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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#361

Post by fomine3 »

crazygringo wrote: post #314
noobermin wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, this more highlights how far out of step tech salaries are with...well everyone else.

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…

"Demand" is insanely rich in SV thanks to VCs

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#362

Post by capitainenemo »

Akronymus wrote: post #272
ilyt wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I preferred previous theme anyway... And it can't be set without being logged in ;/

I use redirector with the following settings: Redirect: https:\/\/(. )\.wikipedia\.org\/wiki\/([^?] )(?!=\?useskin=vector) to: https://$1.wikipedia.org/wiki/$2?useskin=vector Applies to: Main window (address bar)

Thank you for this! Just installed redirector. Actually a few of my tampermonkey scripts are to map twitter to nitter etc, and I have old reddit redirect addon which could be consolidated into this as well.

BTW, to make it work I had to change:

    (.) to ([^.]*) and ([^?]) to ([^?]*)
I think HN formatting ate some characters (I used indenting to try and preserve)

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#363

Post by toadi »

t8sr wrote: post #301
noobermin wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, this more highlights how far out of step tech salaries are with...well everyone else.

A bus driver in San Francisco makes about 80k on average, ranging up to about 150k AFAIK. The higher end is more than a senior engineer makes at Wikimedia in California. It maybe highlights that salaries in the US are higher than in much of the rest of the world, but I don't think that's Wikimedia's fault.

Maybe US is out of whack a bit with salaries. As software engineer I never made 80k in Europe. I made more when I was freelance engineer.

Now I live in Asia only the very senior people will make like around 100k.

I have had several leadership roles still not make as much money as a SWE in America.

Now I bought land and build a nice house on it, with a big garden, pool and big garage for my motorcycles. All out of my own pocket without going into debt. Think in the end it is not the size of the paycheck that matters. But quality of life is calculated with cost of living and your paycheck.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#364

Post by fomine3 »

kajaktum wrote: post #324
tptacek wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't donate to them. My feelings about Wikipedia come pretty close to reverence, and I've never even considered sending them money. They'll be fine no matter what. By all means, advocate against donating to them! They don't need the money. Unless someone here really thinks it's important for Wikipedia to pull in 9 figures in grants and donations, I'm not sure there's as much to argue about here as it seems. Org…

> not giving money to one of the few online that provide free access to billions of people without ads So what would you give your money to? inb4 typical homeless/war/refugee charity. People give money to way greater evil than Wikimedia. For example I myself bought expensive as shit coffee (not even worth the price) twice for the past 2 months. It's an overpriced garbage that I regret buying every time, but I never d…

Internet Archive takes my money.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#365

Post by thomastjeffery »

lallysingh wrote: post #341
thomastjeffery wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as if someone who has already been making several hundred grand is in dire need of financial stability between employment opportunities.

I think you assume a lot about other people's finances.

It's not assuming a lot to think someone who made several hundred thousand dollars has enough to live comfortably for a few months.

I could move into a very nice apartment in any city in the world for less than $5,000/mo. I have no doubt that with that kind of cash, I could move in today. Surely after making $300,000 you would have enough left over to do the same!

If not, then you are obviously not qualified to be making that kind of compensation in the first place.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#366

Post by bomewish »

t8sr wrote: post #289
andersrs wrote: post #14

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…

the reason people find these massive pay packets unbecoming is because it's a nonprofit. Companies can do what they like -- but these folks are going hat in hand to civilians and asking for handouts, which they then use to people these people 700k. Are you happy to subsidize that? I suspect many normal people donors would not be.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#367

Post by zkzjauahsva71 »

crazygringo wrote: post #331
kajaktum wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is entirely possible to work in tech for a company that does not make any profit for years but still receive big pay checks. I used to work for a company that is at a loss, but we have the "potential" to turn around and i still get paid quite well. How does that work?

It works because supply and demand in the labor market has nothing whatsoever to do with the profitability of a firm. It's like how the price of strawberries this week in the supermarket is determined by the supply of strawberries, demand from customers, and the price at neighboring supermarkets. It's not set by anything to do with the supermarket's profitability.

