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2022 Salaries for those interested: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/

2022 Salaries for those interested: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824... Compensation Key Employees and Officers Base Related Other Jim O'leary (Vp, Engineering) $666,909 $0 $33,343 Ehren Kret (Chief Technology Officer) $665,909 $0 $8,557 Aruna Harder (Chief Operating Officer) $444,606 $0 $20,500 Graeme Connell (Software Developer) $444,606 $0 $35,208 Greyson Parrelli (Software Developer) $422,972 $0 $35,668 Jonathan Chambers (Software Developer) $420,595 $0 $28,346 Meredith Whittaker (Director / Pres Of Signal Messenger) $191,229 $0 $6,032 Moxie Marlinspike (Dir / Ceo Of Sig Msgr Through 2/2022) $80,567 $0 $1,104 Brian Acton (Pres/Sec/Tr/Ceo Sig Msgr As Of 2/2022) $0 $0 $0

darthrupert 3y ago
I'll ask the question you're implying out loud. Why does an organization with about 50 employees need 4 C-level executives, totalling about 2M compensation per year? Or perhaps it's 7 C-level executives (3 hiding under the "Software developer" title) totalling about 3,7M compensation per year? I'm absolutely not donating money to such a thing without an answer to this question. As a counterpoint, I am a member of a local (Finnish) non-profit organization, one of whose many services is Matrix. This costs me 40 euros per year and none of that money goes to C-level executives.
- temptemptemp111 3y ago
  [dead]
- jefozabuss 3y ago
  2M in comp distributed between 4 people is not a lot at this scale in my opinion.
  - philjohn 3y ago
    For a nonprofit?
    - EduardoBautista 3y ago
      A nonprofit doesn't mean it's a charity.
      - Lutger 3y ago
        A nonprofit asking for donations because of <good cause>? What is the definition of a charity then?
      - unsungNovelty 3y ago
        > 501(c)(3) tax-exemptions apply to entities that are organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary or educational purposes, for testing for public safety, to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals. Signal foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3). It is literally and legally a charity.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Charities aren't charities in the colloquial sense of the word. It's not a truly altruistic collaboration of volunteers giving their time to help a cause. Non-profit simply means that every bit of revenue made goes back into the company instead of given out to shareholders. Which includes paying your labor. It being a non-profit is exactly why we can view the operating expenses and salaries of the public facing executives. For accountability.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    It is for a non-profit asking for donations. If they want half a mill salaries, they should become for-profit instead.
    - anjel 3y ago
      The beauty of non profits is everyone thinks they're staffed with saints, when the truth is far less beatific.
      - moravak1984 3y ago
        Absolutely. A former student of mine worked for a non profit in Afghanistan (his home country) for a few years. Said non profit was flying in McKinsey consultants for very short gigs at six figures (USD). Same can be said about many LGBT non profits that have shifted their goals in the developed world on the "T" part of the acronym. On countries where marriage equality is a given, no one is going to fund an NGO focused on gay marriage... so they need a new cause to fight for.
        _ugfj 3y ago
        to me this smells transphobic but it's possible the trans genocide several US states are working on made me oversensitive
        rengle 3y ago
        [flagged]
        chx 3y ago
        > safeguarding of children against mutilation and sterilisation, I am so, so tired. None of that happens. GnRH analogues are commonly used in gender affirming care, these are reversible. Surgery is not done on minors. > the protection of women's single-sex spaces, Predatory men have absolutely no problems finding opportunities to predate on women. This made up crap need not happen. You are parroting sound bites on issues you have no understanding of. For the sake of humanity, literally, please stop and start reading. You are on a very dark path.
