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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? T

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.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    Seems like it’s Eurpoean incomes that are insanely low, why not get outraged about that? Your attitude creates a race to the bottom.
    - sorenjan 5y ago
      We get by just fine. Education, health care, vacation, parental leave, child care, a house and two cars. What else do you need? It's not about a race to the bottom, it's the vast differences in pay in the same society. If the median real salary is $35 000, why should a 25 year old web developer make 3X that? Some software engineers act like what they do is so much more important and difficult than what everyone else do, it's a bit disturbing. Of course, people in finance are even worse.
      - TomVDB 5y ago
        Your POV is one way of looking at it. Another one is that the companies that we work for make insane profits despite the sky high compensation. In isolation, without major legislation that depresses those profits too, it at least makes more sense to share the spoils with the shareholders and the employees than with the shareholders alone. I didn’t think it would happen at the time, but compensation saw a significant jump in the years after the compensation cartel (Apple, Google, Intuit etc.) was broken up.
        iSnow 5y ago
        >Another one is that the companies that we work for make insane profits despite the sky high compensation. I guess that's at the core of the discussion. Wikipedia isn't seen by many as yet another tech company there to make insane profits.
      - munchhausen 5y ago
        As a SWE in the EU who is eyeing the software industry in the US with considerable envy, I would not say we get by just fine, at all. I don't see how you could afford all the things you mentioned on an average SWE salary in Europe. I have a very much above average SWE salary, and don't seem to be in any danger of getting a house and two cars anytime soon. I rent and don't have any cars, actually. Healthcare is free, for the bare essentials. I pay a crazy amount per year for (private) healthcare, because the standard, mandatory insurance covers just about nothing of what I actually need. Consider that every month, I pay into the government healthcare system a lump sum which is approximately equivalent to the median salary in my country. This doesn't buy me any benefits - I get the same minimal coverage as everyone else. Socialism at its finest. I'd be OK with it if the money actually went towards worthy causes. That is not the case, however - I am pretty sure most of the healthcare budget goes towards funding an antiquated, insanely oversized bureaucratic system. There's a whole social class of bureaucrats on the government payroll, who do pretty much nothing at all - you won't find them in the office after 3PM - who collect a meager but secure salary for their utter lack of effort and general uselessness. More and more, I am jaded by the illusion of a "fairer" society in the EU, which often ends up being just a case of "everyone is guaranteed to get the same low-quality treatment".
  - hugi 5y ago
    If you pay average salary you get average work (or below). Good programmers in Germany do not work for €50.000. I'm based in Iceland and do contract work for German companies, and I assure you none of the people I work with are even close to €50.000. Perhaps because they're not average but good. Here in Iceland €50.000 might possibly get you a recent graduate. Myself, I wouldn't hire a programmer at that low pay though, graduate or not. A couple of my friends (good programmers, not "average") who have moved to Sweden and Denmark get similar salaries to what they got up here in Iceland. Higher salary gets you talented people.
    - corty 5y ago
      You can pay 100kEUR to a European and get a top 10% developer, or you can pay 100kEUR in the US and get a mediocre one.
      - mratsim 5y ago
        In Europe healthcare doesn't eat your salary like in the US.
        CRConrad 5y ago
        So why should Wikipedia supporters donate to wildly overpriced American healthcare?
  - humanlion87 5y ago
    If the employees/CEO live in San Francisco I don't think paying them European salaries will be fair right? They wouldn't be able to afford rent with ~50k range salary. I think your argument makes sense if Wikipedia had been founded/has their HQ in Germany and was paying San Francisco salaries with their donations.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      What's to say an online encyclopaedia has to be run from San Francisco?
  - louis___ 5y ago
    > Why should I donate to people who earn more than twice my salary? If one look for reasons not to donate, they can always be found by thousands. I find it beautiful that there is such a site as Wikipedia, that is free and open, and I am happy to contribute a tiny bit to it.
    - jiofih 5y ago
      If you go back to the start of this discussion, this is not about not being happy for paying to support Wikipedia. I’d be happy to do that too. It’s the fact that they are begging for donations while hoarding $300M in cash, and only 5% of your donation goes towards Wikipedia itself. The rest is on the hands of a foundation for them to use at will.
