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sillysaurusx

Their lead developer is paid $72k/yr, and mobile developer $49k/yr.

I'm not sure what to think, but that's definitely interesting. I wonder what chess.com is paying their engineers.

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Can you explain what is interesting in those salaries?

They are extremely low (at least by the standard of Software Engineers based in the US)

Lichess is a non profit from France (like it’s author) and those salaries quite normal for France.

No it is not. Yes it could be for your average everyday developer but if someone can run site with millions of active users alone, there is no difference in salary based on where the developer stays. Does Mistral pays $100k salary to researchers?

Pretty sure OpenAI pays higher than chess.com

OpenAI doesn't pay 1 developer higher salary than all the chess.com developers combined.

It’s a *non* profit so I think it’s perfectly normal that he pays himself that. It’s a good salary which lets him live normal comfortable life.

Mistral is *for* profit.

Just because someone is running non profit they are expected to take 10% of their deserved salary?

People working in non profits typically earn less, yes. In general, salary is not a function of how praiseworthy or important or even hard the work is. People who work for non profits have pay cut, because basically they are willing to be paid less in exchange of doing something they see as meaningful.

(Excluding purely "money washing for local mafia and politicians" non profits.)

Dude, Lichess is entirely funded by donations. There's only so much money to go around.

And Thibault iirc is the kind of person that's not terribly interested in earning lots of money. Of he wanted to, I'm sure he could make bajillions elsewhere in tech, because he's that good. But he apparently prefers to only work for a "measly" upper middle class salary and doing something he's really passionate about. And I thank him for it, because lichess is awesome.

A huge difference between just for fun and money oriented products.

Could be part time

Or full time. In some countries, those are pretty decent salaries. I earn €50k in one of the poorer European countries and that puts me in the top ~8%.

Both would be very decent salaries in South America also

Let’s talk. Email is in my bio!

I thought so too, but another entry in their sheet is "Sysadmin (part time)" for $18k/yr. So either they forgot to put part time in parens, or they're paid full time wages. I wonder which...

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