  - pas 3y ago
    we ought to be well past this, if they want to be donation based they need efficiency. it's possible to run this from, let's say, Andalusia, and hire competent folks for a fraction of this.
- fransje26 3y ago
  > We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate And from the link: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824... - Other Salaries and Wages $9,665,761 - Executive Compensation $744,037 So about $10,400,000 a year in compensation and wages, or about 21% of their running costs.
  - darthrupert 3y ago
    So if I give 5 euros, 1 of this will go to salaries. I'd say not terrible. I wouldn't be surprised if most charities are worse. One just have to get over the feeling that I'm donating to a charity of people who make 50x more money than I do with a comparable skill set.
- _ugfj 3y ago
  I find this hypocritical. C executives of tech orgs with world class products often have eight figures compensation -- if not from salary then from stock options. I do not see any excess here. You need to pay to compete.
  - Vinnl 3y ago
    And you get a world-class service that a lot of people can use for free and keeps their communication private in return. I'll happily keep donating for that. I'm sure there are some costs that they could theoretically cut without consequence. Because the same holds for any other product I buy.
  - pelasaco 3y ago
    > I do not see any excess here. You need to pay to compete. What you mean with pay to compete? The goal of Signal to exist is to offer a privacy oriented chat app. Non-profit companies serve a propose, and people not aligned with that, shouldn't be working there in the first place. If you join a non-profit to make money, you are doing it wrong.
    - taway1237 3y ago
      So all the programmers who work there should live on thin air? I agree that ideally the management should not be there for profit, but come on, the salaries are not even that crazy. I suspect FAANG key employees in that area easily earn multiples of that.
      - pelasaco 3y ago
        > Signal is competing with for profit companies for talented engineers and their > talented leaders. In Bay Area? I'm quite sure you get great people all around the World, or in USA, by much less.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        That line of thought is exactly why FAAMG companies tried to lower salaries for CoL when they opened up to more remote roles. I don't know if thst was fair, but it wasn't something appreciated by many engineers during the pandemic. It's also how and why long ago they tried to outsource a lot of engineering. They still do try. But that's not an easy transition either.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Aside from the salaries, which I agree are a problem, I think there are a lot of architectural issues that are both costly and not so secure. > We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. Simple solution, go distributed. 6M $ for that. Stop doing that. What do dictators control? Mobile phone networks and other infrastructure. And, yes, they really do go after people any way they can. This "cost" puts people into danger. Coupling identity and operator infrastructure is a critical privacy flaw. And a costly one too apparently. If your #1 goal is to be the most private solution, this cannot be tolerated to continue to be the case. Get rid of it. Your identity should be your cryptographic key.
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  Have you tried verifying your contacts? It's clunky, but I believe this is how signal handles the problem: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007060632-What-is-a-safety-number-and-why-do-I-see-that-it-changed-#safety_number_view https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007060632-Wh... Using signal without verifying contacts is like bit like using HTTPS without verifying certificates. It prevents passive monitoring.
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    Outsourcing identity to operators just moves the problem. And it adds a lot of privacy and security concerns. Besides, other platforms manage just fine without phone number based authentication (which is what this is).
