I stopped donating because of this - definitely want to contribute to keeping Wikipedia online, I don’t necessarily want to give my money to a larger foundation running all kinds of other projects and wielding that cash as a political tool.
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
I understand that it isn't much for an executive, but then that stuns me even more.
Edit: median US salary is around $70k. This executive's pay is over 5x median income. Those who say it's not a lot are disconnected from the way that most people in the country and the world live.
I don't understand anything about US IT salaries anymore.
They're too high, though not high enough.
We've become the new priesthood. People who complain that sacrificing one calf to us each year would do well to be reminded that we're not demanding one child per year.
In reality, the number of developers making $500K is relatively small. Even in California, the median developer compensation is a fraction of that. FAANG companies can have admission rates that are more selective than Ivy League universities, and they don’t even hire in most cities in the US.
This causes a lot of compensation confusion and anxiety for young people who grow up reading HN comments and snarky Reddit posts when their first job offers don’t come anywhere near the $300K to $500K range that they read about online. It also causes a lot of grief for developers who think they’re overworked and underpaid because it seems like everyone on HN casually acts like $500K is the going rate for being able to spin up a React project.
I've heard this comparison before, but I'm not sure how meaningful it is because the Ivies charge an application fee. There isn't much cost to applying to FAANG and hoping for the best.
Are they really that talented, or are they just good at whiteboarding algorithm questions that they almost never actually use on the job?
These companies that spend $300K or more on their developers aren’t keen on keeping under-performers around, either.
The idea that you can bluff your way into a FAANG job by memorizing enough LeetCode problems yet by somehow remaining an under qualified programmer is a myth.
I am from Brazil, mentioned in the article. I see wages of 60k USD year as a dream job (by the way, if you need a C or Lua dev, and don't want me to relocate to an expensive place to live, I am for hire, for that price tag, I really need it. I currently make around 11k USD year)
I do think that the sky high salaries are ridiculous compared to societal contributions of, say, a nurse or a teacher. But I also like very much that I get them for doing a job that I still do with a small on my face.
Personally I recently quit my high paying industry job and moved to an engineering heavy PhD position (HPC), because I enjoy solving complex problems.
I got into this line of work because it's fun. It's still fun. If I didn't get paid I'd do it for free, although "it" would be lime green hobby projects rather than the productive and tasteful work people employ me to do.
Huh, this is interesting, maybe in some areas of America? But broadly speaking... Outside of America, no. Take a look at even senior dev salaries in Canada.
They're equivalent to master's of social work positions, oftentimes less. Having had education and work experience in both social work and computer science, I can tell you that if you want a stable, low-stress job that requires an "easy" degree, that MSW degree will serve you far better.
Not to mention that remote work is still rare. So that 90k senior AI research job, requiring a Phd at the Autodesk office in Toronto is... not great. Most computer scientists I know are happy with being middle class and just really enjoy the subject matter. Maybe this is rare in your area of the world?
Why do they deserve that much compensation exactly?
The people who to my mind deserve high compensation are people who are risking their lives to help people, such as firefighters (who are often sadly volunteers and don't get paid anything), front line nurses and doctors, teachers in inner city schools or third world countries, Peace Corps volunteers, etc.
People whose job it is to hobnob with other high-paid execs over expensive lunches and give orders should be at the bottom of the pay ladder, not at the top.
I live in Canada. I earn much less than USD $375K/yr. But can we agree that I am very connected with how people live in other parts of the world?
Good. Now let me tell you that were my employer to ask me to move my family to the US, ANYWHERE in the US, I would want way more than $375,000/yr to duplicate the lifestyle we have now.
That’s just how it works when you move from a place with a safety net to one where losing your job could mean certain death.
And in my family’s case, I am not exaggerating: My partner is a cancer survivor. What would we have done if we were living in the US? Hire lawyers to fight with insurance companies for her treatment? What if I was laid off and lost my benefits right when she was diagnosed?
SHUDDER.
Were I to live in the US, I would want to be stinking, immorally rich. It’s the only way to insure yourself against disaster.
She'd go on Medicaid. Anyway, quit watching so much TV. It's just propaganda.
But I don’t watch TV. I do things like read HN. Where I recall an essay on the front page a few years back where a wealthy tech founder cashed out and then tried to buy health insurance for their family.
Despite being wealthy, they reported that basically, it was impossible to get insurance that met their needs. They did not say “no problem, the whole family got medicaid.”
Now tell me: How many people in the US had medical bankruptcies last year? How about the year before? Or the year before that?
