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Comment by kemayo

3 years ago

I'd say it's still a tricky comparison because the WMF is (reductively) a tech company, and tech sector salaries remain pretty high. For a lot of roles they need to fill, they're competing with other tech companies for those employees, not just other nonprofits. A salary that's fantastic by average-nonprofit standards might be vastly underpaying someone who's deciding between a job at the WMF or Google.

WMF is not a tech company, and their value is not in their tech. Their value is in their user created and populated content .

  • WMF is a company that's mostly engaged in maintaining a tech product, and much of its hiring needs are for people who'd otherwise be working in tech. If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category.

    • > If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category.

      They're not in the business of selling/providing tech and there's nothing technologically novel about what they do. What they do is providing and managing an encyclopedia. Their value proposition isn't some tech, it's their content.

      In fact you've got it the wrong way around, because if the bar to being a "tech company" was using or maintaining some sort of technology, then pretty much every company would be a tech company nowadays. In that scenario the category would be truly meaningless.

      The easiest way to spot a tech company is looking at their R&D spending: a tech company is constantly exploring instead of just maintaining.

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