I mean yes and no. If the supermarket never sells it because they can't make a profit (and it's not in enough demand to be a loss leader that brings people in), then the supermarket won't sell them, driving down demand to the supplier. If that exists for one supermarket it likely exists for others driving down the demand more (even if said demand would have otherwise remained high) .

You see this dynamic in markets fairly frequently and the profitable goods and services will be promoted more heavily. One can get philosophical about what is supply and what is demand, but middle man profitablity is a factor in those things as they're at once a customer and a seller.

TLDR supermarket profitablity definitely drives pricing as well. Just another component.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#368

Post by pas »

lapinot wrote: post #60
IceWreck wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text Thats like saying facebook or twitter are just static text. Wikipedia is not static text. It runs Mediawiki which runs on PHP and requires a database, plus all forms of caching. They also serve media (images/video) have users, discussions, comments, etc. And at wikipedia's scale they're not trivial problems to solve and dont cost peanuts for hosti…

Comparing wikipedia to facebook or twitter is ludicrous. They don't do any kind of data analysis (apart from some full-text indexing, which you can do easily on a laptop, it's a basic demo from FTS tools to index wikipedia). Sure they host media and handle lots of traffic but that's about it. It costs money for servers and some network engineers.

it's in the top10 sites worldwide, it's ridiculously naive to assume it's just servers and a few BGP dudes.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#369

Post by pas »

jackvalentine wrote: post #285
jzb wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have no beef with people getting treated well" Nor I. But there's being treated well and then there's being showered with cash, which is how I'd read getting a severance package in excess of 1.5 your base comp for a full year when walking away to take another job. Generally speaking, if I leave my current job for another job I don't expect any severance at all. If I was laid off I'd feel pretty good about getting…

So this is just envy?

it sounds like desire for prudence at a quasi-public foundation.

it might be completely misplaced though.

but more transparency might help in this case too. make the job have some standard salary, make the contract public, and allow people to submit their resumes and let the board pick the best candidate. again, this might be super naive (it is!), but that doesn't mean it wouldn't work.

of course if it's a requirement to have the CEO live in the Bay Area, continue growing the WMF (and in general do a lot more than keeping Wikipedia working well), then it's not surprising that the candidate pool is drastically smaller, and the money involved is a lot more.

(of course, again, maybe it's worth talking about what the public wants Wikipedia and the WMF to be, but ... maybe it's up to those who donate?)

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#370

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

So I see people scoffing at the way the English Wikipedia is run, and people referring incorrectly to "What Wikipedia does" when the Wikipedias are just one aspect of the WMF's activities. So do you really know what the WMF does?

The encyclopedias, and MediaWiki software, are the flagship projects, and they come in hundreds of languages (I'm watching what happens on the Nahuatl project right now). There are also many Wiktionaries, where words are defined in any language you can name. There is Wikidata, which interfaces in a machine-readable way with every other Wikipedia. There is Commons, which is one of the world's largest repositories of freely-licensed media. This is the first place I search if I am looking for a PD or CC-licensed image. That's what it's there for, in addition to serving media for all the other projects. There is Wikisource, a large repository of freely-licensed text. See above. There is Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, Wikinews...

The WMF does not simply run web servers, they run a cloud platform. WMF is a player in Big Data, and the WMF Cloud supports developers of bots, tools, database queries, scripts, and all sorts of widgets that interface with at least one project. Software development. I've already mentioned that MediaWiki is an open-source, in-house platform, and it's constantly under active development. Anyone may create an account and submit an issue in the Phabricator bug database.

Outreach. Wikipedias coordinate with college instructors who are teaching how to edit Wikipedia as part of a class. There is a standardized and recognizable process for this now. WMF holds conferences worldwide, to get people interested in editing, learn how to do it, and keep them engaged.

All projects have separate sets of administrators and unique policies and guidelines. If all you know is English Wikipedia by reputation, you've barely scratched the surface.

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