I’ll let you tell me, since you believe that I only watch propaganda on television, and you believe you have all the answers. What are these medical bankruptcies, if medicaid solves all problems?
Is all this propaganda spread by smug Canadians to boost immigration? I think not, but if you’re prepared to cite some numbers showing that nobody ever loses their home because of cancer or some other major health problem, I’ll gladly read what you share.
Even if they were paid ten times less (or a hundred times less, for execs making millions per year), there'd be lines of people a mile long willing to take their place, and probably do their job just as well if not even better.
Corporate boards and investors are deluding themselves that they need to pay astronomical rates to get people who can do these jobs.
It won't seem so sky-high once your universe also has $4k per month one-bedroom apartments and $2M single-family homes.
Of course, this only makes your point even stronger.
I am a software engineer who used to live in the Bay Area but now live in Europe. In my country, my family is living off of a salary of 30000 (Euros, or about 36k USD). (This is my wife's salary, I'm not currently working). Our income officially puts us below the poverty line, so we pay 0% in income taxes.
With this 30k, about 50% goes to housing, about 1/6 goes to special needs schooling for one of my two children (they both need it, but the younger one's school is currently free), and the remaining 1/3 is for food and bills and misc. expenses.
We own a small, fuel efficient car that my wife drives while I bike or take public transportation. Our entire apartment runs on an average of 250W (servers, laptops, cell phones, electric stove) because everything is energy efficient. (LED lighting, double-pane windows, good applicances) We pay 10 euros a month for gigabit internet, 200+ channels, and unlimited calling to 150+ countries.
We live comfortably in a large (100 m^2) four bedroom apartment in a safe neighborhood (working class, but nice). We eat well, we can afford to go to restaurants occasionally, and even take the occasional vacation.
While we're not currently saving any money, because we have money saved up, we're not living hand to mouth, even though "technically" we are.
If we wanted to return to San Francisco, the budget would look something like this:
* 60k Schooling for both kids
* 60k Four bedroom apartment or split home
* 30k Food, car, bills
Chief Community Officer
Chief Talent and Culture Officer
Chargée d'affaires
Chief Global Development Officer
Chief Creative Officer
Chief Communications Officer
Chief Revenue Officer
VP of Strategic Partnerships
55 million USD in annual salary expenses seems a bit high, even more so for a non-profit. I have seen startup unicorns spend less on salaries. I think there really needs to be some scrutiny into how funding is being spent.
Looking at the list of execs there I really have to question what role they play and how their compensation is justified. It's not just their individual salary either. At their level they have entire organizational hierarchies working under them and the collective salaries can add up. What precisely are they contributing to the movement?
I can't imagine the kind of things Wikipedia needs to do that needs such roles. These guys should be focusing on product and tech primarily. They have a solid product which hasn't changed in years and a strong brand. They have a singularly unique and special thing in this world and need to protect it as sacred. They need to focus on maintaining and scaling this system for eternity instead of experimenting and branching offshoots into community engagement, strategic partnerships, ambassadoring and all that crap.
However, this seems like excessive marketing for an organization that does not produce a physical product (unlike Funk & Wagnal's).
I have seen less online criticism of WikiPedia accuracy of late; perhaps this is the result of the marketing dollars. If true, it is good, but it could likely be done with marketing efforts a fraction of the size.
Obviously there’s a debate to be had about what and how much Wikipedia should engage in other ventures but even for their core work a lot of these roles seem pretty reasonable...
The ones that made it through were specifically the ones that embraced and prepared for change, by running parallel long-shot projects and branched out from doing whatever they were doing before.
Sure, some of these positions sound a bit surprising. But, having checked just the last one, it existed only for a part of 2016. So, eh, what's your point again?
Edit: I think that Salaries are for Top Executive only. There are 450 [1] in Wikimedia. In the case 55M isn't that much.
100k was maybe "sky high" 20 years ago. 100k in most large cities is not. When your modest house costs $800k USD, a car costs 30k, auto insurance is $1600 a year, groceries are 10k a year (looking at you, Toronto), just how in the hell is 100k "sky high"?
$80k was a decent salary in a mid-size city 15 years ago.
Just because six figures seems like a lot of money to you doesn't mean it's a lot of money.
That is the figure for "programmers and software development professionals", anyway.
Sky high is at least top 1%. Maybe top 5% in high income areas.
In Eastern Europe you begin to approach this at 80k.
