6 ms·

I was expecting to see semi-outrageous, border line unjustifiable executive salaries after reading this comment and clicking on the direct link below. I guess

• sorenjan 5y ago
  What exactly is that CEO doing for that money? What important strategic decisions are there to make at Wikipedia? Why do they have to be San Francisco based? The annual real median personal income in the US in 2019 was $35,977[0], how can anyone think that $120k isn't a lot? Why should people around the world donate their hard earned money so that some employees in America can have Silicon Valley salaries? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
  • wizardofmysore 5y ago
    They probably need to pay a good salary to be able to hire folks who would otherwise join a FAANG.
  • hugi 5y ago
    I think it's absolutely great that Wikipedia is able to pay competitive salaries in a good location. It's probably one of the reasons why they can run such an amazing site. I consider my donations well spent.
    • sorenjan 5y ago
      The average software developer salary in Germany is €50 000 per year, just to take one western country as an example. I doubt Wikipedia would be much worse with European developers. American IT salaries are not the norm, and they're a bit insane. When your budget consists of donations, I think it's disrespectful to spend it on frivolous things like San Francisco salaries. The average programmer salary in Sweden is $50 000. Why should I donate to people who earn more than twice my salary?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • kaba0 5y ago
        You are not donating to a person. Also, how much does a company CEO make in Sweden typically? Also, how is it relevant? Should every company move to Thailand because it is cheaper there?
        • sorenjan 5y ago
          That comparison was aimed at the average salary of ~120k for all employees. And maybe there's a middle ground between moving everyone to Thailand and having a non profit operating on donated money based in the most expensive area in the world?
          • kaba0 5y ago
            If an existing talent-pool is located there, why exactly should they move? Is a small inefficiency a failing of a non-profit? No company is a perfectly efficient profit-making machine (even though for-profits like to drop morals for profit), why are we feeling tricked by a non-profit wasting some negligible percentage of donations, especially that 100% efficiency is frankly impossible?
            • jiofih 5y ago
              What talent pool? Wikipedia is not running any cutting edge tech that requires CS or research talent. We are feeling tricked because it’s about 5% efficient right now.
            • CRConrad 5y ago
              "A small inefficiency"?!? They're paying two to three times as much as they would have to pay anywhere else. That's not a "small" inefficiency, it's a pretty huge one.
        • zhdc1 5y ago
          I don't know if it's accurate, but several sites have it at 1,908K krona, which is about 230K USD. Add in the sector - I would imagine that tech CEOs earn more, even in Sweden - and cost of living, and 300K USD doesn't really seem that over the top.
    • rightbyte 5y ago
      > It's probably one of the reasons why they can run such an amazing site. The reason Wikipedia is amazing is the user generated content and community moderation/admin.
      • 20after4 5y ago
        Operating a network at the scale of Wikimedia's is no small task. AFAIK, The largest part of the budget goes to maintaining the servers and network (and paying the people who maintain them). It's also worth noting that many of Wikimedia's staff are remote. I think more of the engineers are based in Europe than in the US and salaries are scaled somewhat based on the cost of living in each employees city/region. Wikimedia salary is almost certainly lower than the big tech companies but still pretty good for a non-profit and the benefits provided are very good if not quite up to the google level of luxury. Disclosure: I work for the Wikimedia Foundation as a software engineer, however, I don't really know much about the financial details. Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion / observation and not representative of my employer.
        • jiofih 5y ago
          > AFAIK, The largest part of the budget goes to maintaining the servers and network It’s like you walked into this discussion without reading any of it. That is precisely the issue - less than 10% of the budget goes towards operating Wikipedia, and they’re still begging for money.
          • 20after4 5y ago
            I did read a substantial portion of the discussion before posting. I just don't believe that it's true that less than 10% goes to operating Wikipedia. Paying for legal staff who defend lawsuits and advocate for legal reforms that matter is part of "operating Wikipedia." Paying SREs to be on-call for incident response, plus routine upgrades of servers and racking new hardware is all part of "operating Wikipedia." Absolutely essential parts of operating Wikipedia certainly account for a lot more than 10% of the budget. Sure there is a lot of overhead and I'm sure some expenditures are non-essential. I just can't agree with your assessment. The overhead and excesses are quite certainly nowhere near 90%.
  • kaba0 5y ago
    So they should continue the great tactic of outsourcing work to poorer countries and call it a day? How is it good for anyone on Earth? It is a scummy thing whether done by non-profit or for profit company.
