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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#411

Post by AdamN »

darth_avocado wrote: post #103
AdamN wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Getting people market rate is fair, but that’s 1. for regular employees. 2. Assuming market rate is fair and not minimum wage There is no reason executive pay needs to follow market rate dynamics at a non profit. Otherwise you’ll have underpaid and free labor while executives milk the cow at 100x median pay rates and generous golden parachutes.

Maybe at the $10MM scale I'd agree but even CEOs of Fortune 500 companies rarely make that much unless they are founders or hit all their targets over many years in a row.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#412

Post by AdamN »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #127
AdamN wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> It's critical to compensate non-profit employees near the market rate otherwise you end up with sub-par performers I hear this all the time for not-for-profits and government roles, it sounds good but just doesn't hold up. The leaders in these roles are not measured or held to the same metrics as private companies, they're not competing for the same jobs and they're not the same pool of candidates. The results pro…

Virtually all of the underpaid executive bureaucrats in the US are already rich or will be once they cycle out. They are underpaid for a few years and then are made whole. It would be better to just pay them properly in the first place.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#413

Post by cubefox »

leokennis wrote: post #408
cubefox wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have any proof that vibes are relevant here?

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#414

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

zkzjauahsva71 wrote: post #367
crazygringo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

>> supply and demand in the labor market has nothing whatsoever to do with the profitability of a firm

> [supermarkets]

All supermarkets have to pay the same price to buy strawberries, regardless of their individual profitability.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#415

Post by t8sr »

akolbe wrote: post #398
t8sr wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO who successfully managed hundreds of people at a fairly visible non-profit got about 300k in severance. Meanwhile: "Google gave top executive $90m payoff but kept sexual misconduct claim quiet – report" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/25/google-an...

You are mistaken. The CEO's severance was $623K. Paid from money donated to Wikipedia – unlike the Google executive. I think it is normal and legitimate for donors to Wikipedia – whether they've donated labour or money – to have a qualitatively different kind of interest in the former case than the latter.

Many have noticed that the more useful a job is to society the less it pays.

People seem to have a weird expectation that if you want to work on something useful you should expect to be paid well below market rates. (In this case, 50-70% below market!)

Why? I can think of no system of ethics that says someone working on addictive mobile games should be making more than the CEO of wikipedia, but that's exactly what's happening. And still people are mad about it! Apparently suckers who want to do something nice for society should do it for free.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#416

Post by t8sr »

bomewish wrote: post #409
ertian wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

It's hard to argue with someone who calls running Wikipedia "maintaining a website". Either you have never worked in the industry or you're just being intellectually dishonest. It will take you 5 minutes to find videos of the CEO of Wikipedia talking to congressional committees about just a small selection of stuff she was dealing with.

And for doing that she was paid what a staff software engineer makes for taking 6 months to change the shade of blue of a button in gmail.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#417

Post by nerdponx »

lallysingh wrote: post #392
heyoni wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case closed I guess?

It's not about anything but resentment here

Is it? They beg for money and then $600k+ of it goes to a severance for one person. So much for charity and donating to support a public good.
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