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Comment by hiddencost | Hacker News Reader

On the countrary, nonprofits need unions more than for profits. They exploit their workers more. They have fewer resources and exploit their mission to get more work from their workers.

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If I'm donating money to fight cancer, and the majority of the money goes to administrative staff, that's inherently a flawed charity. It's exactly what led to the downfall of the Susan G Komen foundation.

There's also a death spiral problem. If donations drop and administrative costs stay the same, that charity's ratings only get worse.

There's a reason most examples of successful non-profit unions all rely on steady streams of government grant funding.

What do you think the core purpose of the Wikipedia Foundation is? Do you think the engineers who write the code and operate the site are “administrative staff”?

If a new software or hardware innovation came along that would allow the engineers to operate the site 2x more efficiently, thus saving the foundation and it's donors a significant amount of money, would the union support it or fight it?

Is there any charity (older than five years) where the majority of the money doesn’t go to administrative staff?

yes, check program expense ratios

https://www.charitynavigator.org/discover-charities/best-cha...

and

https://www.givewell.org/

this is all insane. it assumes you want charity forever! the initial assumption is already wrong.

also, back on topic:

Executive Salaries Position Salary (Annual)

Ex-CEO (Katherine Maher) $789,495

COO (Janeen Uzzell) $503,844

CFO (Jaime Villagomez) $386,433

General Counsel (Amanda Keton) $396,514

Current Highest Salaries Position Salary (Annual)

Software Engineering Manager $164,080

Technical Program Manager $159,200

Senior Software Engineer $109,513

Product Designer $95,972

Additional Salary Insights

    The median total compensation for employees at the Wikimedia Foundation is approximately $109,513.

did you mean to reply to my comment? if yes, can I ask you to explain what do you mean by assumption? where is that coming from?

regarding WMF (and other non-profits, like Mozilla), this is a well-known phenomenon - regarding C-suite compensation (it's usually about risk aversion, and that the board or whatever foundations have, is also usually sitting on other non-profits, and rarely they optimize by moving to the cheapest place and hiring folks for much cheaper, etc)

Yes, workers in non-profits are status-compensated as well as monetarily compensated. I don't think this is an argument for non-profit unionization.

"status-compensated"?

people enjoy doing high-status things and will trade off pay for status. asking for equal pay as low-status work is essentially asking to have your cake and eat it too

Is working for Wikipedia somehow a higher status job than working for Google?

edit: I'm asking because my 7 year stint as an engineer at Wikipedia hasn't provided me with an endless stream of lucrative job offers.

absolutely and i'm surprised that you don't think so.

e: and to your edit, i'm talking about social/moral status

Can you explain what you mean by social/moral status? I haven't seen a big run of non-profit workers marrying movie stars or becoming Pope.

Isn't the Pope like the canonical high-status non-profit worker?

Yes, but notice that the pope gets paid very well

I thought the pope doesn't receive a salary?

That's right, my bad, I just meant that he's clearly doing just fine but said something very wrong instead

Yes, however, my point is that the vast majority of people working for non-profits do not receive that sort of recognition. So what does "social status" mean?

Your edit is comparing opposites, basically making the ops point for them.

You work at google for money. Money is high status under capitalism.

You work at Wikipedia for status in the traditional sense - you trade capitalist status (the salary) for the higher actual status of working for a non profit.

No one thinks non-profit work is ‘high-status.’ People do it because making the world better in some way is more personally motivating than figuring out how to put video ads on refrigerators or whatever.o

Ok, I don't necessarily disagree, but it is thus living your values, which at the very least increases ones self confidence and self perception of status.

Whether one thinks that improves one's status in the eyes of others imo depends on one's cynicism. "Whatever, I'm living my values, they just don't get it. Maybe others will one day."

That's how I see it for myself anyway, if I'm being honest. But in the end I don't think there's any better path to happiness and fulfillment than living my values.

Sure, but happiness and fulfillment isn't status. Not because there's anything wrong with them but because that's not what "status" means.

feeling better because your job fits better in your moral framework that you get from society is a status-mediated effect and i feel you can usually find social scaffolding under things that are articulated as purely intrinsic.

If words don’t mean what they mean, absolutely

I'd love to live in a world where working for a non-profit was high status. Unfortunately that's just not the world we live in. Maybe if you are someone high up at a well known charity, but the bulk of the people keeping non-profits running do not get status from their work.

Uh...

Can you name me a single job where the tradeoff is "You won't get paid much because this position is so respectable"?

There are respectable jobs where you don't get paid much because the area of work simply does not generate much money (charity), or because they're being exploited and guilt tripped into working hard because of their mission (charity), and there are jobs which are respectable primarily because they pay very well...

But there are no jobs where you're "status-compensated", where you are paid less but that's okay, because the job is so respectable so it's okay to pay you less.

I don't think you've ever met anybody who worked for a non-profit in your life.

both my parents worked for non-profits their entire lives

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