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    > What exactly is that CEO doing for that money? Well, managing a company with over a hundred million a year in revenue, for one.
    • ekianjo 5y ago
      When you beg for money I'm not sure you can call that revenue
    • randallsquared 5y ago
      Ah, ouroboros. :)
    • jiofih 5y ago
      You mean running a non-profit donation machine that funnels $100M to a war chest. Sure as hell takes a lot of work.
  • apercu 5y ago
    Just because the richest most powerful people have convinced you that 120k is a lot of money doesn't mean that it is. Especially in a city.
  • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "What exactly is that CEO doing for that money" What is CEO of Twitter doing that CEO of Wikipedia isn't? Why dont we have a discussion of their salaries? Both are working a job. Enployees are not donating, donors are
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      The CEO of Twitter has the task of maximising profit for shareholders; he needs to constantly be on the lookout for new opportunities to exploit. Apparently Twitter made a profit for the first time last year. The CEO of Wikimedia needs to hire and manage maybe 50 people, of whom about 5 need executive pay. I have no idea why Wikimedia needs 500 staff, if they could build the site with a team of 20 or so. It looks like a gravy train, and it quacks like a gravy train.
      • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        How is he doing in finding opportunities, has he found one yet? Whats the most revolutuonary thing they've done in the past five years, increased the character limit? You cannot possibly be serious, assigning twitter CEO some super demanding nebulous task of 'looking for new opportunities' but somehow downgrading Wikipedia one to that of a middle-manager. Both websites have a massive audience, both have new intiatives and the ones by wikipedia are actually productive. Both have to deal with attempts at censorship, inappropriate content, and both have to find a place in the rapidly shifting techbology landscape. This judgement 'if it's charity work then it's easy' comes across as dishonest and presumptios.
        • denton-scratch 5y ago
          I ditn't mean that he deserves his pay; I meant that's what he's paid for. He's paid to make money for shareholders. The Wikimedia execs are obviously not being paid to boost the bottom line; it's fat enough already. Wikipedia has never failed to cover it's costs. It doesn't need whizz-kids; it needs a few competent managers to make sure things don't completely fall apart. All the pointless side-projects just mean there's too much money washing around. Those side-projects could end up torpedoeing the main deal. Wikimedia makes enough in a year to set-up an endowment that would guarantee Wikipedia forever. Provided they prune the management tree - not so much because of salary costs, but because all those execs need projects, to prove they're not overpaid. It's nothing to do with "charity work". It's about maintaining mature code, taking care of the editor community (they're not much cop at that), and buying server racks. You don't need scores of leet execs for that - you just need a handful of competent and responsible administrators.
  • nemothekid 5y ago
    This is insane - are you arguing the Wikipedia should hire cheaper developers because they are a non-profit? Why stop there - why shouldn't Wikipedia fully cut corners and hire a body shop in a 3rd world country to build the site that millions of people use. wikipedia SHOULD be paying competitve salaries so that their best and brightest don't leave to join tire-fire companies like Facebook. I don't know why you think someone working at Wikipedia shouldn't be paid a competitive salary if they work there; if not they will go work for Facebook and the world slowly loses out on an incredible resource while companies like FB get stronger because of misaligned thinking. You are disparaging a CEO for making 350k/year for one of the highest trafficked sites in the world. For perspective, Zuckerberg's net worth places him at an effective salary of 3B/year (his current net worth divided by his age), nearly 10,000x of the guy you are saying is getting paid too much and potentially driving employees away from. If your problem is the median personal income you don't solve that by trying to reduce the CEO of wikipedia's salary. Focus on that - it's your kind of attitude (why should a burger flipper get paid $15/hr) that is actually suppressing wages in this country.
    • 5560675260 5y ago
      > hire a body shop in a 3rd world country This is a good question. Why shouldn't Wikipedia hire developers from 3rd world countries? It sure shows donation banners there. And there isn't anything magical about US developers and anything special about building sites for millions of people. Expertise is there, often used by US companies, salaries are not.
      • 20after4 5y ago
        Wikimedia hires developers from all over the world. Although the pay scale is adjusted for cost of living, the lowest salary band is still much higher than the average salary of other companies hiring in, for example, a lower-income area of the Midwest US.
