341–350 of 417 posts
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Oh yikes, staff with a larger severance. I'm not surprised, I can't imagine it's easy to find a new CEO job after losing your last one.
It's not as if someone who has already been making several hundred grand is in dire need of financial stability between employment opportunities.
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Relatively few Wikimedia staff are in San Francisco. Nearly half are outside the United States: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_... As for the other side of the equation, revenue, most of that is from readers' donations. And most of that comes from North America, Europe, Australia and East Asia. But the Foundation also shows its fundraising messages and sends its fundraising emails begging…
And in those markets I'm sure they're paid less. The most recent salary report at levels.fyi is about 120k in LA, which is as expensive as SF. They're paying in California less than Spotify is paying in Germany. And I'm not sure what you're saying - should they only ask for donations in the US? I mean, they could, probably, but why is it a problem that people in poorer countries also donate, proportionally I assume m…
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I mean, Wikimedia has about 250-300 employees and what they pay their CEO is about what Facebook and Google pay a senior SWE. They seem to run pretty lean to me. Firing everyone and moving to a cheap country doesn't seem feasible, and they already are apparently moving a lot of their hiring to Germany. I don't really see what's outrageous here? > Obviously it's become a gravy train . Oh come on - their CEO manages 25…
To be honest, this more highlights how far out of step tech salaries are with...well everyone else.
The last fact is why FAANG pays a lot -- to stop people from starting companies.
Just take a look at this graph. The salaries have been bloating whilst hosting expenses are flat and plummeting as a proportion of all expenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... Net assets are sitting at ~$240M about 10x what they were a decade ago. Yet they roll out a sob-story banner on every page insinuating that they mi…
I mean, Wikimedia has about 250-300 employees and what they pay their CEO is about what Facebook and Google pay a senior SWE. They seem to run pretty lean to me. Firing everyone and moving to a cheap country doesn't seem feasible, and they already are apparently moving a lot of their hiring to Germany. I don't really see what's outrageous here? > Obviously it's become a gravy train . Oh come on - their CEO manages 25…
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I mean, Wikimedia has about 250-300 employees and what they pay their CEO is about what Facebook and Google pay a senior SWE. They seem to run pretty lean to me. Firing everyone and moving to a cheap country doesn't seem feasible, and they already are apparently moving a lot of their hiring to Germany. I don't really see what's outrageous here? > Obviously it's become a gravy train . Oh come on - their CEO manages 25…
They obviously don't need 250 to 300 people. They need a few server admins and software developers, but no thinly veiled activists.
Just take a look at this graph. The salaries have been bloating whilst hosting expenses are flat and plummeting as a proportion of all expenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... Net assets are sitting at ~$240M about 10x what they were a decade ago. Yet they roll out a sob-story banner on every page insinuating that they mi…
I mean, Wikimedia has about 250-300 employees and what they pay their CEO is about what Facebook and Google pay a senior SWE. They seem to run pretty lean to me. Firing everyone and moving to a cheap country doesn't seem feasible, and they already are apparently moving a lot of their hiring to Germany. I don't really see what's outrageous here? > Obviously it's become a gravy train . Oh come on - their CEO manages 25…
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You seem to be implying there's something "wrong" with it. But tech salaries are just based on supply and demand. If there were more good coders in supply, salaries would go down. So what exactly does "out of step" mean? Everybody's free to try to learn how to code and get those salaries. And so it's not clear what Wikimedia is doing wrong with salaries, if it's paying what's required to get programmers of the needed…
IMO there's absolutely something wrong with it, while millions of people don't have access to food or clean water. Supply & demand is an explanation , not an excuse , and it is a problem that can be fixed (if there's political will).
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You do that at a startup for stock compensation, with the expectation that your risk will be rewarded in the future. A non-profit is not your future cashcow, you don't own it, you either work for current salary or you forgo payment because you believe in the cause. There is no scenario where non-profit workers get to cash out to compensate for previous struggling - except when that non-profit has been captured by a g…
It's critical to compensate non-profit employees near the market rate otherwise you end up with sub-par performers, martyrs, having the vision co-opted by the wealthy who can afford to be underpaid, or the young who leave disillusioned. The Gates foundation pioneered this approach and imho it's the right way to operate in the sector.
A risk, but there's plenty of good managers, and money can only do so much to find someone that performs well.
> martyrs
This one isn't obvious, please explain more.
> having the vision co-opted by the wealthy who can afford to be underpaid
If you pay this much then you guarantee the person you hire has much more money than they need.
> the young who leave disillusioned
Why would paying... let's say 90th percentile US wages ($135k) disillusion anyone?
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I mean, Wikimedia has about 250-300 employees and what they pay their CEO is about what Facebook and Google pay a senior SWE. They seem to run pretty lean to me. Firing everyone and moving to a cheap country doesn't seem feasible, and they already are apparently moving a lot of their hiring to Germany. I don't really see what's outrageous here? > Obviously it's become a gravy train . Oh come on - their CEO manages 25…
To be honest, this more highlights how far out of step tech salaries are with...well everyone else.
Tech people just get advantages due to supply and demand that normal labor used to get from their unions and reasonable representation in Congress.
Just take a look at this graph. The salaries have been bloating whilst hosting expenses are flat and plummeting as a proportion of all expenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... Net assets are sitting at ~$240M about 10x what they were a decade ago. Yet they roll out a sob-story banner on every page insinuating that they mi…