[yareal]

An engineer costs $500k a year. Salary, benefits, office space, equipment, hr, legal, and other overhead. The engineer will only see a fraction of that, of course.

If you told me it took a hundred engineers to run Wikipedia I'd say, that's not totally unreasonable. Features, design, api, scaling, moderation, there's a ton for engineers to be doing.

[JimDabell]

An engineer doesn’t cost $500k/yr. An engineer who lives in one of the highest cost-of-living places on earth costs $500k/yr. There’s absolutely no reason Wikimedia needs to pay that much.

[smsm42]

It doesn't. Even with insurance, etc. I doubt they spend this much. They pay below market for most positions I've seen (though their benefits are on a good level) so even with taxes, overheads and all I don't see where 500k would come from.

[threecheese]

Hire only the lowest cost employees, I demand it!

You’ve mildly annoyed me with that banner each of the thousands of times I’ve used your free world-library over these decades, and I’m done putting up with it!

[JimDabell]

> Hire only the lowest cost employees, I demand it!

Nobody said that. There’s a difference between “don’t hire the top 1% most expensive developers in the world” and “hire only the lowest cost employees”. Wikipedia can comfortably avoid the extremes on either end of the spectrum.

[riku_iki]

> highest cost-of-living places on earth costs $500k/yr. There’s absolutely no reason Wikimedia needs to pay that much.

those places also have highest talent pool.

[JimDabell]

There’s more talented developers outside of high CoL places than inside. The comparison is not with one other place, the comparison is with the entire world.

[sciurus]

Your overall point still stands, but FWIW Wikimedia pays less than its peers. To compare two active listings

Senior Security Engineer at Mozilla (https://boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/5803609): $124,000 to $199,000 plus bonus

Senior Security Engineer at Wikimedia (https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/5890112): $105,000 to $164,000

[yareal]

The rule of thumb is that employees cost the company double what they pay the employee. So, still hundreds of thousands per employee.