[atlasunshrugged]

But that's not salary, that's the total cost per employee. So if you factor in ~40% cost for healthcare, pension, perks, and various taxes, then the average salary is closer to $240,000 which will still a bit high, is probably less than market for the average engineer working at the company.

[gamblor956]

Per the 990, which is just salary, multiple employees at Signal are getting paid over $650k. That's way above market for the nonprofit sector for comparable positions.

[macNchz]

From page 2 of Schedule J (at the bottom) they break out the components of the compensation, showing that most of those numbers incorporate a base salary that looks fairly normal with 2-600k of bonus & incentive comp on top.

In curious Googling to see if there was an explanation for how their structure works, I stumbled on this interesting Glassdoor review:

> The bonus structure promised up to a 100% match with salary, but in practice the system was set up so that nobody got more than 50%, if that. Had I understood this I probably would have taken a competing offer that ultimately would have had much higher comp.

> The quarterly cliff on the bonus system, where a feature failing to ship within the quarter specified (even if just by a single day) was counted as if you hadn't done it at all. This led to death marches each quarter as everyone scrambled to try to finish unrealistic goals. It wasn't possible to get help from anyone else at these times since of course they too had the same problem.

> Nominally, the quarterly goals were set in a collaborative process. In practice it was a 2 day full day meeting where we were told what Moxie had decided we were going to do - our input wasn't really considered at all, including if it was even viable to complete in a quarter. I'm fine with top down control, that's how most corps work, but I disliked the false patina that this was some democratic process.

> Internal communications are a disaster, because Signal uses Signal for everything, including things Signal isn't at all designed for or good at. Bug tracking is literally done in a giant group chat. I have a newfound appreciation for JIRA.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Signal-Messenger-Reviews-E...

[gamblor956]

After a few hours of reaching out to people about this, the Signal salaries appear to be grossly inflated not only compared to other non-profits, but to what engineers working on iMessage and Meta Messenger make for the same or more difficult work (considering that both of these competitors many several times the users as Signal; Meta Messenger has over 1 billion users).

[notachatbot123]

Even in central Europe $240000 would be way more than what an average engineer would cost. I'd estimate ~$150000 for well paid jobs there.