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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

Why are they actually getting any severance at all? It looks like they resigned to take new jobs. They weren't sacked or made redundant.

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Katherine left under questionable circumstances (right after a rebranding attempt that absolutely exploded). Who knows what really happened, but it seems plausible it wasn't her choice.

It's amazing how once you become what used to be called a quangocrat [1] you seem to live in this charmed circle where you keep getting offered positions on the board for X or a researcher at Y, effortlessly failing upwards through NGOs, think tanks and charities without any accountability or record of achievement.

[1] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/quang...

That's because so many of those NGOs are hustles of their own, delivering some marginal value while supporting their own bloated universe.

There was this post last year on Wikipedia by Victoria Doronina, one of the WMF trustees:

"The Board has done its main job - changed the CEO."

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village...

Victoria explicitly referred to the Knowledge Equity Fund in that post, which appears to have been Uzzell's and Maher's brainchild.

The Knowledge Equity Fund became very controversial last year when people realised it was set up to funnel millions of dollars of Wikipedia donations to non-Wikimedia social justice causes via Tides Advocacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Janeen announced on 14 May 2021, two weeks after Katherine had left, that she was going to leave the WMF and devote herself to racial equity and technology causes:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...

She started as CEO of the National Society of Black Engineers on 7 July 2021, just one week after her last day with the WMF.

Including the $325K severance, she pocketed over half a million dollars for half a year's work and went straight to her next job.

Hire PHBs, win PHB prizes.

This actually makes me feel optimistic. An org like Wikimedia being able to resist the attempt to subvert their mission to "social justice" instead of doing what it was created to do, sounds great. So many other orgs have fallen to the same and turned into a mockery of their former selves...

Executive compensation packages work differently and tend to be much more bonus driven.

Frequently these types of severance packages are to make up some sort of assumed bonus and ensure no compensation based contract disputes later.

Even if you quit voluntarily?

To be clear I'm not as familiar with this for non-profits.

But generally yes, if much of your compensation is bonus based most executive contracts will have a mechanism for pro-rating or just paying out future bonuses.

This sounds a bit like it was something of a mutual parting of the ways so sometimes boards will payout other bonuses like Retention Bonuses (A bonus for staying at a position, frequently with another job offer at hand) even though the person is leaving. It could also just be a bonus triggered by the board choosing to part ways with her that was part of her executive contract. Proving a firing is "for cause" is frequently difficult so sometimes if there's a desire to replace a senior executive it's easier to just pay them off.

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