Upper middle class maybe. People in the upper class don't need to work.
But rent is getting crazy here, a 60 sqm apartment will cost you 1300+ utility.
For example here [1] you can see some reliable statistics for France, see page 2 (it's in French but the plots are easy to understand). The median salary (annual before taxes) when starting is 35k€, and roughly increases by 1800€/year. So it only reaches 40k€ after 3 years. It reaches 50k€ after 8 years only.
Also all engineers have Masters in continental Europe. You can't be an engineer without one. It's nothing special.
[1] https://www.iesf.fr/offres/doc_inline_src/752/IESF_Synthese_...
But Italy and Spain aren't really what I would consider Western Europe, they are the less developed parts and I admit I have no experience with France and know nobody who works there.
Yeah, well, you're American, right?
You really are living up to it in many ways.
If Wikipedia(1) is semi-accurate, no (ZERO) major European county surpasses this. Not even Switzerland which clocks in at 70k EUR. And that's average, the mean is even lower due to skew by those making top money.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
And slap 20-25% VAT on top.
That money is really not that much, a generalist MD would make that for eg.
To be considered sky high in my book you need to be actually rich - able to afford luxuries such as own a luxury home, driving a premium car, be able to rent a yacht for a vacation - you need to be making >150k for your income to be noteworthy, otherwise you're just doing well off - higher middle class.
Sorry but there's nothing sky high about earning 80k EUR per year and living in London, Zurich, Oslo, Amsterdam, Munich, etc. you barely stand out, especially if you socialise with other college educated workers, you're probably the norm or below it for career people.
[1]: https://www.iwkoeln.de/fileadmin/user_upload/HTML/2019/einko...
PS: Data is for Germany.
> Also from the diagram, 75% of the population are earning less than 10,400 EUR while 25% are earning more than 10,400 EUR.
If 25% of the city is making more money than you you are not rich by any definition.
I have friends living in Munich, friend is a SW engineer, makes 75k, his wife has her own business so I'm not sure how much she makes, they are very much middle class lifestyle and can't afford to live in the wealthy areas.
Sorry to burst your bubble but you're not rich if you make 80k/year, you're just (maybe upper) middle class, even in EU.
[1] http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=982&loct....
Edit: Also it's completely unclear to me how this point relates to your initial gross misrepresentation of compensation in western Europe.
OP suggested that 100k$/year not being noteworthy is a uniquely SV/US thing - it is not. Any place worth living in Europe will take that much to live comfortably (note. 100k USD = 80k EUR)
/s
Upper class income only seem lackluster compared to the perverse 0.1% incomes and the housing bubble.
You know how many people live in Iowa?
How did you get these costs? You can get a French Chateau with that much money. https://www.prestigeproperty.co.uk/french-chateau-for-sale-2...
I paid $340k for this house 13 years ago. I thought that was far too expensive but I didn't have a choice.
Wikimedia is a global foundation, so they don't have to live in the US even.
They could have easily hired someone from a country with a much lower cost of living.
I'm also a Principal SWE and my salary is well below $200k, though there are years with bonuses, etc.. that I reach $200k
I would guess that they co-evolved in a vicious cycle of inflation. But I know very little of economics.
A sense of purpose alone won't let you lodge in cities with high cost of living.
If anything, I dare say running a non-profit usually requires a lot more skills, especially people skills and passion than a tech job.
I'm not sure how it is in the US but in Europe there is this sense of entitlement when you talk to people that because you work at a non-profit you should work for free. If I give my valuable time to contribute to the world at large, I expect to be able to have decent living conditions.
Same line used in defense of corporate board hiring practices, and as in that case, stated without evidence to support the claim.
Oh come on! What talent do they need that a million much lower paid people don't have?
At entry level you typically manage a two-pizzas sized team in one fairly limited domain. "Have this desk and a bunch of people, figure out how to run a worldwide wiki" would be a typical senior manager/director assignment (a.k.a. middle management).
If we set aside an argument about IT salaries fairness, I think people at Wikimedia deserve some thanks for taking a salary cut to undeniably make a difference on the world.
I guess there's a chance that executive compensation went up significantly after 2018, but nothing I saw looks out of place for an organization as large as Wikipedia. ~300k for a San Fransisco-based CEO and an average salary of ~120k for all employees employees seems fairly reasonable to me.
The annual real median personal income in the US in 2019 was $35,977[0], how can anyone think that $120k isn't a lot? Why should people around the world donate their hard earned money so that some employees in America can have Silicon Valley salaries?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
The average programmer salary in Sweden is $50 000. Why should I donate to people who earn more than twice my salary?
