this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Not trying to be a dick but the Executive Director can take a fucking pay cut.
I found a reddit thread from 4 months ago where he said his salary was $170k/year. I'm not saying he is making obscene money, but if that's nearly 15% of all operating costs he can shave that down to $80k-$100k and still live comfortably if he's willing to accept a more austere standard of living.
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to be paid well, but he's getting a damn sight better pay than moderators and community managers who seem to make up 50% of the budget for multiple people: the trust and safety team as well as the other employees at the foundation.
To be fair, that's the lowest executive salary I've seen in a looong time.
170k for running a company? Shit. I wouldn't do that. You can make just as much being a halfway competent developer, and it's way less stress.
I guess you live in the USA? No one makes this amount of money
A Senior Developer in any major city makes that amount of money.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-developer-salary-SRCH_KO0,16.htm
Funnily enough, it shows the localised amount.
For me in France it shows 50k€ to 69k€, so $58k to $80k at current exchange rates
It just confirms that this is USA only haha
Btw glassdoor sucks. Forces you to have an account and register work shit
Listed salaries are almost always what the employee pays, not what it costs the company. In the US, this includes the payroll tax, and cost of "benefits," like healthcare and unemployment insurance, and is referred to as the burdened rate. This is separate from the income tax the employee has to pay to the government, mind you.
The burdened rate for most employees at the companies I've worked for in the US is like 20-50% higher than the salary paid. Not sure exactly how it works in France, but I do know there's a pretty complex payroll tax companies have to pay. I think it's something like 40% at the salary you quoted.
seems like there's a problem here?
Pretty much the same in France. Companies pay 150% to 200% of the amount that the employee receives, when the employee has a relatively high pay, and the employee then pays a significant amount of its pay in diverse things, then the income tax hits. France is pretty much one of the countries that taxes the most in the world so...
Plus you have to add in the amortized cost of legal, HR, etc for employees.
Not a big deal for 1-2 employees, but as you scale you need support employees
You can't just look at the exchange rate. You have to look at cost and standard of living.
Someone in the US making 100k is not doing as well as someone in France making 70k€
Then at this point I start to wonder: why can't they take people in countries where the cost of living is cheaper? When you're funded by donations, this seems more logical
I feel like companies based in the USA and accepting donations make it so that donations from countries outside USA are a lot less meaningfull because we get less money, and they need to spend more.
You've basically just reinvented off shoring.
CEO don't just run company. Their job is also to determine strategy and work relationships to improve sales/donations. They should be hired wherever they can do that best.
Doing better until you happen to incur a medical emergency, then bankrupt.
And a 80k$ salary in France amounts to around 125k$ cost for the employer. So 170k$ isn't that much - I actually know French developers and network engineers that make similar money. The French ITsec architect I interviewed last year would have cost me (converted) around 150k$.
So 170k$ is absolutely not out of the normal range here.
Talking about France: The French government could start to properly support matrix.org as they use it for tChap. The same goes for Germany with the "Behördenmessenger"
If that's the amount the company pays, then yea. If this is the amount the employee receives, then that's a lot. Like really.
As we are looking at the company expenditures here, it's the former.
Why would it display the priced paid by the company like this, when it doesn't for other countries like France though? Seems weird
Unless USA companies don't pay taxes when paying a salary? But I don't really believe that
Nah, my bad, the later. Sorry
80k plus all of society's trappings of France. Dude, it's not even a comparison. Worker's rights, healthcare, public transit, safety, security...
Indeed, but it's understandably a super high amount compared to what we get. If you're in good shape, you get way more money. If not, you probably get (a lot) less.
Good shape? I think something got lost in translation.
I meant good health, no (mental) illness, no medical treatment, already have somewhere to live...
Right. For perspective, I once paid $200 for a single Xray (needed 3, total $600, not counting the doctors bill). And that's with health insurance.
If you have to go to urgent care, expect to pay close to $1000 for simple needs, much higher than that for more complex needs. An ambulance ride can cost upwards of $5000, and an airlift is several times that.
So better not be too much into sports, or trauma will drain your bank account.
