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The salaries of Wikimedia executives are sparking an online debate about tech sector wages (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[+] 154 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (22 children)
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  • [–] 64 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    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.

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

    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.

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

    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.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago

    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.

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

    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.

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

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    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)

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

    Honestly, today, with a family, house, car, etc... 100k isn't as much as it sounds.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Dog I make less than 40k, it's exactly what it sounds like.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago*

    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.

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

    $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.

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

    All that extra money seems to be a detriment. People seem to be less empathetic and just use that money to get more money.

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

    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.

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

    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.

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