We are feeling tricked because it’s about 5% efficient right now.
They're paying two to three times as much as they would have to pay anywhere else. That's not a "small" inefficiency, it's a pretty huge one.
Your attitude creates a race to the bottom.
It's not about a race to the bottom, it's the vast differences in pay in the same society. If the median real salary is $35 000, why should a 25 year old web developer make 3X that? Some software engineers act like what they do is so much more important and difficult than what everyone else do, it's a bit disturbing. Of course, people in finance are even worse.
Software and finance are high-leverage jobs where improvements are instantaneously rolled out to large sections of humanity all at once and the potential change isn't incremental, it's epoch-defining.
Another one is that the companies that we work for make insane profits despite the sky high compensation.
In isolation, without major legislation that depresses those profits too, it at least makes more sense to share the spoils with the shareholders and the employees than with the shareholders alone.
I didn’t think it would happen at the time, but compensation saw a significant jump in the years after the compensation cartel (Apple, Google, Intuit etc.) was broken up.
I guess that's at the core of the discussion. Wikipedia isn't seen by many as yet another tech company there to make insane profits.
I don't see how you could afford all the things you mentioned on an average SWE salary in Europe. I have a very much above average SWE salary, and don't seem to be in any danger of getting a house and two cars anytime soon. I rent and don't have any cars, actually.
Healthcare is free, for the bare essentials. I pay a crazy amount per year for (private) healthcare, because the standard, mandatory insurance covers just about nothing of what I actually need. Consider that every month, I pay into the government healthcare system a lump sum which is approximately equivalent to the median salary in my country. This doesn't buy me any benefits - I get the same minimal coverage as everyone else. Socialism at its finest.
I'd be OK with it if the money actually went towards worthy causes. That is not the case, however - I am pretty sure most of the healthcare budget goes towards funding an antiquated, insanely oversized bureaucratic system. There's a whole social class of bureaucrats on the government payroll, who do pretty much nothing at all - you won't find them in the office after 3PM - who collect a meager but secure salary for their utter lack of effort and general uselessness.
More and more, I am jaded by the illusion of a "fairer" society in the EU, which often ends up being just a case of "everyone is guaranteed to get the same low-quality treatment".
Good programmers in Germany do not work for €50.000. I'm based in Iceland and do contract work for German companies, and I assure you none of the people I work with are even close to €50.000. Perhaps because they're not average but good.
Here in Iceland €50.000 might possibly get you a recent graduate. Myself, I wouldn't hire a programmer at that low pay though, graduate or not. A couple of my friends (good programmers, not "average") who have moved to Sweden and Denmark get similar salaries to what they got up here in Iceland.
Higher salary gets you talented people.
If one look for reasons not to donate, they can always be found by thousands.
I find it beautiful that there is such a site as Wikipedia, that is free and open, and I am happy to contribute a tiny bit to it.
It’s the fact that they are begging for donations while hoarding $300M in cash, and only 5% of your donation goes towards Wikipedia itself. The rest is on the hands of a foundation for them to use at will.
The reason Wikipedia is amazing is the user generated content and community moderation/admin.
It's also worth noting that many of Wikimedia's staff are remote. I think more of the engineers are based in Europe than in the US and salaries are scaled somewhat based on the cost of living in each employees city/region. Wikimedia salary is almost certainly lower than the big tech companies but still pretty good for a non-profit and the benefits provided are very good if not quite up to the google level of luxury.
Disclosure: I work for the Wikimedia Foundation as a software engineer, however, I don't really know much about the financial details.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion / observation and not representative of my employer.
It’s like you walked into this discussion without reading any of it. That is precisely the issue - less than 10% of the budget goes towards operating Wikipedia, and they’re still begging for money.
Paying for legal staff who defend lawsuits and advocate for legal reforms that matter is part of "operating Wikipedia."
Paying SREs to be on-call for incident response, plus routine upgrades of servers and racking new hardware is all part of "operating Wikipedia."
Absolutely essential parts of operating Wikipedia certainly account for a lot more than 10% of the budget. Sure there is a lot of overhead and I'm sure some expenditures are non-essential. I just can't agree with your assessment. The overhead and excesses are quite certainly nowhere near 90%.
Well, managing a company with over a hundred million a year in revenue, for one.
What is CEO of Twitter doing that CEO of Wikipedia isn't? Why dont we have a discussion of their salaries?
