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Translation: business-types are salty about Wikipedia not toeing the line on the fiction that executive pay “needs” to be obscene in order to “attract talent.”
They don’t like it when real life counters their narrative, and this shows that corporations can pay reasonable salaries to their executives.
I still think the “low” salary of Wikimedia is obscene.
There is no way even that figure is proportionate to what these people actually do day to day.
700k? For being in charge of one of the biggest websites in history?
That doesn’t seem awful at all.
I’m not saying I agree with the grandparent commenter that Wikipedia execs are overpaid (in fact, I probably don’t agree), but I am skeptical of the assumption in general that executives of large companies deserve to get paid more than executives of small ones. Who’s to say that a big company is inherently more complicated than a small one? Who’s to say that big-company execs’ jobs couldn’t be the same complexity or even simpler because they benefit from economies of scale?
As far as I can tell, the only difference we can be sure about is that a bigger entity would generally have a bigger budget and therefore be able to afford to pay more, but for me, that’s far from sufficient justification to argue that they should.
I got my BA in organizational communication, so I feel that I can speak to this. There is definitely a direct correlation with the size of a company and the complexity of running the company. It gets compounded when your company is high profile like Wikipedia is because it winds up becoming political really quick, as stupid as that is. The only way to keep a company ‘not complicated’ is to keep it perfectly flat, which is impossible once you get up to around 25 employees, at which point the CEO is directly managing everyone and can’t do their job running the company.
Now the question of deserving to get paid more is pretty nuanced imo. Does a person deserve to be paid more because they work harder? If so, service industry workers should be some of the top paid people. Or should compensation be determined by impact to the companies bottom line? Or perhaps correlated with personal risk in the role? What about volume of work? Or difficulty of work? I don’t think it’s as simple as asking if they deserve it so much as asking what the company can pay and the value add the executive makes. But this is a bit of a blue sky scenario where there’s equity in how we pay people rather than this obscene good old boys club where executives all smell their own farts and pat each other on the back for doing so.
I do think that higher level positions with higher levels of responsibility (which will be different based on numerous factors, including size and complexity of the company) should be paid more than lower levels. But I also think there should be a cap on the wage disparity between the lowest and highest earners.
One of my favorite fiction series of books broke it down as follows. You get paid for danger, skill, and annoyance. In this case annoyances are everything that makes the job undesirable.
Service industry has limited personal danger, relatively accessible skills, and limited annoyances.
Meanwhile deep sea fisherman has extremely high personal danger, again relatively accessible skill set, but it also has moderately high annoyances.
Because of this, the fisherman should be paid more than the chef.
I’m not entirely certain this actually works out in real life. CEO may have a high skill set, but personal danger and annoyances are both relatively low…
I don’t think execs at bigger companies should be paid more because it’s more complex, I think a big part of it is the pressure/stakes are higher because you have to answer to more employees/shareholders if you make the wrong decision.
In many cases their narcissistic personalities make this argument moot, but I wouldn’t want to be responsible for decisions that affect the lives of thousands of employees.
Seems obscenely low, tbh.
And you know what they do day to day because you’re who again?
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Maybe I’m mistaken, but I haven’t seen that person assume anything. They just asked who the person was that would make them an expert on the subject. Pretty reasonable question
In fact, the only person I see making assumptions is you. You’re assuming that the person you replied to was making assumptions.
Those are very reasonable salaries to me. What’s insane and should never exist is those who make $200 million a year. Like who needs this much money? What are you gonna do with all of it? Does it even matter how much money you have after a certain amount? I think at a certain point it becomes some kind of disorder or a mental illness to pursue more and more money. Give me $100k a year and I’ll be a happy, very happy camper.
Edit: to be more clear, I’m talking about where I live currently. $100k where I live would put me in a very comfortable spot financially. My bad, everyone.
Honestly, today, with a family, house, car, etc… 100k isn’t as much as it sounds.
Dog I make less than 40k, it’s exactly what it sounds like.
I don’t make 100k, but me and my fiance make about 140k combined and that gets us a 1BR apartment in North Chicago and we share a car. We live better than when we each made about $40k but six figures isn’t what it used to be.
Been sinking on that for a couple of years. It is suffering. Start a new job in January and should be doing much better. Best of luck with your endeavors!
I get that, my wife works in education and makes minimum wage. People are underpaid and that sucks. Doesn’t change the fact that inflation sucks too.
I remember when 40k was a decent living wage and it wasn’t that long ago. 100k ain’t CEO money tho. It’s can’t afford a house and living check to check when you have more than 2 kids money. Hell, probably is with only 2 kids. Forget about a college fund.
