Wikipedia exec salaries are sparking a debate on tech sector wages
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The post includes a tiny bit of original reporting at the end, but that's mostly a perfunctory nod to to journalistic integrity (gotta at least ask the other party for a statement!). The author has nothing useful to contribute to the discussion, so they instead put their effort into studiously recording the like counts on each of the quoted tweets.
Excluding stock options is underselling the compensation at FANG by a lot, as they vest monthly and are immediately liquid.
An engineering manager of a faang type company basically makes more money than most of these executives, so seems under compensated if anything for an organization of that size /importance.
edit: nevermind, I see there was outrage in both directions. Obviously the people saying they are paid too much are out of touch with reality.
From looking at the dumps, it does seem feasible to have a custom browser app that's capable of quickly looking up and navigating around articles either mirrored locally or on a self-hosted Linux VM. Combined with RAG and local LLMs it might be especially interesting.
I've been in tech since the early 2000s, after more than 2 decades in this I only get more disgusted about the industry... The dreamy creation phase with unlimited potential is over, replaced by the chase of ever-increasing TC, corporate growth, etc.
This is from September of last year but it definitely changed my mind about this stuff.
> In fact, however, the Wikimedia Foundation is richer than ever. Its assets and reserves (including an Endowment with the Tides Foundation now holding well over $100 million) have increased fivefold since 2015, and stood at an estimated $400 million at the end of March 2022.
I wish they'd quoted some of that conversation, it sounds interesting. Instead, all they quoted were a bunch of people on Twitter who seem not to have much of an idea how compensation for leadership is derived or negotiated. I love that they also carefully note how many likes each take got, as though that were an important measure of journalistic salience.
I think a high brow discussion of leadership salaries is a lot less interesting that the ever expanding gap between people working in tech and everybody else.
It's the exact same thing as Reddit, where the moderators that create the look and feel of each subreddit get the "privilege" of moderating for free, while the engineers and execs of Reddit are going to become millionaires off the free work of the mods and commenters.
Even better, not only will they make money from ads, they will take the content from commenters and then monetize that to AI companies like OpenAI and Google. It's the gift that keeps on giving, and everyone is doing creating content on Reddit for free, and aren't seeing a cent of it.
Editors/mods are not dumb and they understand they’re creating content on sites that belong to others. Small contributions to something that would have never received any attention now at least have a chance of being seen by others. The trade off is not getting paid, or maybe better stated as the payment is the site providing storage, network, search, etc. for that user’s content.
Pay writers
Offer legal protection against defamation lawsuits
Now people say "well Wikipedia writers dont get paid they are volunteers its very important" -> what this actually ends up in, in real life, is that public figures and corporations pay people to monitor and edit their Wikipedia articles on the down low. So Wikipedia writers do, in fact, get paid. They are just being paid by the subject they are writing about rather than by the media organization hosting / publishing the content. It's not overt but it's also not that hard to research if you really wanted to. And it's something no reputable media organization in the world would allow. (edited many times)
The exec pay would be fine if they had done a good job running the place, but they haven't. They have let costs spiral out of control and are running misleading ads begging users for donations.
* The article is nearly devoid of substance. Nearly all of the content is just copy/pasted from a Twitter argument, with a non-trivial amount of text devoted to detailing the like counts for each post. That's not the kind of post I like to see on the front page, but anger about Wikipedia's handling of money gets a lot of upvotes based on the title alone, regardless of the quality of the content. The flag mechanism is there for precisely this situation: to remove posts that will lead to low-quality knee-jerk reactions instead of thoughtful discussion.
* The submitter seems to have a vendetta against Wikipedia: if you look at their submissions [0] with showdead turned on, 25/34 of their submissions are negative posts about Wikipedia. That's a weirdly single-minded fixation on targeting negativity at a single company, and something that I'd like to see discouraged on HN. Disliking Wikipedia is fine, but if most of your interactions with HN are trying to push that dislike on the community, that's unhealthy.
For many moons, am using more and more alternative sites for looking things up, even if there are obvious quality issues. WP shouldn't be trusted, you'll find this out when you are competent in certain areas and cross-reference with them.
PPP loan data is another great source for finding these scam charities, although most of them dont even have any output to critique.