- jwestbury 3y ago
  > which I agree are a problem Are they? These salaries are much lower than most tech competitors. I know we like to call out "high" salaries when a useful service is struggling - but they'll struggle even more if they can't retain good talent because their pay is too low. There's a reason tech skill in government is generally lower than that in industry, for instance.
miclill 3y ago
Does anyone have an idea why they did not list the combined salaries of all employees? They did seem to list all the other things...
- tempestn 3y ago
  They don't break out salaries specifically, but personnel costs are in this paragraph: > To sustain our ongoing development efforts, about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
pelasaco 3y ago
I'm kind of happy to don't see Moxie with such rockstar salary as for instance the CTO one..
- viktree 3y ago
  From the same link, it seems like his compensation was much higher in all the preceding years. Not sure what changed this year, but I agree it's a bit refreshing to see. Especially since he's probably made good money throughout his career
  - ldayley 3y ago
    I think the lower 2022 numbers reported for Moxie Marlinspike reflect that he was only involved as CEO until February 2022, so $80k would make sense as ~2 months of salary before Meredith Whittaker stepped up to the role.
zynker 3y ago
Salaries: Pretty abusive salaries for a non profit but that seems to be pretty much the standard nowadays, right? Bandwidth: I took at quick look and see that chat.signal.org resolves to AWS. If they are paying AWS for a lot of bandwidth, that is very expensive. Let's take a quick look: They say they use 20PB per year of bandwidth for voice calls alone, this costs them $1.7M a year. According to AWS pricing for great customers (suckers) of over 150TB per month, the cost per GB goes waaaay down to $0.05, yay. 1.6PB per month is 1600000GBs, that's $80K a month and therefore $960K a year. Very roughly, a 10Gbp/s link to the Internet, from a Tier-1 provider will be around $800 (eight hundred dollars, you're reading this right) a month in a low-bandwidth-cost country like the US, possibly double that in say Asia. A 10Gbps link fully utilized (minus some overheads), translates roughly to 3 Petabytes per month, that's 36 petabytes per year, almost double their advertized amount of bandwidth needed for calls per year. So we have ~$10K a year (negotiable) for 36PB which is double their bandwidth needs but let's not forget that AWS graciously (geniously) charges for egess only, this means that their actual bandwidth needs are 40PB per year for whatever they are reporting. So we have $10K for 36PB a year vs $960K a year for 20PB (actually 40PB) of bandwidth from dear Amazon. 1. Not sure why they are saying the cost is $1.7M per year. 2. Even at 960K it's daylight robbery. 3. AWS makes an absolute killing on bandwidth costs. Best. Business. Model. Ever. 4. Don't these guys have a Devops pro at $300K+ a year? weird :) Servers: I won't get into the numbers here as that's a lot more involved, and impossible without more data, but buying and maintaining your own infra, or possibly easier, renting it, would still be quite a lot cheaper than using AWS. Takeaways: - Storage is something you should buy and maintain (Thanks B!), you swap out old/dying storage devices. See Backblaze. - Bandwidth, compute and storage costs at your favorite CSP are absolutely f'ing *outrageous* - If you care about your money, your bottom line, do things differently than the *insane* mainstream way of clickity-click on some UIs to provision services without understanding what's really happening under the hood (not saying Signal doesn't understand that part, I'm sure they do), or caring about the added costs of whatever gets so easily "added" to your "infrastructure". - By having your stuff on a CSP you don't even have "infrastructure", but that's juts me. Anyway, I do love Signal, what they do and what they represent. Keep up the good work. Signal, mail me at m aaaat zynk.it if you'd like to talk.
- 3y ago