$250-$300k is the new $100k from the 90’s imo. It’s rough out here.
$100k used to be a number to aspire to, growing up in the 90s and early 00s. But, nowadays (depending on location), $100k is not as much as you think. Especially if you’re trying to support a family on it.
True, I should have been more clear that I’m talking about where I live currently. $100k would definitely put me in a very comfortable spot in life, but I get what you mean :)
$100k
Havs you done any math on this for where you live?
How about Dallas? Atlanta? Philly? Baltimore?
OK, let’s pull the big ones: DC? Anecdote: was once offered a job inside the beltway for a little over $100k. Fuck no. $100k in DC is nothing.
How about San José? LA? San Fran? NY? Again, more places where $100k ain’t much.
Single metrics don’t tell us much.
I agree with you 100% $100k in some states like NY or California don’t mean shit, but where I live, I’d live a very comfortable life if I made $100k.
All that extra money seems to be a detriment. People seem to be less empathetic and just use that money to get more money.
Reminds me of what Warren Zevon had to say about rich people problems, off Preludes. It came out a few years after his death, and the back half of the album has snippets from some radio interview(s?) he did. Neat musings by a complex dude: he was creative genius in a lot of ways, and a titanic asshole in a lot of other ways (he asked his ex-wife to write his biography, and to not go easy on him - alcoholism, violence, absentee parenting…it’s all there).
Anyway, that’s a preface for the folks who don’t know about him: he probably could have been a bigger financial success had he not been a disaster of a human, but maybe his dirty life and times gave him enough material to feed his creativity…who knows.
WZ: I was real lucky, because I always had some kind of work that came along - at the last minute, anyway.
I was always able to make some kind of living as a musician
I also never really got rich, and that might have been lucky too, ya know?
Interviewer: in what way?
WZ: Well, because the less time you spend with the issues of being rich
they’re like the issues of being famous
they’re not real issues
so they’re not real life.
Interviewer: And it leaves more time to be creative?
WZ: There’s more of an exchange - a human exchange of ideas and feelings to be had on the bus stop than over the phone with your accountant, and if you’re rich you spend a lot of time on the phone with your accountant. it’s necessary, I believe.
I know I’m happy and that means I must be lucky. That I know.
EDIT: this is not to say I wouldn’t be grateful for more money, myself, but I chose the life of a biologist - in ecology and evolution, no less. I’m happy to make a living, and it’s always a little shocking to see folks make double/triple what I do and say it’s “not much these days”. Those of us scraping by have a wildly different perspective, and I’d love to give folks a tour of what it looks like long-term.
I’ve not heard of Warren Zevon of maybe I have and not yet known it. However, that was a great recount of that interview and I’m happy to have read it.
I appreciate you taking the time to say that! Thank you. My favorite song by him is probably Desperados Under the Eaves, if you’d ever like to hear the best of his music.
Yup, it’s like it washes off their souls out of their bodies. I wouldn’t wanna be in that spot to be honest.
100k would ruin me!
Move?
No!
So they’re making $150-300k per year, with more for severance. That is indeed relatively low compared to major tech companies.
The article’s examples were Docusign (CEO made $85M) and Google (CEO made $225M).
$150-300k makes sense. $225M does not. It’s obscene and absurd.
the difference between $225M and 300k is $224.7M
Hell, even low 7-figures could make sense. Though even that’s still high.
But Jesus Christ with these hundreds of millions, it’s obscene.
It’s important to note that most of what they “made” is actually just the stock that they already own or the stock options they received.
In general the actual cash that they receive is less than $500k.
Taxes are calculated differently on stock sales vs wages.
So?
The lack of people understanding this is what leads to poorly written laws.
They think that all we need is an income tax to tax the rich more.
So when laws are passed saying that they’ll tax anyone making more than $1mil, people don’t realize that it doesn’t really do a whole lot.
I mean I think capital gains needs to be rolled into income tax too
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You’re right that their salaries weren’t $500k plus, those numbers included severance. Actual salaries were in the order of $150-300k (with the highest salaries paid to the owners).
Wikimedia doesn’t have stock AFAIK.
If all other executives would earn as much as the guys from Wikipedia, the world would be a better place.
These are eminently reasonable salaries. Compared to some of the parasites that I work with who get paid > $300K to do fuck all.
So eh, you guys hiring?
Sure, but you actually have to work hard for your $60k. Don’t want the $300k people to feel bad for firing you for not supporting their salary.
