Comment by bzbz

This number includes taxes, benefits, etc, not just raw salary.

Notably Signal employees do not get equity, so the salary must be higher to remain competitive.

Signal is probably the hardest class of product to build. Name an optimization/distributed systems problem, they probably have it. And quite literally, a Signal bug could jeopardize an activist/journalist’s life.

So for a <$200k salary and no equity, how many world-class engineers do you think you could hire?

I simply wouldn’t trust the product, if it had mediocre engineers.