[swiftcoder]

> raised concerns about the proposed $300,000 salary for arXiv’s new CEO, saying it seemed high

Is a mid-to-high engineering salary outlandish for a CEO of what is likely to be a fairly major non-profit? Even non-profits have to be somewhat competitive when it comes to salary, and the ideal candidate is likely someone who would be balancing this against a tenured position at a major university

[mort96]

Salaries in the US are so bonkers. Everywhere else outside of the US, $300,000 is an outlandish high salary. To call it "mid to high" is insane.

[swiftcoder]

Even in the states, it’s more a distortion caused by the big tech centres. A software engineer in Ohio doesn’t command that kind of salary, but in San Francisco or Seattle that’ll buy you a moderately-senior engineer.

And while academic salaries are generally not great, tenured professors at big universities tend to make a fair bit (plus a lot more vacation time and perks than is normal in the US)

[justin66]

> A software engineer in Ohio doesn’t command that kind of salary, but in San Francisco or Seattle that’ll buy you a moderately-senior engineer.

On the other hand, a CEO of a well-known nonprofit might command that kind of salary in Ohio. People often underestimate how much the leaders of nonprofits pay themselves.

[supern0va]

I'm not entirely convinced that this is entirely some sort of widespread bad behavior. Many non-profit boards conduct research on salaries and essentially size their organization and pay something akin to a market rate for the given size and scope.

However, even a small percentage of bad actors finding a way to inflate their salaries will, as a side effect, inflate salaries across the board because it influences the process that sets the salaries for the honest organizations.

It's a fun problem.

[justin66]

I suspect abuse is more prevalent at the low end, among nonprofits that don’t do much.

I stand by the point of my original post: People often underestimate how much the leaders of nonprofits pay themselves. These are figures you can look up and quiz your friends to test the hypothesis, if they’re into that sort of thing. For a good time include some nonprofit hospitals.

[supern0va]

Outside of manipulating the board, they do not pay themselves, though. The board decides their comp package.

[philipallstar]

It's also caused by progressive tax rates. People take harder jobs based on net wage, not gross wage, so gross wage has to compensate.

[ZpJuUuNaQ5]

>Salaries in the US are so bonkers.

Sure, but the cost of living there is significantly higher as well. Anyway, I can hardly even comprehend these kinds of sums, though I am a bit of an outlier, as I earn around $27,700 as an SWE in Europe, which is low even by the standards of companies in my own country.

[nozzlegear]

> Sure, but the cost of living there is significantly higher as well.

The US is huge though, and the cost of living is astronomically lower outside of those big tech hub cities. I live in a tiny town in the midwest with a big house and a big yard that we bought for $89k USD in 2016[†]. I'm able to support myself and my wife comfortably on just my (self-employed) SWE salary.

[†] Real estate inflation index for our area says the house would have cost us around $130-$150k USD in 2026.

[ryukoposting]

Silicon Valley is the only place in the United States where $300K is even close to the "middle" of anything.

I just moved to SV a few months ago from the Midwest (and not a particularly cheap part of it). Telling my coworkers who aren't from the US what a house costs in Wisconsin, you'd have thought I was the one who moved from a foreign country.

[Supermancho]

As a datapoint, I get paid just under 250k/yr and I'm an above average developer in his very late career, at a midwest company. 300k avg for SV is about right.

The local college and medical administrators are the ones that own the mansions in my city. I have a family, house and mortgage plus my large medical expenses (cardiac) I can handle...until I cant.

[ryukoposting]

Holy moly, $250 in the midwest? Where do I get your job?

For reference, I just left a position in the Midwest for a job in SV that pays a little more than you're getting paid. $250 but with Midwestern rent would be life-changing. Sounds like we're in very different stages of our careers, though.

[swiftcoder]

> Silicon Valley is the only place in the United States where $300K is even close to the "middle" of anything.

It does heavily cluster around SV, for sure, but Seattle/NewYork/Boston/Arlington will all get you there, and Chicago/Austin/etc aren't all that far behind at this point

[ryukoposting]

I just left a position in Chicago because SV pays me about double.

[0x3f]

Not everywhere. Switzerland exists. Also cost of living is a thing so if anything US/CH just ramp up to match that. The rest of Europe has high CoL but terrible salaries. Asia has bad salaries but low CoL (on average).

[mort96]

According to swissdevjobs.ch[1], the top 10% salary for a senior software developer in Switzerland is 135,000 swiss franc; that's roughly $170,000 per year.