Every large corporation is like this too. Even after layoffs, they seem to mostly just get rid of the low pay workers. The high pay morons are still around.
We’ll look at that. I’m even MORE incentivized to donate, now
Yeah donating is a lot easier to understand when wages are (low) 6 figures instead of 8 or 9.
I’ve been meaning to for years! I will as soon as I’m able to.
Yeah, someone complained that they have funds to operate for 100 years. First, I doubt that if you account for inflation. Second, it’s one of the most valuable resources ever created. I hope it lasts at least 100 years.
Mozilla’s CEO is paid $7m for running the “charity”.
So? If that’s what she’s worth then you either hire her, or put up with second best. You may think CEOs are paid too much overall - I’m not disagreeing, but let’s not pretend people who work for charities should all take charity salaries. If you want to build a world class product, hire world class people - they’re not cheap.
I cannot fathom the indignation.
She’s CEO of Mozilla foundation (charity) but also Mozilla corporation (normal business).
US salaries are just completely bonkers. 500k is “mid-level facebook”? What the actual fuck? Europeans are getting completely shafted. They are the cheap, qualified, tech labor of the US.
One reason tech companies are able to give absurd salaries is to suppress competition. If they can price everyone else out from good engineers, they can keep competition low.
Well, we don’t have these kind of tech…uh…“foundations” in Europe. But execs in other companies are getting 500k…
Last I checked GAFAM exist in Europe but don’t pay close to what they pay their US counterparts. European companies also have CEOs that earn millions but still pay their software devs way below 100k€/year.
Oh I agree with that, it’s just that there aren’t many CEOs that get 6 or 7 millions as salary in the EU. These people are making their money elsewhere…
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and are now injecting its extension directly into the browser! Firefox?
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Thanks for the reminder! Just donated!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Wikipedia’s pages are created and edited by a community of volunteers, while the Wikimedia Foundation manages the website’s technical backend.
Mind you, it’s about doubled since, but they don’t publish breakdownsThey have enough cash to operate wikipedia for more than 100 years according to the public IRS filings.
On the lower end, vice presidents Carol Dunn and Margaret Novotny were paid $241,438 and $242,379 respectively, the filing shows.
wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the internet, contains terabytes of information, doesnt host ads, and is entirely free to browse.
The CEO of Docusign, a company that JUST signs documents for you, made $85,940,000 this year," wrote another person, whose post garnered over 22,000 likes.
The encyclopedia is also one of the most important sources of training data for AI tools like ChatGPT, Nicholas Vincent, a professor at Simon Fraser University, told The New York Times.
The original article contains 606 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The CEO of Docusign, a company that JUST signs documents for you, made $85,940,000 this year," wrote another person, whose post garnered over 22,000 likes.
That just shows how grossly overpaid other executives are. The problem isn’t that Wikipedia execs aren’t paid enough, it’s that other executives are paid way too much.
I stand by my opinion that CEO pay should be pegged to the “lowest” employee on the totem pole, everyone should ride the wave and spread out the earnings. Its just gross how it currently is.
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They’d just do what they always do and make the money elsewhere (mostly using accounting tricks), and claim they made $0 in income.
Good luck going tit for tat with capital. The house always wins.
I don’t think the raises would be as big as you think.
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Look up mondragon Spain. Its a town in Spain whose economy was struggling after WWII. They turned it around by adopting a cooperative business model. This means all employees are owners.
All employees get to vote how the company operates. Executives work for share holders right? With cooperatives, the share holders are employees creating a business Ouroboros where the boss and their boss have an interest in keeping employees Happy. Employees are invested in keeping the company profitable.
They have padded rules like CEO pay is tied to the lowest salary in the company. It can never be more than X amount of the lowest salary. If they want it to raise they have to increase all salaries in the company first.
They don’t get filthy stinking rich. But what they have shown is that the people living there score happier than most. They also show that they are economically more resilient. For close to a 100 years they have withstood recessions and economic down turns.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/07/mondragon-spains-giant-cooperative
In addition to Mondragon, look into co-determination laws in places like Germany, where they have profit sharing, and a certain % of a company’s board needs to be made up of actual workers.
This can be done.
I stand by my opinion that CEO pay should be pegged to the “lowest” employee on the totem pole
And congressman/representative salary should be pegged to minimum wage.
Why?
You’ve use the word “should”, which means you’re applying a value judgement. On what metrics are you basing this value judgment? Does a company perform better using this guideline? Do they lower any risks? Does this increase retention? Improve cross-team communication? Reduce waste or losses?
