Comment by palata
11 hours ago
> I'm certain that he's not doing this because he wants more money.
There are many reasons to change job. The pay is always one of them (if you don't work for money, it's not called a job, is it?).
> join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.
Obviously, it's better to believe that what Anthropic is doing is good for humanity when you decide to go working for them. But it is at the very least debatable.
I was a part of the Zulip project as a contributor and have contributed > 100 commits to `zulip/zulip` and also admire Tim a ton. But, leaving you're life's work to work on "long-term benifit of humanity" at Anthropic doesn't sound right to me. I am guessing Tim isn't going to work on safety research or interpretability side of Anthropic, that's not his expertise. Hence, leaving Zulip to help build anthropic a new software is meh. There are labs who actually care about people and aren't pretentious like Anthropic. Nevertheless, wish him, alya and rest of the team all the best; they are genuinely nice people. I don't know if I'll have interest in sticking to the project anymore though (+ I am not sure about other core member's status like Anders -- that will affect my decision too).
> There are many reasons to change job. The pay is always one of them (if you don't work for money, it's not called a job, is it?).
Not at the same scale as this, but I've seen friends deliberately choose to get paid less, perhaps much less money, because they wanted to do something. Video games for example, does not pay well, but it may be your passion. Banking pays very well, but it's hard to find any significant emotional involvement.
You can probably argue that's what I did, but it's complicated because I'm hard work. I can't stand debt but I also don't like the feeling of not knowing how to spend all the money. I can say that it's surprisingly hard to get people who are hiring you to accept that (a) the number you put in their mandatory "previous salary" box is correct and yet (b) yes you did understand that they have fixed pay scales and can't possibly match that.