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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

What are you talking about? The AVERAGE CD right now is 5%. My local CU is almost 6%. US bonds are currently ~4.5% - if you consider those unstable, I guess the US economy isn't stable - and if the US economy crashes, wikipedia will be the least of their or our worries.

Wikimedia's expenses are almost ENTIRELY going to staff. Their balance sheet for 2023 included $101m in expenses for salaries and benefits out of a total expense of $160m. Their hosting was $3m. So yes, I'm confident their network links and servers cost almost nothing, and they don't need anywhere near $101m in compensation to keep the lights on when the VAST majority of their content is contributed for free.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/W...

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> Their hosting was $3m

Its kind of unclear what this includes. Computer equipment is a separate line, and wikimedia owns its own servers, so presumably that is separate from server costs. You don't have to buy new servers every year so some servers might simply have been purchased in other years, although maybe that gets ammortized, i dont know.

Additionally when you host your own servers you need staff to operate them. When using something like AWS, this would be part of your AWS fees, but if you operate your own servers then you have to pay that part separately. Its probably cheaper overall in the end when you are wikipedia scale, but the costs break down differently.

You may have missed them saying "when accounting for inflation". In the US at the moment that's around 3%. Thus your local credit union's savings account, a nice and stable investment, is effectively giving you around 3% appreciation in real-money each year right now. (I have no idea whether their broader point about the rate over-time is correct, admittedly.)

An engineer costs $500k a year. Salary, benefits, office space, equipment, hr, legal, and other overhead. The engineer will only see a fraction of that, of course.

If you told me it took a hundred engineers to run Wikipedia I'd say, that's not totally unreasonable. Features, design, api, scaling, moderation, there's a ton for engineers to be doing.

Your overall point still stands, but FWIW Wikimedia pays less than its peers. To compare two active listings

Senior Security Engineer at Mozilla (https://boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/5803609): $124,000 to $199,000 plus bonus

Senior Security Engineer at Wikimedia (https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/5890112): $105,000 to $164,000

The rule of thumb is that employees cost the company double what they pay the employee. So, still hundreds of thousands per employee.

An engineer doesn’t cost $500k/yr. An engineer who lives in one of the highest cost-of-living places on earth costs $500k/yr. There’s absolutely no reason Wikimedia needs to pay that much.

> highest cost-of-living places on earth costs $500k/yr. There’s absolutely no reason Wikimedia needs to pay that much.

those places also have highest talent pool.

There’s more talented developers outside of high CoL places than inside. The comparison is not with one other place, the comparison is with the entire world.

It doesn't. Even with insurance, etc. I doubt they spend this much. They pay below market for most positions I've seen (though their benefits are on a good level) so even with taxes, overheads and all I don't see where 500k would come from.

Hire only the lowest cost employees, I demand it!

You’ve mildly annoyed me with that banner each of the thousands of times I’ve used your free world-library over these decades, and I’m done putting up with it!

> Hire only the lowest cost employees, I demand it!

Nobody said that. There’s a difference between “don’t hire the top 1% most expensive developers in the world” and “hire only the lowest cost employees”. Wikipedia can comfortably avoid the extremes on either end of the spectrum.

Hosting means nothing without the staff. Hardware, networking, datacenters, etc are the cheap part because the staff are good at their jobs.

You and the other set of trolls that think that Wikimedia can run itself need to appreciate that just because you work for a non-profit doesn't mean you should work for slave wages, or that you should be forced to work with the bare minimum amount of staff to keep things running without being able to make improvements to the infrastructure, reader experience, editor experience, or data consumer experience.

In comparison to similar services, Wikimedia has a relatively small overall budget that's well spent.

> What are you talking about? The AVERAGE CD right now is 5%. My local CU is almost 6%. US bonds are currently ~4.5% - if you consider those unstable, I guess the US economy isn't stable - and if the US economy crashes, wikipedia will be the least of their or our worries.

If you want to live off the interest you have to worry about inflation which essentially devalues your pot by x% per year, so if you really need y% for running costs you really need about x*y% to do it long term.

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