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The salaries of Wikimedia executives are sparking an online debate about tech sector wages
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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yup. wikipedia's salaries aren't 'too low'--the others (mostly-publicly traded or dreaming-of-an-ipo) pay their top executives way too fucking much.
They are probably still a little low - but there’s a giant gap between $400k and $200M.
If you believe that a lot more lower level people should make $150-200k, their manager should probably make more, and their manager should probably make more, and their manager should probably make more, and the CEO should probably make more and all the sudden there isn’t a wide enough gap to pay those people more. Would you want to manage a bunch of people for $5k/yr more?
Money that isn’t paid to employees is paid to shareholders or squandered on stupid stuff.
Their CEOs should make more, and their regular employees should make more.
Wait. Baked into your thoughts here is an idea that each middle manager up the chain deserves “more” and that isn’t substantiated.
Managing a bunch of people may/mayn’t be harder than doing a difficult job w/ customers or manual labor or whatever. In some cases it’s a relatively kooshy desk job compared to “being in the trenches”.
Yes, sometimes decisions at higher levels has more ramifications. This is why we want good talent in those roles. But it’s a cultural choice that we decide to pay them 100s of times more.
I did not say they should get paid 100s of times more. In fact I said the opposite.
But it’s not a leap to imagine someone who manages people has an outsized impact (on average) on the performance of the business relative to the people they manage. They set direction and goals - and while it isn’t more important than the individuals doing the work to achieve the goals, on average it has a larger impact.
Cushy office job or not, managing people is a shit ton of work, work you don’t have as an IC. It’s work that is often done after you do your day job. There are shitty managers just like there are shitty ICs, but if you’re talking in generalities, the percentages are probably similar.
Its pretty easy to explain. You see 400k is where us taxes for a couple is paying the highest rate. It never goes higher no matter how much more you get paid. Those are the people we tax. at 4mil you have your income go into your one man llc and shuffled through various trusts and bussnesses in a varitey of countries so that you pay less tax than someond making 5 figures.
The max bracket starts at $693k for married couples filing jointly. The vast majority of couples making $1M-10M are not running that that income through an LLC and shuffling into trusts and businesses. That definitely happens - not with ordinary income, which is what those tax brackets are for. It predominantly happens with people putting assets in trusts (i.e. stock). There are ways to play games with ordinary income, but it's much, much harder.
yeah I am way out of date. I remember it as roughly 125 and 250. Regardless though a person making millions pays the same top tax rate as a person making hundreds of thousands and we have people who make billions now (well not as a wage which is the other issue)