345
The salaries of Wikimedia executives are sparking an online debate about tech sector wages
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
345 points (87.4% liked)
Technology
58133 readers
4469 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.