So if this is correct, then even in Switzerland, it seems like $300,000 per year would be an obscenely high salary for a senior developer.

[1]: https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries/all/all/Senior

[0x3f]

Well first of all it's a CEO position, not an SWE :)

Even if we scope it to SWE, I don't think that's far off the US percentiles.

In London I imagine the top 10% SWE is not even 100k GBP. In Germany even worse.

[mort96]

I responded to the idea that $300,000/year is a "mid-to-high engineering salary". CEO salaries are absurdly high everywhere.

[0x3f]

Oh right, well it depends on CoL doesn't it? You can reframe European salaries as 'obscene' by world standards too. Both the US and Europe have totally broken and unaffordable housing markets, for example, but at least the Bay Area compensates with salary. I would say that relative to costs it's more that other salaries are obscenely low, if anything. People in Europe should be rioting, but unfortunately only the home owners are politically active.

[groundzeros2015]

Note that you are seeing an explicit tradeoff of different economic systems.

[HappyPanacea]

Yes the obvious play is to move human labor to cheaper countries like France (including CEO of course).

[0x3f]

The net salary in France might be low but the overall cost of hiring is quite high. Besides, why go to the middle when you can just find even cheaper places, if that's your prime metric?

[renewiltord]

The reason the French can’t build these things is the same reason they shouldn’t be allowed to be in charge. It’s a preprint PDF host. Just make your own if you can run this one.

[magnio]

They do have their own: https://hal.science/

It is actually quite common to come across HAL in subfields of mathematics in my experience.

[bjourne]

HAL is decidedly second-tier. Given the option, everyone would pick arXiv over HAL. Hence, HAL hosts lots of stuff that didn't (even) make it to arXiv => lots of subpar dredge.

[linhns]

I agree that dredge is a huge problem with HAL, but it's getting better. While arXiv is still stuck with a unfriendly UI.

[Miraltar]

> HAL is decidedly second-tier. Given the option, everyone would pick arXiv over HAL.

Can you elaborate on that?

[renewiltord]

That’s great. People will use whichever one is better.

[swiftcoder]

Turns out that "better" for many people means "better moderated", since static hosting is hard to differentiate. And at present Arxiv is winning that one (at the expense of considerably higher running costs due to said moderation)

[dev_l1x_be]

So is the living cost. Insurance, housing, etc. A better comparison is PPP.

[carlosjobim]

Living costs are similarly high in many places that have nowhere near the salaries of the US.

It's still the land of opportunities. It's easier to find ways to reduce your living costs than ways to increase your salary.

[segmondy]

Everyone outside the US doesn't deal with USD. Your comment is bonkers. Read up on purchasing power. All locations are not equal.

[jltsiren]

The traditional definition of high income starts at 2x the median. Looking the US as a whole, anything above $125k should be considered high income. But it doesn't feel like that, because median wages are unusually low in the US relative to mean wages. Upper middle class salaries, on the other hand, have grown very high, and they have distorted people's perceptions. Even now, we are debating whether almost 5x the median should be considered high income.

[MattDamonSpace]

The us has an enormous per capita gdp for that large a country

[snovymgodym]

It's frankly not that crazy of a salary for an important executive position.

The city manager of a small city in Texas gets paid around that much and that's taxpayer money.

Now what collegiate football coaches are paid, that's pretty crazy.

[mort96]

I didn't say it's a crazy salary for an important executive position, I said it's wild to call it a "mid-high engineering salary"

[DonsDiscountGas]

Considering the value and prominence of arxiv to the world, this seems low to me. Although more importantly the rest of the staff needs to be well paid too, and if that's the ceiling its a bit concerning. It's crazy to me that people thought this was too high.

[Hendrikto]

For anybody outside the SV, and especially outside the US, this seems high, yes.

arXiv does not need to and should not optimize for “shareholder value”, which is at least nominally the justification for outlandish CEO pay packages.

[kingstnap]

arXiv doesn't need much. All they do is host static pdfs uploaded by someone else with free CDN services from Fastly [0]. I'm sure they could get academics to volunteer moderation services as well.

In reality you could host the entire thing for well under $50k/year in hardware and storage if someone else is providing a free CDN. Their costs could be incredibly low.

But just like Wikipedia I see them very likely very quickly becoming a money hole that pretends to barely be kept afloat from donations. All when in reality whats actually happening is that its a ridiculous number of rent seekers managed to ride the coattails of being the defacto preprint server for AI papers to land themselves cushy Jobs at a place that spends 90+% of their money on flights and hotels and wages for their staff.