Then you add the complete absence of consumers rights and little to no oversight on industrial activity. Lead and PFA poisoned water, food additives that are banned in most of the developed world, sugar in everything,... It's near impossible not to get sick here.
Just looked on that link for the UK. The average is listed as £63k, which is $85k.
So you're not exactly disproving the point that that type of high salary is a US thing.
You can't at all compare unless you reference cost and standard of living. I've managed and hired people in multiple countries. It's not as simple as salary X exchange rate.
Cost of living in the UK is about 12% lower than the US, including housing costs. But the average salary is about half of the US salary. So you can see that that doesn't really cover it.
Source: https://livingcost.org/cost/united-kingdom/united-states
I hate that people treat the US like a country. It's bad for statistics.
The cost of living in New Jersey is 50% higher than Alabama, for example, using the site you linked. Averages across the US are near meaningless.
Since I'm talking about tech jobs, we should compare to states with lots of tech jobs, and we might get a better comparison.
Sure, but that applies to the UK too. London has a higher cost of living than Los Angeles; averages being averages, this is weighed against lots of cheaper places to live (with massive unemployment and stagnated economics).
Depends on what that title actually means. Viewing it as a pie chart skews it so you don't realize that $170k in USD is pretty mediocre for a Director of Engineering role. If the project dies without this person, and that's what they need in salary to make it worth it to keep them there, then that's what they get paid.
It's not like they're even making an obscene amount of money ffs. That's a middling engineering salary, and this person is running the whole show. You should see what other "director" jobs at much shittier companies get paid. I think twice this amount would be a weak guess. If this person was a prick, they'd be milking that goat and taking all the free money.
This is an open source project backed by a non-profit foundation, granted, but this person is taking a massive pay cut just by working this job. Think about how that might impact their life to make that choice while trying to have a family.
$170k salary still won't you a fucking house in this country unless you live in the middle of nowhere, and this person is almost certainly in a major tech hub city, so that money means diddly when trying to pay the bills. It's barely above the poverty line in Silicon Valley after taxes for reference.
Everyone in here complaining because they make half this and think it's a lot of money because they live in Bumfuck, Idaho has no idea what it costs to live in the larger tech hubs around the world.
Exactly. I’m nowhere close to the top of the tech ladder, but I make more than that and still have to rent and will be renting for several more years. To buy an average house in this city, it would be like 7k/month without a 20% down payment. And household debt needs to be 30% of your total income so I would need to make $250k to even get approved for a loan for an average house in the city.
That's probably because I live in another country which works very differently, so what I'll say is not a judgement about the veracity of your comment, but I find incredible that $14'000 a month could be in any capacity considered a mediocre salary… the French president earns that in euros!
You don’t have to buy a house every year
No, but you do have to make enough to convince the bank to loan you the money to buy it. Houses in major cities cost WAY more than $170k.
if it's a matter of years and not centuries then in fairly alright. In many countries nowadays, new borns will never have ownership of a house or flat.
Even in europe, $50k yearly would be considered a good pay, and house in major cities would also cost way more than $170k
Maybe. But $170K isn’t what it used to be, even 5 years ago. Especially if you have kids.
Does that matter if he is failing to secure enough funding to run the non-profit? If they're risking shutting down major portions of what they do as the guiding foundation for the Matrix protocol, isn't that literally his fault since he's in charge? If the non-profit fails are all the people who donated their fucking money in hopes of it succeeding going to be happy that instead of being willing to take a haircut on pay to save the damn organization he was instead using their donated funds to fund his fucking lifestyle instead of, I don't know, living in a more modest area and doing more of the foundation business remotely?
Maybe someone shouldn't be taking on this kind of major risk and asking people for donations for the project if his kids are so fucking expensive. Nobody forced them to have those kids or live in a high cost of living area. Christ.
Not trying to be rude but they are not meeting their funding goals, which is his job. That's the entire point of the foundation existing, is to meet funding goals so they can continue to develop the protocol. If they aren't making enough money, should he take a paycut, or should they shut the whole thing down? It seems to me like they want to save the project he could take a modest pay cut, but that's just me.
Now 9 wonder if there's a similar report for Mozilla
You can pull the form 990 for any non-profit in the US pretty easily. Here's Mozilla's: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200097189