darthrupert 3y ago

I'll ask the question you're implying out loud. Why does an organization with about 50 employees need 4 C-level executives, totalling about 2M compensation per year? Or perhaps it's 7 C-level executives (3 hiding under the "Software developer" title) totalling about 3,7M compensation per year? I'm absolutely not donating money to such a thing without an answer to this question. As a counterpoint, I am a member of a local (Finnish) non-profit organization, one of whose many services is Matrix. This costs me 40 euros per year and none of that money goes to C-level executives.

temptemptemp111 3y ago
[dead]
jefozabuss 3y ago
2M in comp distributed between 4 people is not a lot at this scale in my opinion.
- philjohn 3y ago
  For a nonprofit?
  - EduardoBautista 3y ago
    A nonprofit doesn't mean it's a charity.
    - Lutger 3y ago
      A nonprofit asking for donations because of <good cause>? What is the definition of a charity then?
    - unsungNovelty 3y ago
      > 501(c)(3) tax-exemptions apply to entities that are organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary or educational purposes, for testing for public safety, to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals. Signal foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3). It is literally and legally a charity.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Charities aren't charities in the colloquial sense of the word. It's not a truly altruistic collaboration of volunteers giving their time to help a cause. Non-profit simply means that every bit of revenue made goes back into the company instead of given out to shareholders. Which includes paying your labor. It being a non-profit is exactly why we can view the operating expenses and salaries of the public facing executives. For accountability.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  It is for a non-profit asking for donations. If they want half a mill salaries, they should become for-profit instead.
  - anjel 3y ago
    The beauty of non profits is everyone thinks they're staffed with saints, when the truth is far less beatific.
    - moravak1984 3y ago
      Absolutely. A former student of mine worked for a non profit in Afghanistan (his home country) for a few years. Said non profit was flying in McKinsey consultants for very short gigs at six figures (USD). Same can be said about many LGBT non profits that have shifted their goals in the developed world on the "T" part of the acronym. On countries where marriage equality is a given, no one is going to fund an NGO focused on gay marriage... so they need a new cause to fight for.
      - _ugfj 3y ago
        to me this smells transphobic but it's possible the trans genocide several US states are working on made me oversensitive
        rengle 3y ago
        [flagged]
        chx 3y ago
        > safeguarding of children against mutilation and sterilisation, I am so, so tired. None of that happens. GnRH analogues are commonly used in gender affirming care, these are reversible. Surgery is not done on minors. > the protection of women's single-sex spaces, Predatory men have absolutely no problems finding opportunities to predate on women. This made up crap need not happen. You are parroting sound bites on issues you have no understanding of. For the sake of humanity, literally, please stop and start reading. You are on a very dark path.
- pas 3y ago
  we ought to be well past this, if they want to be donation based they need efficiency. it's possible to run this from, let's say, Andalusia, and hire competent folks for a fraction of this.
fransje26 3y ago
> We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate And from the link: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824... - Other Salaries and Wages $9,665,761 - Executive Compensation $744,037 So about $10,400,000 a year in compensation and wages, or about 21% of their running costs.
- darthrupert 3y ago
  So if I give 5 euros, 1 of this will go to salaries. I'd say not terrible. I wouldn't be surprised if most charities are worse. One just have to get over the feeling that I'm donating to a charity of people who make 50x more money than I do with a comparable skill set.
_ugfj 3y ago
I find this hypocritical. C executives of tech orgs with world class products often have eight figures compensation -- if not from salary then from stock options. I do not see any excess here. You need to pay to compete.
- Vinnl 3y ago
  And you get a world-class service that a lot of people can use for free and keeps their communication private in return. I'll happily keep donating for that. I'm sure there are some costs that they could theoretically cut without consequence. Because the same holds for any other product I buy.
- pelasaco 3y ago
  > I do not see any excess here. You need to pay to compete. What you mean with pay to compete? The goal of Signal to exist is to offer a privacy oriented chat app. Non-profit companies serve a propose, and people not aligned with that, shouldn't be working there in the first place. If you join a non-profit to make money, you are doing it wrong.
  - taway1237 3y ago
    So all the programmers who work there should live on thin air? I agree that ideally the management should not be there for profit, but come on, the salaries are not even that crazy. I suspect FAANG key employees in that area easily earn multiples of that.
    - pelasaco 3y ago
      > Signal is competing with for profit companies for talented engineers and their > talented leaders. In Bay Area? I'm quite sure you get great people all around the World, or in USA, by much less.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        That line of thought is exactly why FAAMG companies tried to lower salaries for CoL when they opened up to more remote roles. I don't know if thst was fair, but it wasn't something appreciated by many engineers during the pandemic. It's also how and why long ago they tried to outsource a lot of engineering. They still do try. But that's not an easy transition either.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Aside from the salaries, which I agree are a problem, I think there are a lot of architectural issues that are both costly and not so secure. > We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. Simple solution, go distributed. 6M $ for that. Stop doing that. What do dictators control? Mobile phone networks and other infrastructure. And, yes, they really do go after people any way they can. This "cost" puts people into danger. Coupling identity and operator infrastructure is a critical privacy flaw. And a costly one too apparently. If your #1 goal is to be the most private solution, this cannot be tolerated to continue to be the case. Get rid of it. Your identity should be your cryptographic key.