I'm already expecting their financial reports to look ridiculously headcount heavy with Personnel Expenses, Meetings and Travel blowing up. As well as the classic Wikipedia style we spend a ton of money in unclear costs [1].

Whats already sad is they stopped having a real broken down report that used to actually showed things. Like look at this beautiful screenshot of a excel sheet. Imagine if Wikipedia produced anything this clear. [2]

[0] https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/18/faster-arxiv-with-fastly/

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/FY26_Budget_Public.pdf

[2] https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/2020_arXiv_Budget.pdf

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

> arXiv doesn't need much. All they do is host static pdfs uploaded by someone else with free CDN services from Fastly [0]. I'm sure they could get academics to volunteer moderation services as well.

This just isn't true. arXiv nowadays has to deal with major moderation demands due to the influx of absolute drivel, spam, and slop that non-academics and less-than-quality academics have been uploading to the site.

Moderation for arXiv isn't perfect or comprehensive but they put so much work into trying to keep the worst of the content off their site. At this point while they aren't doing full blown peer review, they are putting a lot of work into providing first pass moderation that ensures the content in their academic categories is of at least some level of respectable academic quality.

[prepend]

Volunteer moderators are a valid option. And I think may work out better than paid employees.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

volunteer moderators are a valid option however this is also the way peer review works and the system is unfortunately very problematic and exploitative.

First pass sanity checks are also a lot less fun than proper peer review so paying moderators to do it is probably safer in the long run or else you end up with cliques of moderators who only keep moderating out of spite/personal vendettas against certain groups or fields.

[prepend]

How is wikipedia successful?

[weitendorf]

> In reality you could host the entire thing for well under $50k/year in hardware

I could pay Anthropic $400 to write more code than you have in your entire lifetime.

Sure, you're able to operate a website acting as essentially the most important and highest volume venue for sharing academic research in the world, but come on, why couldn't I just ask Claude Code or some web developer in a foreign country to do the same thing?

[jjk166]

$300k for a top executive position isn't especially high for anywhere in the US. That's around what the administrative director of a hospital would be making, which seems like a much smaller scope than leading ArXiv. For comparison, my roommate works for a non-profit that serves Philadelphia whose CEO's salary is $1.1 million. The CEO of the wikimedia foundation, which is similar in terms of role, has a salary of $450k. General average for US CEOs including for profits is around $800k and for large organizations tens of millions is not atypical.

Non-profits aren't maximizing stock value, but they do need to optimize for stakeholder value - you want to maximize the amount of money being donated in and you want to make the most of the donations you receive, both to advance the primary mission of the non-profit and to instill confidence in donors. This demands competent leadership. The idea that just because something is not being done for profit means the value of the person's contributions is worth less is absurd. So long as the CEO provides more than $300k of value by leading the organization, which might include access to their personal connections, then the salary is sensible.

[prepend]

Yes, considering the workload and responsibility of the position.

Non-profits run into the problem of creating cushy jobs that just burn doner money.

Arxiv is basically a giant folder in the cloud and shouldnt have such high paying jobs. At least not if they want rational people to keep donating.

[HappyPanacea]

arXiv's CEO doesn't need to be a tenured professor equivalent it is a preprint repository ffs.

[0x3f]

It's a bit more complex than an S3 bucket though because the value comes from the reputation network, which can't really be replicated easily.

Though, saying that, I suppose all the reputation data is kind of public. Apart from emails/accounts.

[groundzeros2015]

> It's a bit more complex than an S3 bucket

It’s even less. I would bet if it’s not now, for the vast majority of its life it was a machine at someone’s desk at Cornell.

[PaulHoule]

When I was involved it was an x86 machine in a rack in Rhodes Hall.

I had a copy of the whole thing under my desk though in Olin Library on a Pentium 3 machine from IBM that was built like a piece of military hardware. In April the sun would shine in the windows of my office, the HVAC system was unable to cool my office, and temperatures would soar above 100F and I'd be sitting there in a tank top and drinking a lot of water and sports drinks and visitors would ask me how I could stand it.

[groundzeros2015]

Thanks for confirming. We need to stop marketing for AWS by talking about the ability to use the internet in AWS branded product terms.

[0x3f]

The S3 API/UX/cost model is so seductively simple for static hosting though. I kind of think they deserve their ubiquity. Not on 90% of their products though.