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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#401

Post by jzb »

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?

No. I'm disputing the idea that this qualifies as merely being "treated well." Treated extravagantly would be more accurate, and from the budget of a non-profit no less.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#402

Post by AlchemistCamp »

toadi wrote: post #363
t8sr wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which part of Asia?

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#403

Post by [deleted] »

noobermin wrote: post #298
t8sr wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#404

Post by drekk »

crazygringo wrote: post #335
zacmps wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Well yes, we tried once "fixing" it with communism, which simply dictated values for things like salaries and forcibly assigned jobs. And communist economies fell apart because of the horrific inefficiencies and inflexibilities. If you want to fix it, I'd ask you this: suppose there are 20 million people who know how to code worldwide. But that if coders were paid the same as bus drivers, there would be 100 million c…

Currently we allocate most talent to unprofitable enterprises. Uber isn't profitable. DoorDash isn't. A lot of these companies will never turn a profit.

It says a lot about Western society that people only really feel incentivized to be a doctor or lawyer or engineer or coder if the money is right. Not about passion, or wanting to help people, or solve a particular societal problem. Just a bunch of individuals on a hedonistic treadmill making line go up.

There are tons of criticisms for the USSR and PRC, the two big examples that come to mind. But within living memory (my grandparents) both countries went from backwater agrarian feudal states to global superpowers. That amount of progress in so short of a timescale is dizzying to think about, and if we want to talk about the human cost of that progress (worthwhile) we should maybe recount the human cost for liberal representative democracy to reach where it is today.

How should labor be allocated? It's a great question. I think personally that having to sell your body to a capitalist in order to meet your basic needs is only a few polite steps removed from serfdom. When it's not regulated it clearly veers in that direction (scrip, company towns, etc.), and the only alternative is for you yourself to acquire/borrow capital and hope to enter the rent-seeking class. An alternative could be to simply meet people's basic needs without the fanfare. Let people work on solving real problems (climate change, carceral system, education, etc.) instead of optimizing ads and telemetry for the latest planned obsolence plastic box. We live in a post-scarcity society where food and clothes are destroyed so that the "underclass" can't at least enjoy the scraps.

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops". - Stephen Jay Gould

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#405

Post by patrec »

tptacek wrote: post #332
patrec wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the universities fine after the decades long algae bloom of administrators? Has admission become more merit based, tuition more affordable, inquiry freer, and the pace of scientific breakthroughs faster?

Wikimedia, as you may have noticed, is not a university.

It is not. But since you seem to tacitly agree that most of Wikipedia's enormous wealth is funneled into putting people into positions of power who are not predominantly motivated by furthering Wikimedia's core mission, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on when in human history this has worked out "fine" for an organization, i.e. without degrading or even perverting the pursuit of its original objectives? If it hasn't, what makes you so confident Wikipedia will be different?

Wikipedia indeed has some unique aspects that give it additional resilience from hostile takeovers, such as public auditability (via edit history etc.), forkability, and finally the fact that the bureaucrats have unusually little leverage over the lives of those who do the actual mission-aligned work.

But universities also enjoyed some unique protections (tenure etc.). The end result was that it just took a bit longer.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#406

Post by b3lvedere »

ethanbond wrote: post #71
b3lvedere wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great financial packages for a non-profit

Could it be that their financial packages is part of what makes it such an effective operation?

I don't know. If it's a standard into obtaining certain levels of effectiveness, then why don't they just add it to their salary or something? Why the extra things?

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#407

Post by b3lvedere »

skyyler wrote: post #94
b3lvedere wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great financial packages for a non-profit

Are they? It's also the 7th most visited site on the web. I don't think as many people would take offense to Roblox or Reddit leadership taking these kinds of packages...

I don't take offense at all. I think it's strange/confusing for a non-profit organisation, but maybe not unheard of. Certain roles need certain amounts of money i guess. Kinda also gives weird vibes on what the definition of non-profit really is.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#408

Post by leokennis »

cubefox wrote: post #383
heyoni wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes being wrong is wrong. It’s hard to talk about conservatives in a neutral tone sometimes because stating just the facts can sometimes sound negative. Remember how all the media outlets were “anti Trump” because they all described the voting scandal as being “without evidence”? That’s because there was none. You couldn’t report on that and simultaneously be on the side of reality without also being against th…

Of course "woke" is mostly used in a derogatory way. Again, no such article analysing a supposed "woke pipeline" would be acceptable in Wikipedia. > Sometimes being wrong is wrong. It’s hard to talk about conservatives in a neutral tone sometimes because stating just the facts can sometimes sound negative. The same thing can be said about progressives. Nonetheless, the above example would be seen as highly biased.

Do you have any proof for your claims? So far I'm mainly getting a https://www.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/ vibe from them.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#409

Post by bomewish »

ertian wrote: post #400
bomewish wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems to me like a strange and counterproductive attitude. People are fine with Facebook or Google manipulating them and extracting vast amounts of money from them and handing it out to their employees, but get upset when an extremely useful product simply asks for voluntary payment from time to time to pay out a fraction as much in order to retain talent? The world would be better off if people were happy to do…

Hm. Though I'm skeptical it's really "talent" in the sense of purely meritocratic ability, you know? It seems cronyish. Why does a nonprofit actually need someone who is "worth" 700k/year? Would that person be able to command that much in private industry? In theory, if they could legitimately pull down 700k from nonprofit work, this suggests they would be worth far _more_ in industry. The Wikimedia foundation does not oversee a fast growing startup. They need to maintain a website. Why does that need 200 staff and some of them pulling down 700k? The other thing is that nonprofits have a fundamental misalignment in product market fit. They are not selling a good to a customer, so the feedback loop is not tight. They have to convince donors of their value, fundamentally an ideological proposition in many ways, but the donors are not the consumers of the product. So there's an information asymmetry there. Of course I agree on all your points about corporates. But nonprofits get a special status -- both in terms of tax and in the eyes of the public -- so we hold them to a different standard.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#410

Post by AdamN »

bdidbdidhdidh wrote: post #237
bombcar wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundraising part is the completeness of it. I could probably COO on the non-fundraising side, but I'd be an absolute fundraising failure. Non-profit C level execs are fundraisers.

even when all the money is from a banner?

The banner probably drives enough small donors to give the big donors confidence that they are force multipliers and not just propping up a one-off thing.
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