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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago (13 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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Yes, I agree it's a lot.

I think that with "recruiting" and "HR services" they mean outsourced services, so maybe not all of it goes directly to the employees.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

~~Don't forget the CEO's salary is $5.7M. If you subtract the CEO's and other execs' salary from those $20M total, the salary of ordinary employees would probably way less than $200k.~~

[–] [email protected] -5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months 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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