Wikipedia exec salaries are sparking a debate on tech sector wages
businessinsider.comIt's depressing how common these "summarize a Twitter argument" news articles have become.
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.
I need a browser extension that replaces all citations/references to social media with "according to hearsay and rumor..."
Thankfully or sadly, soon this will all be replaced by text generation bots.
"BI also reported in October 2022 that software engineer salaries at the company (Meta) can reach up to $308,148, not including stock options"
Excluding stock options is underselling the compensation at FANG by a lot, as they vest monthly and are immediately liquid.
Depends on the company. Meta vests quarterly.
Why is this outrageous... Large non profit execs salaries need to be high enough to attract talent good enough to run operations of that size.
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.
Pretty sure the shock was in the other direction - "how can they be paid so low", which, seems obvious to me?
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.
I'm curious what alternative ways there are to consume Wikipedia. I was poking around to see how feasible a local mirror would be, or at least a self-hosted mirror. It'd be especially interesting if there were ways to "patch in" alternative versions of articles on top of a mirrored based on pluggable feeds, for people who feel Wikipedia is biased on some topics and want to have a seamless experience in which most articles are taken from the base but others are forkde. Sort of like a github but for the wiki.
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.
For the locally hosted part of it, you’re looking at Kiwix[1].
These are low salaries compared to US tech companies. I made more than all of them as an IC dev.
These circumstances don't make the fact more palatable! The US tech sector is outside reality anyway.
Tech is looking more and more alike the finance yuppies boom from the 80s-90s, a lot of overpaid people creating little value to society, and a lot of times actually extracting value from society to line their pockets.
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.
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
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.
> The post has since garnered 9 million views and 5,000 likes on the platform — and it kicked off a conversation about salaries in the tech world.
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 its a not unreasonable measure of how the mob feels about the issue.
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.
The biggest problem to me is that they are profiting off the completely free labor of their volunteers. The billions of man-hours spent adding content is being used to make money for a bunch of execs that have questionable value. Chief Creative Officer for a site that hasn't changed in decades? Chief Advancement Officer? Could these not be volunteer positions as well and save millions of dollars a year?
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.
Volunteer editors/mods are clearly also getting something out of doing it, even if not monetary, and they’re free to stop whenever they want. It’s completely up to them to decide if what they’re getting is worth the effort.
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.
Just because someone does something because they find satisfaction in it or they enjoy doing it does not make it right to exploit their work for huge personal gain and especially when none of that will ever go back to the people who did the actual work.
Yes, the volunteers should be happy with the self-satisfaction of helping the more important classes of our society attain their dreams of becoming multi-millionaires. God forbid that the actual revenues be shared with the actual content creators!
right, every other media company like the NY Times, Britannica, Guardian, do the following
Now I ask why Wikimedia does neither? It seems a lot like basically just another Section 230 exploitation tech company, where all liability is shifted to users (editors / content creators), so its not really a media company. This does I think make it more like Facebook, Youtube, Insta, TwitterX, etc, because it is not in the business of content, it is in the business of watch-time or engagement or whatever.Pay writers Offer legal protection against defamation lawsuitsNow 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)
Excessive executive compensation is unnecessary and steals value from shareholders and employees. Tech execs, even middle management, are wildly overcompensated for the value they bring compared to the engineers.
As the article describes, those salaries are low in comparison to other tech companies, and if keeps those executives happy without feeling the need for continuous Wall Street demanded growth YoY, and allows them to avoid the desire to monetize all traffic (which ultimately results in enshittification), then that’s fine.
They have the need for continuous growth, but not demanded by Wall St. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
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.
If a mod is reading this, can you please explain why this has been flagged? Thanks. Genuine question here, not trying to stir the pot.
Flagged usually means that users did it, not mods. I flagged it for two reasons:
* 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.
I think those points make sense. I do think there is some material within though, which is that the tweets had some point. Sure the reporting was not really interesting, but I thought the source material was, personally.
Do they have enough to run the site for 100 years?
Right, that's just the cost of employees. What are their server costs?
Woohoo, i am surprised. Seriously, fuck them. Got pestered TWICE this year by Jimmie begging for donations, which is a new low. Make use of your endowment! And get rid off your political bias.
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.
I'll not be donating again
I also stopped donating seeing how they use money to fund culture wars https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33170710
Great twitter thread. Thanks. I'll definitely never donate again.
Wow that twitter thread was great, actually diving into the output of these scam organizations.
PPP loan data is another great source for finding these scam charities, although most of them dont even have any output to critique.