Both are working a job. Enployees are not donating, donors are
The CEO of Wikimedia needs to hire and manage maybe 50 people, of whom about 5 need executive pay. I have no idea why Wikimedia needs 500 staff, if they could build the site with a team of 20 or so.
It looks like a gravy train, and it quacks like a gravy train.
You cannot possibly be serious, assigning twitter CEO some super demanding nebulous task of 'looking for new opportunities' but somehow downgrading Wikipedia one to that of a middle-manager.
Both websites have a massive audience, both have new intiatives and the ones by wikipedia are actually productive. Both have to deal with attempts at censorship, inappropriate content, and both have to find a place in the rapidly shifting techbology landscape.
This judgement 'if it's charity work then it's easy' comes across as dishonest and presumptios.
The Wikimedia execs are obviously not being paid to boost the bottom line; it's fat enough already. Wikipedia has never failed to cover it's costs. It doesn't need whizz-kids; it needs a few competent managers to make sure things don't completely fall apart.
All the pointless side-projects just mean there's too much money washing around. Those side-projects could end up torpedoeing the main deal. Wikimedia makes enough in a year to set-up an endowment that would guarantee Wikipedia forever. Provided they prune the management tree - not so much because of salary costs, but because all those execs need projects, to prove they're not overpaid.
It's nothing to do with "charity work". It's about maintaining mature code, taking care of the editor community (they're not much cop at that), and buying server racks. You don't need scores of leet execs for that - you just need a handful of competent and responsible administrators.
It is your personal judgement, and I violently disagree: if they stagnate, they will either wither and die. FAANGs of this world will eat them, for example by taking snippets from wikipedia and giving nothing back.
It is charity work to spread knowledge, and it has never been as important as it is in the knowledge economy of the 21st century. Do you seriously think that there is nothing to improve, the pinnacle of creation is text format with links? You cannot imagine a more interactive alternative to learn?
Now it's possible that both of us are wrong, and the truth of the matter is something else entirely.
However they are not a public service, and they run their charity in accordance with their vision. If they want to document every dead language and give each poor kid a laptop, people like myself support them, and you don't have to.
Your cost-cutting/management bloat critique comes across as a standardised copy paste of critique you might encounter on "department of highways" or similar public service. It appears to be based off prejudice and assumptions. Not only don't you have that level on knowledge, no-one without a crystal ball could know for sure.
wikipedia SHOULD be paying competitve salaries so that their best and brightest don't leave to join tire-fire companies like Facebook. I don't know why you think someone working at Wikipedia shouldn't be paid a competitive salary if they work there; if not they will go work for Facebook and the world slowly loses out on an incredible resource while companies like FB get stronger because of misaligned thinking.
You are disparaging a CEO for making 350k/year for one of the highest trafficked sites in the world. For perspective, Zuckerberg's net worth places him at an effective salary of 3B/year (his current net worth divided by his age), nearly 10,000x of the guy you are saying is getting paid too much and potentially driving employees away from.
If your problem is the median personal income you don't solve that by trying to reduce the CEO of wikipedia's salary. Focus on that - it's your kind of attitude (why should a burger flipper get paid $15/hr) that is actually suppressing wages in this country.
This is a good question. Why shouldn't Wikipedia hire developers from 3rd world countries? It sure shows donation banners there. And there isn't anything magical about US developers and anything special about building sites for millions of people. Expertise is there, often used by US companies, salaries are not.
> You are disparaging a CEO for making 350k/year for one of the highest trafficked sites in the world
The root of the question is: what determines compensation at companies? FAANG and SV startups are able to offer huge salaries not because they are "the highest trafficked sites in the world". It's because they rake in billions of dollars in revenue, by monetizing their users, and/or because they are VC-funded. If that wasn't the case, their employees' -- and certainly their executives' -- salaries would not be this high.
When your company makes billions of dollars a year, and you can make the case to your board that you can increase or maintain that number, that's when your salary becomes high -- when the tradeoff to shareholder value between paying you a lot of money and the company making a lot of money tips your way. You don't just automatically get a high salary for running (or working in) a large company, if that company does not make this much money.
The WMF is a nonprofit. It does not make any money aside from donations. When running its donation campaigns, it does so from the perspective of keeping internet knowledge alive, rather than saying "we think it's important to keep ourselves in the top 10% worldwide salary bracket". It's absoluetly fair to say that they need to raise a certain amount of money in order to keep the foundation going, and in order to maintain and develop it. But saying that it's "insane" to argue that a nonprofit should not be able to compete against a multi-billion dollar organization salary-wise is... strange?
