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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 37 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I would never have guessed that an app like signal would spend almost 20 million in salaries. I wonder what is the salary of the executives.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago*

    I wonder what is the salary of the executives.

    Wonder no more, they have it in their 2022 tax filing:

    Compensation

    Key Employees and Officers Base Related Other

    Jim O'leary (Vp, Engineering) $666,909 $0 $33,343

    Ehren Kret (Chief Technology Officer) $665,909 $0 $8,557

    Aruna Harder (Chief Operating Officer) $444,606 $0 $20,500

    Graeme Connell (Software Developer) $444,606 $0 $35,208

    Greyson Parrelli (Software Developer) $422,972 $0 $35,668

    Jonathan Chambers (Software Developer) $420,595 $0 $28,346

    Meredith Whittaker (Director / Pres Of Signal Messenger) $191,229 $0 $6,032

    Moxie Marlinspike (Dir / Ceo Of Sig Msgr Through 2/2022) $80,567 $0 $1,104

    Brian Acton (Pres/Sec/Tr/Ceo Sig Msgr As Of 2/2022) $0 $0 $0

    from https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    I mean, without browsing levels.fyi or anything like that you can get 4 to 10 software engineers for 1 million (anything from 100k to 250k depending on location, experience, etc.).

    Not all employees are engineers but that would imply 80 to 200 staff for the 20 million they state.

    That's only the component paid to the actual staff though. There are additional costs like Healthcare, unemployment, social security, etc, and other benefits that may not be included in wages (though some portion may be deducted from salaries), but they are including in that statement / summary.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's not only salaries:

    about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Still, the cost equals almost 400 000 dollars per employee. That is a LOT of money. Even half that (twice the employees or half the cost) would still be a lot.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Believe me, one seriously awesome software developer for 400k achieves more than 10 shitty ones at 100k each.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't need to believe, I work with these guys on a daily basis (not the Signal guys, but devs) and I know your statements to be true. Still, I very much doubt that they need 50 devs with that salary. It's a chat app! Of course they have other people too, like marketing, project leads, blah blah - still doesn't put the price into my mind.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago*

    They develop a lot of software themselves. They aren't just throwing together a few established libraries and call it a day like 80% of software development. They also take the hard and correct way every time instead of the fast, easy and bad way. Quote from the article:

    The same dynamic played out again when Signal introduced support for animated GIF searches on Android and iOS. Instead of quickly and easily integrating the standard GIF search SDK that most other apps were using, engineers spent considerable time and creativity developing another unique privacy-preserving technique that hides GIF search terms from Signal’s servers, while also hiding who is searching for those terms from the GIF search engine itself. We later expanded those techniques to further obfuscate GIF search information by obscuring the amount of traffic that passes through the proxied connection.

    When Meta acquired GIPHY, and many other apps were scrambling to contend with the privacy implications of the deal, Signal employees slept soundly knowing that we had already built this feature correctly several years earlier.

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  • [–] -5 points 2 years ago*

    That is not that much in this industry.

    I've got roughly 25 years in the software development industry and depending on what talent market you're working in, that 400k may not even be enough for one engineer or architects salary.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    It's an absolutely surprising amount, because Matrix spends less than that if you just count the people working on the open source offerings.

    And that project has significantly more features, is federated, and has a much larger scope.

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