While I also personally think these salaries are insane, without answering about a thousand more similar questions, there’s no justification for the metric you’ve provided.
Another way to look at it: if a company could hire someone for less, and get similar results, wouldn’t they?
so heres where I disagree, if you’re paying the minumum you’re attracting the minimum, the reverse can be said for the worker, why work here when I can get more elsewhere? with pegging the top and bottom rungs of the ladder and spreading the income everyone is motivated to come in to work everyday because they know that if they take care of their work, their work will take care of them. I don’t think thats radical. everyone wins.
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Fair point. I find it interesting that there’s such an emphasis on « just »; it takes some efforts to get to a point where as a company you can trust the process to the extent we trust docusign… it’s not exactly trivial. Still waaaaaaay overpaid indeed but still.
How much of that success was a direct result of the CEO, though? The more time goes on, the more any company depends on the historic collective achievement of humanity. The company couldn’t have succeeded at all without an educated workforce, infrastructure, “the economy”, or a million other general social, economic, and political factors completely outside the company’s control.
Think of it like this… Most of math as we know it, and by extension computer science, wouldn’t exist without Euler. Does that mean Euler, or Euler’s children, should own all value generated by Euler’s math? How about if he started a company that copyrighted those algorithms? All tech companies in perpetuity? How about the VC that conducted the hostile takeover with other people’s money? Should the CEO who leads the robotics company that replaces the human workforce, rule ALL of humanity for the remainder of eternity?
Even though my examples are fucking ridiculous, the way the world actually works is that any CEO who started an ultimately successful company, regardless of whether or not they were pivotal or hindered the company, and even average executives who jumped in for a year just before IPO, frequently end up wealthier than hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people — wealthier than entire nation states — weather than people who had many orders of magnitude more influence in the success of the company than they ever did…
Ultimately, no matter how much you do or achieve individually, human civilisation and all its achievements could not exist without the collective effort of billions of people (and counting). In the grand scheme of things every hot shot CEO is just an inevitable statistic fulfilling a role that someone else would have fulfilled if they had never been born.
You’re preaching the choir. I agree he (and others) is overpaid. I solely reacted on weird spike thrown at docusign.
Where in disagree is on your very generous of billions in humanity’s achievements ; pretty sure a lot of us didn’t pitch in. Pretty sure my own name isn’t appearing in the credits for example. But I salute your optimism.
Have you ever worked for a company that did something? Then your name should be in the credits. You probably did a greater amount of directly value generating labor than the executives did.
Yeah, until we find out it doesn’t when they inevitably get hacked. Like the credit reporting agencies. I’m sure those CEOs were (and still are) doing just fine.
Hardly an argument ; it can be said just about every company… and also unrelated to their CEO to a large extent.
I mean I’d argue that the Wikipedia execs are still paid too much given their actual productive output.
Why is this such an unpopular take? Is it because Lemmy is largely comprised of tech bros who make too much money? I just don’t understand how people are justifying any salary above 200k, and even that’s a huge stretch.
Yeah I mean the point I’m making isn’t that Wikimedia execs are paid too much, it’s that all executives are paid to much. The workers actually create value, all an executive does is direct that value generation and claim the rewards for themselves.
IMO income below something like $200k shouldn’t be taxed at all - workers below that range are sacrificing their time (and sometimes their physical health) to earn money. Above $200k income should be taxed heavily. People who make more than that are typically doing less while earning more - what they earn is disproportionate to the amount of effort they put in.
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The CEO made $780k with $600k of that being severance. She left Wikipedia a lot bigger and influential than when she started. Sure that is still a lot but there are much bigger fish to fry.
It used to be that Wikimedia projects had lots of volunteers willing to maintain the projects, but the WMF didn’t have a lot of money. Now the WMF is swimming in money (which it uses to do more and more “office actions” bypassing community processes), but editor numbers are staying constant or even shrinking. People nowadays like to spend time a lot more pretty much everywhere else on the Internet than on Wikimedia projects.
It is time for free knowledge to transition to a concept where people get paid, not the wiki concept that worked fine to start out in the beginning, but whose limits have now become clear.
I’m all for CEOs and executives limiting their pay, ideally based on what they pay their regular employees, but of all the companies in the tech space to get mad at, they choose one that’s actually doing a significant public service?
And I know people are gonna say it’s the volunteers that do the real work but people still had to build and run things. I dunno, I respect them getting luxury pay more than anyone at Facebook at least.
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