    • mithr 5y ago
      > are you arguing the Wikipedia should hire cheaper developers because they are a non-profit? > You are disparaging a CEO for making 350k/year for one of the highest trafficked sites in the world The root of the question is: what determines compensation at companies? FAANG and SV startups are able to offer huge salaries not because they are "the highest trafficked sites in the world". It's because they rake in billions of dollars in revenue, by monetizing their users, and/or because they are VC-funded. If that wasn't the case, their employees' -- and certainly their executives' -- salaries would not be this high. When your company makes billions of dollars a year, and you can make the case to your board that you can increase or maintain that number, that's when your salary becomes high -- when the tradeoff to shareholder value between paying you a lot of money and the company making a lot of money tips your way. You don't just automatically get a high salary for running (or working in) a large company, if that company does not make this much money. The WMF is a nonprofit. It does not make any money aside from donations. When running its donation campaigns, it does so from the perspective of keeping internet knowledge alive, rather than saying "we think it's important to keep ourselves in the top 10% worldwide salary bracket". It's absoluetly fair to say that they need to raise a certain amount of money in order to keep the foundation going, and in order to maintain and develop it. But saying that it's "insane" to argue that a nonprofit should not be able to compete against a multi-billion dollar organization salary-wise is... strange? Most of the world's companies, startups or otherwise, in fact can't afford SV salaries, and so they look elsewhere -- there are many, many great developers, executives, and other folks around the world (and in the US, outside of SV) who work for less than FAANG salaries. This doesn't meant they aren't well-compensated, it just means that maybe they don't live in SV, and that yes, it's possible that FAANG will poach some of them. That's just something you have to live with when you don't make infinite amounts of money, like 99% of the world's companies. > For perspective, Zuckerberg's net worth places him at an effective salary of 3B/year ... For perspective, Facebook's revenue was about $85B last year. Using the world's fifth-richest person, who heads a fortune 150 company that is the F in the only five-lettered FAANG acronym that's frequently used as the barometer for high salaries, "for perspective", is also strange. The only perspective that Zuckerberg's salary offers is "what does the top 0.1% of the top 0.1% make?" > it's your kind of attitude (why should a burger flipper get paid $15/hr) that is actually suppressing wages in this country It's disingenuous at best to connect a nonprofit's executive staff making large salaries with raising the minimum wage. In fact, that's precisely the discrepancy that is making folks talk about the salaries at WMF: the foundation is soliciting donations from the folks making $15/h in order to pay its CEO $300k+ a year.
• ekianjo 5y ago
  Why do they have to be based in SF? that's wasting the donations' cash.
  • mkoubaa 5y ago
    Exactly. I don't mind a high salary by an average city standard but a high salary by SF standards is unjustifiable. Move to Atlanta or Dallas or Boise, idc
    • snuxoll 5y ago
      Boise ain’t cheap anymore - our COL may not be Bay Area crazy yet, but they many locals are rapidly being priced out of the area with stagnating wages and 2 bedroom apartments costing $1200/mo and rising fast. Add on our dysfunctional political mess and it’s not worth it anymore unless you’re wealthy and have a “got mine, fuck you” attitude.
• opportune 5y ago
  I was prepared to defend even $1m. $300k is an absolute bargain for a CEO running a $120m organization. There are 25 year olds getting paid that much to fix Jenkins pipelines
  • Aachen 5y ago
    So it's good because they're not corrupt? Or why should the company value be related to the compensation you receive? Like, this claim of "if everyone donated $2..." (or whatever this year's amount is) means they need more than a hundred thousand donations to pay this guy. And then the site is still at zero, getting nothing, that only pays one person at a "non profit". I'm all for fair compensation but if you dedicate yourself to running a non-profit, getting rich on people's donations (98% of whose money you took earning less than you) is a weird kind of definition of fair. If people want to get rich, maybe they should go and fix Jenkins pipelines for some adtech company where everyone's clear on what the goal is.
• denton-scratch 5y ago
  So don't run Wikipedia from the most expensive place to live on the planet. Wikimedia doesn't need to recruit top engineering talent; it's now a maintenance project, and it's open-source. Wikipedia content is created by volunteers, and significant editorial decisions are made by admins, who are usually volunteers. These volunteers mainly manage themselves. Most editors have never communicated with a staffer. This "Tides Trust" is not a proper destination for donor's money. No donor thinks their money will be spent on some random project dreamed up by Tides Trust. And it seems pretty irregular to me to treat a donation to the Tides Trust as "expenditure". The correct name for that money is "profit".
• jiofih 5y ago
  The salary aspect is not the worst of it, but the majority of cash that goes to non-Wikipedia funding. For some reason justifying the fairness of a $400k salary gets people more excited than discussing where the other $97 million are going.