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Comment by t8sr | Hacker News Reader

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 250 people and gets paid what a SWE with 3 years of experience gets paid down the street. Their engineers are paid like a third of what they could be making at Amazon. Nobody is doing this for the money.

EDIT: As a comparison for people unaware of the cost of living in SF, a bus driver makes about 80k a year. A senior SWE at Wikimedia makes about 120k, according to levels.fyi.

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To be honest, this more highlights how far out of step tech salaries are with...well everyone else.

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.

Relatively few Wikimedia staff are in San Francisco. Nearly half are outside the United States:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

As for the other side of the equation, revenue, most of that is from readers' donations. And most of that comes from North America, Europe, Australia and East Asia.

But the Foundation also shows its fundraising messages and sends its fundraising emails begging readers to chip in in places like India, Brazil and South Africa:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2021-22_Report

And in those markets I'm sure they're paid less. The most recent salary report at levels.fyi is about 120k in LA, which is as expensive as SF. They're paying in California less than Spotify is paying in Germany.

And I'm not sure what you're saying - should they only ask for donations in the US? I mean, they could, probably, but why is it a problem that people in poorer countries also donate, proportionally I assume much less?

There are many wealthy/high income people in India, Brazil and South Africa. Proportionally fewer, but still many.

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 own pocket without going into debt. Think in the end it is not the size of the paycheck that matters. But quality of life is calculated with cost of living and your paycheck.

Which part of Asia?

You seem to be implying there's something "wrong" with it.

But tech salaries are just based on supply and demand. If there were more good coders in supply, salaries would go down.

So what exactly does "out of step" mean? Everybody's free to try to learn how to code and get those salaries.

And so it's not clear what Wikimedia is doing wrong with salaries, if it's paying what's required to get programmers of the needed ability.

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 coding positions available worldwide. How do you decide which one-fifth of companies get coders, and which four-fifths go without?

Currently we allocate the fifth to the companies who want to pay the most*, because we've decided that's where they're most helpful in general, because those are the companies building the most potentially profitable products that provide the most economic efficiency (lower prices and/or higher value for consumers). And this is why coders are paid more than bus drivers.

So what's the alternative allocation you're suggesting? To achieve what alternative goal? Because it's not helpful to say "it is a problem that can be fixed" if you don't also provide the fix.

----

* There can also be non-monetary factors (nice office environment, purposeful mission, good vibe with team) but they can be converted into estimated monetary values for purposes of comparison -- it doesn't change the argument

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

Imagine thinking that people making high six figures are the problem. Don't be afraid to set your sights a little higher, or you'll keep making the classic mistake of tearing down the upper middle class.

It is entirely possible to work in tech for a company that does not make any profit for years but still receive big pay checks. I used to work for a company that is at a loss, but we have the "potential" to turn around and i still get paid quite well. How does that work?

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 fairly frequently and the profitable goods and services will be promoted more heavily. One can get philosophical about what is supply and what is demand, but middle man profitablity is a factor in those things as they're at once a customer and a seller.

TLDR supermarket profitablity definitely drives pricing as well. Just another component.

>> 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.

Normally by convincing VCs that the company is worth the money of your inflated salaries and after X years they will make it back. Not many people out here are investing out of good will.

"Demand" is insanely rich in SV thanks to VCs

If a company is making 1 million per employee, why shouldn't the employee get a substantial part of that? I was personally responsible for easily 2 million / year in income at my previous job (and possibly just as much or more at my current job).

I have a hard time tracking income of a software product to specific employee contribution, unless it's a solo enterprise, which is rare and fraught with its own issues. Who's responsible for a piece of income? The original software author? The maintenance SWE? The SRE? The PM that identified the market opportunity? The exec that signed off the funds for the whole thing?

I'm working a project solo for my employer that is worth $2-3M/mo.

I make like 0.5% of that before tax.

Disagree. If you are as an engineer make 10s-100s of millions or billions in some cases, you are worth every penny. Also the good engineers when they feel slighted go out and start a company relatively easily competing or changing the environment.

The last fact is why FAANG pays a lot -- to stop people from starting companies.

I would argue that's a problem with wages everywhere else being too low, rather than tech salaries being too high.

Tech people just get advantages due to supply and demand that normal labor used to get from their unions and reasonable representation in Congress.

Tall poppy syndrome

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 donate to useful products like Wikipedia, and encouraged high pay there (because with a large enough denominator, it's an insignificant amount of money to users), and more upset about the exploitative practices of mainstream companies. Then we might see more open and straightforward services like Wikipedia, and fewer creepy and insidious businesses like Facebook or Google (thinking specifically of YouTube and it's attempts to drive 'engagement' here...)

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.

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.

It says 700 employees and contractors in 2022.

I wonder what the biggest departments are.

Do you think Sysadmin / tech / development is the highest? followed by editors?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

Yeah but this isn't Facebook, it's just a free encyclopedia.

They obviously don't need 250 to 300 people. They need a few server admins and software developers, but no thinly veiled activists.

What are their engineers working on?

The entire annual plan is public. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_... (The "infrastructure" goal is the one related to engineering).

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