- That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV.
You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.
> $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people
That $19M/year was total employee costs which, as best I understand these things, can often work out to be double the raw salaries which would bring the average down to a slightly less excessive $170k/year.
Whilst competitive salaries are important, it's fair to say that, outside of the US, you can get good people for a lot less than $338k/year.
To give one example of a (not that cheap) market, outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK. Even accounting for additional costs like taxation and equipment, that's likely to be under $100k fully loaded.
I said Average for a reason :D I didn't say you can get "top-notch" security developers for that.
I don't think there's industry numbers for that set of people in the UK, as it's not a big enough set. However I'd be surprised if they were 150K plus though, that's a very rare salary in the UK.
Also there are cheaper countries than the UK who have great devs.
There's definitely top-notch software and security engineers making well north of £150k in the UK. As you go up in levels, it's indeed a small set of people, but FB / Google comp for a top L7 engineer working in the same space as Signal engineers can be $700k+ in the UK. Just have a look at levels.fyi, and you'll see that even finance will pay over $500k in London. Furthermore, given how small the group of people are at the top of these companies, very few will self-report their incomes publicly, which is why you'll rarely hear about the engineers making $1M+ – but those cases do exist.
The people behind Signal pioneered end-to-end encryption, and as is pointed out in the blog post, there's still a lot of novel cryptography development involved in building a privacy-first messenger. You can't do that without top-notch talent.
IIRC, employees cost the business ~150% of their salary. That means we're looking at more like a $220k/yr salary on average. For a bay area company, that seems completely reasonable.
Nonprofits, as with for-profits, must pay competitive wages or they will have trouble getting the expertise that they need. $338k/head seems reasonable when you also consider taxes the company must pay for each employee.
"just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages"
Actually it does usually. Because when people see real meaning in their work, as opposed to find yet another way to manipulate people on other peoples behalf, then you don't have to buy their consciousness as well.
So sure, it is awesome, that signals employers get to have meaning and money. But I would bet, you would find competent people working for less. (And maybe somewhere else)
But .. they do have a working app and organisation right now and drastic changes could destroy that.
Why shouldn't we want to pay people working at non-profits the same for their labor than they would get at for-profits? If they are doing just as or even more important work, why do we want to bend over backwards to justify them getting paid less for it?
