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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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61–70 of 417 posts

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#61
post #5

Man, I've been fired by for-profit companies and felt lucky to get four weeks severance. It's upsetting that people working for a non-profit are getting 1.5x their salary, but I guess this is kind of what we get for believing that a non-profit is going to act better than an evil corporation.

While I think Wikipedia is highly suspect given its ample reserves and continued begging, it should not be upsetting for you. It should bring you joy that someone got treated well.

When a for-profit company gives someone a huge severance/golden-parachute, that's fine. Fundamentally I was giving them money for "whatever they want", and if that's how they felt they should allocate those funds then fair enough.

However, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and their messaging in their donation drives always sort of implied that they really needed these donations. Since Wikipedia is a non-profit, I do have higher aspirations of how they're going to allocate their funds: chiefly in making the highest quality freely-available knowledge resource even better.

If they had given these people a three month paid severance, I would not criticize them at all. That's very generous and there is value in making sure employees are treated well. 1.5x your annual salary though? I'm sorry, but there's "generous" and then there's "shady".

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main organisation that owns Wikipedia funnels all the donations into the owners. Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text so they pocket almost all of the money.

> 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…

The actual Internet hosting costs have consistently been less than $3 million a year:

2022/2021: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...

2020/2019: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...

And they were the same a decade ago:

2012/2011: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL...

Admittedly, this doesn't include salaries.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#63
post #57

It looks like the CEO of Wikimedia gets paid roughly as much as a Staff/Senior Staff-level FAANG engineer. That looks about right. And they got 6 months severance. Also comparable. I don't get why people are upset. Somehow everyone working for a nonprofit should bring home less money to their families. In truth what that assumption would mean is that nonprofits get less skilled people.

To take a global perspective: Would you be happy to donate to charity that uses the money to pay executives 10x-100x your salary?

It depends. If the charity is doing amazingly good things and the executives in question are making a big impact on being able to do those good things, then yes I'd be fine with that.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#64
post #57

It looks like the CEO of Wikimedia gets paid roughly as much as a Staff/Senior Staff-level FAANG engineer. That looks about right. And they got 6 months severance. Also comparable. I don't get why people are upset. Somehow everyone working for a nonprofit should bring home less money to their families. In truth what that assumption would mean is that nonprofits get less skilled people.

To take a global perspective: Would you be happy to donate to charity that uses the money to pay executives 10x-100x your salary?

I would be happy to donate considering the value I get from their work. Given the market where they operate, the salary and severance is actually low in my opinion. I would like them to pay their people well.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#65
post #5

Man, I've been fired by for-profit companies and felt lucky to get four weeks severance. It's upsetting that people working for a non-profit are getting 1.5x their salary, but I guess this is kind of what we get for believing that a non-profit is going to act better than an evil corporation.

I have the complete opposite read of the situation to you. I have no beef with people getting treated well by any kind of organisation.

For nearly half of households, the severance for the CEO represents over 10 years of income. Households, not people. A great many of those people would have never received severance pay of any amount. Of those who do, they would be fortunate to receive months of severance pay based upon earnings that are a fraction of what a CEO earns. Is it any surprised that some people would be upset? Factor in that the Wikipedia depends upon donations and volunteer labour, and it looks like some people are reaping a disproportionate amount of the rewards.

I'm not saying this to diminish what the Wikipedia does, nor to suggest the pay was not earned. These people almost certainly could have earned more elsewhere, yet decided to align themselves with an organization that serves the greater good. What I am saying is it is (or should be) easy to see where these sentiments come from.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#66
Ignoring for now the severance package, the salary seems pretty low for a CEO of such a large foundation. $400-500K is about the salary range of a senior-staff engineer at FAANG and their responsibility is way lower.

One of the issues with non-profits is that people expects the employees/management to be there for the cause and to be happy with lower salaries. This seems to incentives IMO one of the following: - only already rich people to apply - high turnover - people with less experience or options to apply

Having a generous severance package that for example requires you to work for at least x amount of years might solve some of those pitfalls?

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#68
post #57

It looks like the CEO of Wikimedia gets paid roughly as much as a Staff/Senior Staff-level FAANG engineer. That looks about right. And they got 6 months severance. Also comparable. I don't get why people are upset. Somehow everyone working for a nonprofit should bring home less money to their families. In truth what that assumption would mean is that nonprofits get less skilled people.

To take a global perspective: Would you be happy to donate to charity that uses the money to pay executives 10x-100x your salary?

It's this question about value for skills or resentment for income inequality? For the latter, wikimedia would have to move somewhere with lower labor rates yet is somehow to keep talent from leaving for better paying places.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#69
post #62

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…

The actual Internet hosting costs have consistently been less than $3 million a year: 2022/2021: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim... 2020/2019: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim... And they were the same a decade ago: 2012/2011: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL... Admittedly, this doesn't include salaries.

What about development costs ?

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#70
post #19

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…

>politically neutral What does politically neutral mean?

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