Comment by vjk800
2 years ago
> Another $19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people, a far larger team than a few years ago.
What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?
Costs for staff are not just salaries. It's also pensions, taxes, benefits, the offices, software licenses and all the other stuff. I've often heard 50% of total cost going to salary, but it varies.
Still does seem high though.
Pensions aren't a thing in the U.S. anymore, especially not for tech. And when a U.S. company says "staffing costs" that does not include licenses, offices, etc. It's strictly salary and benefits.
According to Signal's 990, it's paying multiple employees over $700k. That's above-market for corporate compensation, and it's way above market for non-profit compensation, to the point where it could be considered private inurement.
They cover this pretty substantially in the post on Signal's website (I know they merged the Wired article into this one).
Signal is trying to compete with the richest companies in the world; including for talent. And considering Signal's origins and motivations, they're not going to lower salaries or decrease benefits because some people believe that working for a non-profit automatically means lower compensation.
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I keep re-reading this section of their blog post trying to figure out what I'm missing here. $2.6 million full load per employee on avg? Is this heavily weighted to a few executives? Can somebody explain this to me?
Edit: I'm stupid and did the math backwards.
You mathed backwards. It's $380K per person fully loaded. Which is pretty inline with decent tech salary these days.
That is their total cost, not the salary paid.
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A few employees and their compensation are listed on their Form 990, page 7. Sidenote: did "Moxie" legally change his name from Matthew Rosenfeld?
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
They have devs and support engineers earning 700k, more than the CTO?
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Isn't it 380k per person in average? Seems like in-line with FAANG salaries in major US cities.
Only thing I can think of is it incentives them not to put backdoors into Signal/get fired.
I think your math is off? $19M/50 people = $380,000?
You're doing that division backwards.