8organicbits 3y ago
Have you tried verifying your contacts? It's clunky, but I believe this is how signal handles the problem: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007060632-What-is-a-safety-number-and-why-do-I-see-that-it-changed-#safety_number_view https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007060632-Wh... Using signal without verifying contacts is like bit like using HTTPS without verifying certificates. It prevents passive monitoring.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Outsourcing identity to operators just moves the problem. And it adds a lot of privacy and security concerns. Besides, other platforms manage just fine without phone number based authentication (which is what this is).
jwestbury 3y ago
> which I agree are a problem Are they? These salaries are much lower than most tech competitors. I know we like to call out "high" salaries when a useful service is struggling - but they'll struggle even more if they can't retain good talent because their pay is too low. There's a reason tech skill in government is generally lower than that in industry, for instance.

miclill 3y ago

Does anyone have an idea why they did not list the combined salaries of all employees? They did seem to list all the other things...

tempestn 3y ago
They don't break out salaries specifically, but personnel costs are in this paragraph: > To sustain our ongoing development efforts, about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.

pelasaco 3y ago

I'm kind of happy to don't see Moxie with such rockstar salary as for instance the CTO one..

viktree 3y ago
From the same link, it seems like his compensation was much higher in all the preceding years. Not sure what changed this year, but I agree it's a bit refreshing to see. Especially since he's probably made good money throughout his career
- ldayley 3y ago
  I think the lower 2022 numbers reported for Moxie Marlinspike reflect that he was only involved as CEO until February 2022, so $80k would make sense as ~2 months of salary before Meredith Whittaker stepped up to the role.

zynker 3y ago

Salaries: Pretty abusive salaries for a non profit but that seems to be pretty much the standard nowadays, right? Bandwidth: I took at quick look and see that chat.signal.org resolves to AWS. If they are paying AWS for a lot of bandwidth, that is very expensive. Let's take a quick look: They say they use 20PB per year of bandwidth for voice calls alone, this costs them $1.7M a year. According to AWS pricing for great customers (suckers) of over 150TB per month, the cost per GB goes waaaay down to $0.05, yay. 1.6PB per month is 1600000GBs, that's $80K a month and therefore $960K a year. Very roughly, a 10Gbp/s link to the Internet, from a Tier-1 provider will be around $800 (eight hundred dollars, you're reading this right) a month in a low-bandwidth-cost country like the US, possibly double that in say Asia. A 10Gbps link fully utilized (minus some overheads), translates roughly to 3 Petabytes per month, that's 36 petabytes per year, almost double their advertized amount of bandwidth needed for calls per year. So we have ~$10K a year (negotiable) for 36PB which is double their bandwidth needs but let's not forget that AWS graciously (geniously) charges for egess only, this means that their actual bandwidth needs are 40PB per year for whatever they are reporting. So we have $10K for 36PB a year vs $960K a year for 20PB (actually 40PB) of bandwidth from dear Amazon. 1. Not sure why they are saying the cost is $1.7M per year. 2. Even at 960K it's daylight robbery. 3. AWS makes an absolute killing on bandwidth costs. Best. Business. Model. Ever. 4. Don't these guys have a Devops pro at $300K+ a year? weird :) Servers: I won't get into the numbers here as that's a lot more involved, and impossible without more data, but buying and maintaining your own infra, or possibly easier, renting it, would still be quite a lot cheaper than using AWS. Takeaways: - Storage is something you should buy and maintain (Thanks B!), you swap out old/dying storage devices. See Backblaze. - Bandwidth, compute and storage costs at your favorite CSP are absolutely f'ing *outrageous* - If you care about your money, your bottom line, do things differently than the *insane* mainstream way of clickity-click on some UIs to provision services without understanding what's really happening under the hood (not saying Signal doesn't understand that part, I'm sure they do), or caring about the added costs of whatever gets so easily "added" to your "infrastructure". - By having your stuff on a CSP you don't even have "infrastructure", but that's juts me. Anyway, I do love Signal, what they do and what they represent. Keep up the good work. Signal, mail me at m aaaat zynk.it if you'd like to talk.

3y ago