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Comment by yareal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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