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.....
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.
yup. wikipedia's salaries aren't 'too low'--the others (mostly-publicly traded or dreaming-of-an-ipo) pay their top executives way too fucking much.
They are probably still a little low - but there’s a giant gap between $400k and $200M.
If you believe that a lot more lower level people should make $150-200k, their manager should probably make more, and their manager should probably make more, and their manager should probably make more, and the CEO should probably make more and all the sudden there isn’t a wide enough gap to pay those people more. Would you want to manage a bunch of people for $5k/yr more?
Money that isn’t paid to employees is paid to shareholders or squandered on stupid stuff.
Their CEOs should make more, and their regular employees should make more.
Wait. Baked into your thoughts here is an idea that each middle manager up the chain deserves “more” and that isn’t substantiated.
Managing a bunch of people may/mayn’t be harder than doing a difficult job w/ customers or manual labor or whatever. In some cases it’s a relatively kooshy desk job compared to “being in the trenches”.
Yes, sometimes decisions at higher levels has more ramifications. This is why we want good talent in those roles. But it’s a cultural choice that we decide to pay them 100s of times more.
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.
$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.
$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 :)
All that extra money seems to be a detriment. People seem to be less empathetic and just use that money to get more money.
In times like this, especially when the original twitter post gets ratio'd to shit, it's important to evaluate where they're getting their numbers. I see they post a link to Rumble. I've never heard of this before, what is it?
Rumble
Rumble is a video platform where you can watch live and on-demand content from various categories, such as news, politics, gaming, sports, viral, power slap and finance. You can also discover new creators, join communities, and support your favorite channels on Rumble.
Um... I don't know what Power Slap is but ok, it's a youtube clone.
All Videos
ALEX JONES EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW! Elon Brought Him Back... What's Next?!
Pentagon PANIC, Trump "Happening", Obama FEAR push, Cyber PUSH, Focus, Pray!
"HE'S BACK!!" Musk RESTORES Alex Jones On X…
NEWSMAX2 LIVE on Rumble
Oh fuck me it's a right wing nutjob site. This post is fucking dogshit, trashing Wikipedia because it helps counter their propaganda. Fuck that noise.
Happily other people noticed this fucking nonsense:
He says elsewhere that it’s a “liberal cesspool” so you know where is problem really is.
Also the CEO makes $400k if anyone just wanted that information. I had to listen to 60% of that dudes video to get to that point.
This doesn't seem insane to me. It's high for the average joe, but it's not competitive at all with other big tech CEO total comp.
Everyone is pointing out the comparison of Wikipedia's salaries to other tech companies, but they're missing the point that the person they're arguing with is NOT coming from a good faith position. They are hoping to feed on your distrust of the rich and powerful, in an attempt to convince you to work against your interests and the common good.
They hope their calls of "Wikipedia owners make too much money!" leads to "We should dismantle Wikipedia by boycotting donations!" and then to "We should sell Wikipedia to the last surviving Koch brother!"
Yeah he's disingenuous as hell, but also I don't see a ton of his Qanon-leaning audience as big donators to Wikipedia anyway.
They're the kind of people that back weird shit like Conservapedia.
It's not his audience I'm worried about (not in this context anyway). I'm worried about the people who aren't aware of who his audience is.
This lunduke recently posted the same shit against Mozilla, and sadly a lot of ppl here in lemmy are buying their crap and started bashing Mozilla for everything, at least in the posts I saw recently. I think ppl still believe that free software should be made from free labor.
If all other executives would earn as much as the guys from Wikipedia, the world would be a better place.
I don't care what their executives earn, but if those companies paid their taxes and stopped interfering with unionization efforts that would be nice.
Por que no los dos ?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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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.
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.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