- 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.

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.
- FredPret 5y ago
  Seems like it’s Eurpoean incomes that are insanely low, why not get outraged about that? Your attitude creates a race to the bottom.
  - sorenjan 5y ago
    We get by just fine. Education, health care, vacation, parental leave, child care, a house and two cars. What else do you need? It's not about a race to the bottom, it's the vast differences in pay in the same society. If the median real salary is $35 000, why should a 25 year old web developer make 3X that? Some software engineers act like what they do is so much more important and difficult than what everyone else do, it's a bit disturbing. Of course, people in finance are even worse.
    - TomVDB 5y ago
      Your POV is one way of looking at it. Another one is that the companies that we work for make insane profits despite the sky high compensation. In isolation, without major legislation that depresses those profits too, it at least makes more sense to share the spoils with the shareholders and the employees than with the shareholders alone. I didn’t think it would happen at the time, but compensation saw a significant jump in the years after the compensation cartel (Apple, Google, Intuit etc.) was broken up.
      - iSnow 5y ago
        >Another one is that the companies that we work for make insane profits despite the sky high compensation. I guess that's at the core of the discussion. Wikipedia isn't seen by many as yet another tech company there to make insane profits.
    - munchhausen 5y ago
      As a SWE in the EU who is eyeing the software industry in the US with considerable envy, I would not say we get by just fine, at all. I don't see how you could afford all the things you mentioned on an average SWE salary in Europe. I have a very much above average SWE salary, and don't seem to be in any danger of getting a house and two cars anytime soon. I rent and don't have any cars, actually. Healthcare is free, for the bare essentials. I pay a crazy amount per year for (private) healthcare, because the standard, mandatory insurance covers just about nothing of what I actually need. Consider that every month, I pay into the government healthcare system a lump sum which is approximately equivalent to the median salary in my country. This doesn't buy me any benefits - I get the same minimal coverage as everyone else. Socialism at its finest. I'd be OK with it if the money actually went towards worthy causes. That is not the case, however - I am pretty sure most of the healthcare budget goes towards funding an antiquated, insanely oversized bureaucratic system. There's a whole social class of bureaucrats on the government payroll, who do pretty much nothing at all - you won't find them in the office after 3PM - who collect a meager but secure salary for their utter lack of effort and general uselessness. More and more, I am jaded by the illusion of a "fairer" society in the EU, which often ends up being just a case of "everyone is guaranteed to get the same low-quality treatment".
- hugi 5y ago
  If you pay average salary you get average work (or below). Good programmers in Germany do not work for €50.000. I'm based in Iceland and do contract work for German companies, and I assure you none of the people I work with are even close to €50.000. Perhaps because they're not average but good. Here in Iceland €50.000 might possibly get you a recent graduate. Myself, I wouldn't hire a programmer at that low pay though, graduate or not. A couple of my friends (good programmers, not "average") who have moved to Sweden and Denmark get similar salaries to what they got up here in Iceland. Higher salary gets you talented people.
  - corty 5y ago
    You can pay 100kEUR to a European and get a top 10% developer, or you can pay 100kEUR in the US and get a mediocre one.
    - mratsim 5y ago
      In Europe healthcare doesn't eat your salary like in the US.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        So why should Wikipedia supporters donate to wildly overpriced American healthcare?
- humanlion87 5y ago
  If the employees/CEO live in San Francisco I don't think paying them European salaries will be fair right? They wouldn't be able to afford rent with ~50k range salary. I think your argument makes sense if Wikipedia had been founded/has their HQ in Germany and was paying San Francisco salaries with their donations.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    What's to say an online encyclopaedia has to be run from San Francisco?
- louis___ 5y ago
  > Why should I donate to people who earn more than twice my salary? If one look for reasons not to donate, they can always be found by thousands. I find it beautiful that there is such a site as Wikipedia, that is free and open, and I am happy to contribute a tiny bit to it.
  - jiofih 5y ago
    If you go back to the start of this discussion, this is not about not being happy for paying to support Wikipedia. I’d be happy to do that too. It’s the fact that they are begging for donations while hoarding $300M in cash, and only 5% of your donation goes towards Wikipedia itself. The rest is on the hands of a foundation for them to use at will.
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.