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.
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.
I did not say they should get paid 100s of times more. In fact I said the opposite.
But it’s not a leap to imagine someone who manages people has an outsized impact (on average) on the performance of the business relative to the people they manage. They set direction and goals - and while it isn’t more important than the individuals doing the work to achieve the goals, on average it has a larger impact.
Cushy office job or not, managing people is a shit ton of work, work you don’t have as an IC. It’s work that is often done after you do your day job. There are shitty managers just like there are shitty ICs, but if you’re talking in generalities, the percentages are probably similar.
Its pretty easy to explain. You see 400k is where us taxes for a couple is paying the highest rate. It never goes higher no matter how much more you get paid. Those are the people we tax. at 4mil you have your income go into your one man llc and shuffled through various trusts and bussnesses in a varitey of countries so that you pay less tax than someond making 5 figures.
The max bracket starts at $693k for married couples filing jointly. The vast majority of couples making $1M-10M are not running that that income through an LLC and shuffling into trusts and businesses. That definitely happens - not with ordinary income, which is what those tax brackets are for. It predominantly happens with people putting assets in trusts (i.e. stock). There are ways to play games with ordinary income, but it’s much, much harder.
yeah I am way out of date. I remember it as roughly 125 and 250. Regardless though a person making millions pays the same top tax rate as a person making hundreds of thousands and we have people who make billions now (well not as a wage which is the other issue)
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.
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 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.
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.
$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 :)
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.
The absolute nosedive of firefox's share, its erratic and pointless development, the waste of money... in fact there are many valid criticisms against mozilla and its mismanagement, take your pick.
In a world set against you, even doing the right thing might not lead to success.
They are deeply dependent on Google; they’ve been trying to find revenue without Google. They’ve largely failed, but that doesn’t mean the strategy is wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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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:
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.
The dude does not even seem to know what a nonprofit is.
Their calculation of Wikipedia being able to run for 100 years is if you removed everyone’s salary. Not sure you would get many people working 40+ hours a week for free voluntarily.
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, 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.
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.”
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.
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 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.
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…
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).
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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