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Where your money goes is detailed here: https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ (s

by Aachen 7y ago

Where your money goes is detailed here: https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ (see PDF downloads). The most recent data is from 2018, when they had an income of about 43M of which about 3.4M goes to the top 10 paid employees and the top two get 0.7M and 0.8M. The total salary budget is 35M, 25M of which are for "program services" (I guess creating content, developing the platform, etc.). This looks more reasonable compared to an organisation like Mozilla. Other things that jump out are half a million in legal fees and 1.8M for fundraising. In total, 43M out of 49M expenses in 2018 went to "program services", and they were running at a slight deficit. Looks pretty OK to me. Assuming "information technology" means hosting, that's about 5M. Doing that times 2.5 would indeed create quite a problem, and that's assuming they don't need more people working on it to keep up with the new crowd.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
malux85 7y ago
I wonder what the technology breakdown costs are? Is there anyone from KA engineering here who can satisfy our curiosity? Most of it would be outgoing bandwidth I’d think... maybe storage as well?
- dangoor 7y ago
  Our videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost. Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage. We're working to move to Go, which will make a big difference in this part of our bill. http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm
  - phonon 7y ago
    Did you try switching your interpreter to PyPy?
    - dangoor 7y ago
      That's not possible in that particular hosting environment. I believe some people have done experiments with PyPy, but the difference in performance is nothing like that we see with Go.
      - phonon 7y ago
        Oh, because you use App Engine Standard? Did you reconsider being locked into App Engine? What about App Engine Flexible? https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/custom-runtimes https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/custom-runt... PyPy might give you a 2-4x speedup, and if it wasn't for App Engine Standard, might be as easy as dropping it in instead of CPython, while Go is a total rewrite. Seems strange you wouldn't at least do a deeper dive on PyPy...
        dangoor 7y ago
        The fundamental reason that we started on this track is the need to get off of Python 2, which has reached EOL and from which the community is moving away. Because of APIs we're using and such, it's not easy to switch to Python 3. Because of API changes in GAE, moving to PyPy on Flex is also still difficult and doesn't solve the problem of still being on Python 2. Performance is one of several important reasons for the move to Go, and not the top reason.
  - malux85 7y ago
    Very cool and interesting thanks for your response!
  - samrosea 7y ago
    >Go is better supported than Kotlin by a broad range of editors Lol is this a joke when Kotlin is literally made by IntelliJ?

by Aachen 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

malux85 7y ago

I wonder what the technology breakdown costs are? Is there anyone from KA engineering here who can satisfy our curiosity? Most of it would be outgoing bandwidth I’d think... maybe storage as well?

dangoor 7y ago
Our videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost. Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage. We're working to move to Go, which will make a big difference in this part of our bill. http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm
- phonon 7y ago
  Did you try switching your interpreter to PyPy?
  - dangoor 7y ago
    That's not possible in that particular hosting environment. I believe some people have done experiments with PyPy, but the difference in performance is nothing like that we see with Go.
    - phonon 7y ago
      Oh, because you use App Engine Standard? Did you reconsider being locked into App Engine? What about App Engine Flexible? https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/custom-runtimes https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/custom-runt... PyPy might give you a 2-4x speedup, and if it wasn't for App Engine Standard, might be as easy as dropping it in instead of CPython, while Go is a total rewrite. Seems strange you wouldn't at least do a deeper dive on PyPy...
      - dangoor 7y ago
        The fundamental reason that we started on this track is the need to get off of Python 2, which has reached EOL and from which the community is moving away. Because of APIs we're using and such, it's not easy to switch to Python 3. Because of API changes in GAE, moving to PyPy on Flex is also still difficult and doesn't solve the problem of still being on Python 2. Performance is one of several important reasons for the move to Go, and not the top reason.
- malux85 7y ago
  Very cool and interesting thanks for your response!
- samrosea 7y ago
  >Go is better supported than Kotlin by a broad range of editors Lol is this a joke when Kotlin is literally made by IntelliJ?