and there are few applicants".   This seemed safe, since the deadline was in a few hours. But in those few hours the number of applications skyrocketed- I want to say 5x but my memory is shaky- presumably because I wasn't the only person the grantmaker encouraged.  I ended up wasting several hours of my and co-founders time before dropping out, because the project really was not a good fit for the grant.

[if the grantmaker is reading this and recognizes themselves: I'm not mad at you personally]. 

I've been guilty of this too, defaulting to encouraging people to try for something without considering the costs of making the attempt, or the chance of success. It feels so much nicer than telling someone "yeah you're probably not good enough".

A lot of EA job postings encourage people to apply even if they don't think they're a good fit. I expect this is done partially because orgs genuinely don't want to lose great applicants who underestimate themselves, and partially because it's an extremely cheap way to feel anti-elitist. 

I don't know what the solution is here. Many people are miscalibrated on their value or their competition, all else being equal you do want to catch those people. But casting wider net entails more bycatch.

It's hard to accuse an org of being mean to someone who they encouraged to apply for a job or grant. But I think that should be in the space of possibilities, and we should put more emphasis on invitations to apply for jobs/grants/etc being clear, and less on welcoming. This avoids wasting the time of people who were predictably never going to get the job. 

I'd be very interested in information about the second claim: that the incubator round already had 2k applicants and thus the time from later applicants was a waste.

Did you end up accepting late applicants? Did they replace earlier applicants who would otherwise have been accepted, or increase the total class size? Do you have a guess for the effects of the new participants?

Or more generally: how do you think about the time unaccepted applicants spend on applications?

My guess is that evaluating applications is expensive so you wouldn't invite more if it didn't lead to a much higher quality class, but I'm curious for specifics. CE has mentioned before that the gap between top and median participant is huge, which I imagine plays into the math.

Google was producing the Android OS and its own flagship phones well before the Pixel, so I consider it to predate my knowledge of the policy (although maybe the policy started before I got there, which I've now dated to 4/1/2013)

the policy was commonly announced when I worked at google (2014), I'm sure anyone else who was there at the time would confirm its existence. In terms of "haven't grown anything since", I haven't kept close track but can't name one and frequently hear people say the same.