Most of the world's companies, startups or otherwise, in fact can't afford SV salaries, and so they look elsewhere -- there are many, many great developers, executives, and other folks around the world (and in the US, outside of SV) who work for less than FAANG salaries. This doesn't meant they aren't well-compensated, it just means that maybe they don't live in SV, and that yes, it's possible that FAANG will poach some of them. That's just something you have to live with when you don't make infinite amounts of money, like 99% of the world's companies.
> For perspective, Zuckerberg's net worth places him at an effective salary of 3B/year ...
For perspective, Facebook's revenue was about $85B last year. Using the world's fifth-richest person, who heads a fortune 150 company that is the F in the only five-lettered FAANG acronym that's frequently used as the barometer for high salaries, "for perspective", is also strange. The only perspective that Zuckerberg's salary offers is "what does the top 0.1% of the top 0.1% make?"
> it's your kind of attitude (why should a burger flipper get paid $15/hr) that is actually suppressing wages in this country
It's disingenuous at best to connect a nonprofit's executive staff making large salaries with raising the minimum wage. In fact, that's precisely the discrepancy that is making folks talk about the salaries at WMF: the foundation is soliciting donations from the folks making $15/h in order to pay its CEO $300k+ a year.
So let's say I start a company selling cars. I decide to sell my cars for $1. It's a terrible business model, and I don't make much money. So according to you, because my company makes no money, I should be allowed to pay my staff way under market. This doesn't make sense to me, despite being obviously illegal.
The amount of money you paid for labor is decided by a market. Just because I have a horrible business model of giving away cars for free does not entitle to me to underpay for labor. And conversely, if I am a good engineer working for Wikipedia, and FB offers me a much better paying job, I will probably jump ship to FB. Employee retention is a problem for any company.
Now I'm not saying Wikipedia is completely justified in paying the exact same pay grade as FAANG, but it's ridiculous to me that there are so many tears about an executive member of Wikipedia making the same amount of money as a middle manager at Facebook. We are not even comparing directors, we are comparing rank & file to the CEO of another company and people still have a problem with it.
>It's disingenuous at best to connect a nonprofit's executive staff making large salaries with raising the minimum wage
I don't see how the argument is different. I don't think engineers working at Wikipedia should make 300k because they work at Wikipedia. I don't think cashiers working at McDonalds should make $15/hr because they work at McDonalds. You are removing the value of their work simply based on where you think their social status should be,
The better analogy here is GoldBurger, which is a very successful burger chain that sells gold-plated $200 burgers and pays its employees $100/hr. Would it then be reasonable for my local mom-and-pop burger joint, where the most expensive burger costs $5, to compete with GoldBurger on salary? Would the cashiers making only $20/hr at my local joint be paid "way under market" just because GoldBurger exists?
The fact that GoldBurger exists and can create very well-paying jobs for its cashiers doesn't mean that suddenly the entire base of the market rises up to match it. It just means that, all else being equal, it's entirely possible that potential employees will go with GoldBurger rather than my local joint, if given the choice, and the local joint will have to hire other folks. If every burger joint was like GoldBurger, my local joint would be in trouble. But that doesn't tend to be the case, and it isn't the case in the tech world, either.
Like, this claim of "if everyone donated $2..." (or whatever this year's amount is) means they need more than a hundred thousand donations to pay this guy. And then the site is still at zero, getting nothing, that only pays one person at a "non profit".
I'm all for fair compensation but if you dedicate yourself to running a non-profit, getting rich on people's donations (98% of whose money you took earning less than you) is a weird kind of definition of fair.
If people want to get rich, maybe they should go and fix Jenkins pipelines for some adtech company where everyone's clear on what the goal is.
Wikimedia doesn't need to recruit top engineering talent; it's now a maintenance project, and it's open-source. Wikipedia content is created by volunteers, and significant editorial decisions are made by admins, who are usually volunteers. These volunteers mainly manage themselves. Most editors have never communicated with a staffer.
This "Tides Trust" is not a proper destination for donor's money. No donor thinks their money will be spent on some random project dreamed up by Tides Trust.
And it seems pretty irregular to me to treat a donation to the Tides Trust as "expenditure". The correct name for that money is "profit".
After looking, I realized that I made more than them at my previous job just being an engineer.
90%+ of the cash goes to fund the other foundations’ programmes, that’s the core of the issue.