Seriously? This place already has a rep for being a personality cult. Let's not purposefully reinforce it. ;)

Most grad students work half time! We pay ~$45k/yr full time rate (so most students get around $28k/yr) plus insurance and tuition. How much is a cool story worth?

No. Same here.

It's not a question of SIAI not being good enough for Yvain, it's a question of whether they might both do even better if he pursues something else. It clearly sounds like he's pursing a different path than joining SIAI now, so he must have done at least some of the math. He's in med school according to his webpage, so I suspect his prospects for helping the cause might be higher if he does well as a doctor and sends every dime he doesn't need (say his salary as a doctor less $36k/yr) to SIAI. It certainly seems like it might be a waste of his current efforts to drop his medical aspirations and become a curriculum producer at SIAI, but I might be suffering from a form of the Sunk Cost Fallacy here.

There's no indication that this is entry-level. Also, if you look further on that page, you'll see that the median full-time employed person over 25 years of age with a Bachelor's degree in the US makes $56k/yr. My read of the position description leans towards college grads given some of the qualifications that they want. If you look at overall median household incomes in the Bay Area, you'll see that they top $74k/yr depending on the county of choice. Given the way that full-time vs. part-time seems to skew the data, I still say they're undershooting for their area of the country.

Don't sell yourself short. Unless you're willing to forgo income now for the possibility that the movement needs you now, perhaps it will be better off if you go and make a lot more money with your skills, improve the world through some different work, and give as much of your income as you don't want or need to SIAI instead.

Here's how typical people read typical job ads (typically), especially ones that are this long: Read the title. Scan for a dollar sign or the words "salary" or "salary range". If both are good enough, scan for the first bulleted list of qualifications. Most ads call these "required qualifications". If the reader meets enough of these, they scan for the second bulleted list of qualifications which is usually called "preferred qualifications". Then, if they meet enough of both of these, they'll go back and start reading in detail to understand the position better before they consider sending in an application or contacting the hiring entity for more information.

I suspect that most people expected your job ad to follow this form since it almost does. Your sections are labeled, effectively "needed" and "bonus". It's not until you get to reading the now-bolded details that you find out that not all of the "needed" stuff is required of the applicant and that essentially any one of the needed qualifications will be sufficient. Basically, you don't have any required qualifications, but you do have a general description of the sort of person you're interested in and a list of preferred qualifications. In this regard, the ad is defective as it fails to comport with the usual format of a typical ad.

Non-standard forms get experienced people's hackles up. It often indicates that there's something unprofessional about the organization.

Like I said in response to Anna, I'm not offended. I just think you could have done better in setting expectations.

I'm sorry if I came across as overly critical. I had a flashback to the job ad that EY promoted in September of '10 which came off in a similar way to me (though, clearly, this one has much more detail), and that probably drove the tone of my posts. I'm certainly not offended.

Now, that being said, I've noticed that there are a number of young idealists in this community, and I think it would be good if we could help them understand what they're getting into. We have a responsibility to help the up and coming among us to make good decisions. Making it clear that the SIAI "standard" salary is way under market for skillful people and that applicants should understand the opportunity costs associated with working for a non-profit for a period of time should be part of the job description when it comes a rationalist source to this audience. I presume that EY knows this, and so I attribute the lack of it to something being fishy. If nothing's fishy, then this discussion let us clear the air.

Agreed.

We pay grad students ~$45k for 40 hours a week. Most of them only work half time, so they take home a lot less than that. Of course they also get health insurance. Also, this doesn't appear to be seeking a student.

Edited to add: We pay their tuition, too.

It's also possible, for example, that they don't actually want people with work experience doing these things and would settle for folks who are decent at them but have so far only done these activities as a hobby/self-training exercise. If that's the case, then $36k/yr might be OK, and it might be a good opportunity for someone to get these skills on their resume for a later job search in a relevant industry. If that's what they're really looking for, they should state it as such. Otherwise, I remain highly skeptical of the position.