It's depressing how common these "summarize a Twitter argument" news articles have become.<p>The post includes a <i>tiny</i> bit of original reporting at the end, but that's mostly a perfunctory nod to to journalistic integrity (gotta at least ask the other party for a statement!). The author has nothing useful to contribute to the discussion, so they instead put their effort into studiously recording <i>the like counts</i> on each of the quoted tweets.
"BI also reported in October 2022 that software engineer salaries at the company (Meta) can reach up to $308,148, not including stock options"<p>Excluding stock options is underselling the compensation at FANG by a lot, as they vest monthly and are immediately liquid.
Why is this outrageous... Large non profit execs salaries need to be high enough to attract talent good enough to run operations of that size.<p>An engineering manager of a faang type company basically makes more money than most of these executives, so seems under compensated if anything for an organization of that size /importance.
I'm curious what alternative ways there are to consume Wikipedia. I was poking around to see how feasible a local mirror would be, or at least a self-hosted mirror. It'd be especially interesting if there were ways to "patch in" alternative versions of articles on top of a mirrored based on pluggable feeds, for people who feel Wikipedia is biased on some topics and want to have a seamless experience in which most articles are taken from the base but others are forkde. Sort of like a github but for the wiki.<p>From looking at the dumps, it does seem feasible to have a custom browser app that's capable of quickly looking up and navigating around articles either mirrored locally or on a self-hosted Linux VM. Combined with RAG and local LLMs it might be especially interesting.
<a href="https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/YKYDOBBH2RHJO2DHNP4YEPH37J3L5PBH/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...</a><p>This is from September of last year but it definitely changed my mind about this stuff.<p>> In fact, however, the Wikimedia Foundation is richer than ever. Its assets
and reserves (including an Endowment with the Tides Foundation now holding
well over $100 million) have increased fivefold since 2015, and stood at an
estimated $400 million at the end of March 2022.
> The post has since garnered 9 million views and 5,000 likes on the platform — and it kicked off a conversation about salaries in the tech world.<p>I wish they'd quoted some of that conversation, it sounds interesting. Instead, all they quoted were a bunch of people on Twitter who seem not to have much of an idea how compensation for leadership is derived or negotiated. I love that they also carefully note how many likes each take got, as though that were an important measure of journalistic salience.
The biggest problem to me is that they are profiting off the completely free labor of their volunteers. The billions of man-hours spent adding content is being used to make money for a bunch of execs that have questionable value. Chief Creative Officer for a site that hasn't changed in decades? Chief Advancement Officer? Could these not be volunteer positions as well and save millions of dollars a year?<p>It's the exact same thing as Reddit, where the moderators that create the look and feel of each subreddit get the "privilege" of moderating for free, while the engineers and execs of Reddit are going to become millionaires off the free work of the mods and commenters.<p>Even better, not only will they make money from ads, they will take the content from commenters and then monetize that to AI companies like OpenAI and Google. It's the gift that keeps on giving, and everyone is doing creating content on Reddit for free, and aren't seeing a cent of it.
Excessive executive compensation is unnecessary and steals value from shareholders and employees. Tech execs, even middle management, are wildly overcompensated for the value they bring compared to the engineers.
As the article describes, those salaries are low in comparison to other tech companies, and if keeps those executives happy without feeling the need for continuous Wall Street demanded growth YoY, and allows them to avoid the desire to monetize all traffic (which ultimately results in enshittification), then that’s fine.
Woohoo, i am surprised.
Seriously, fuck them. Got pestered TWICE this year by Jimmie begging for donations, which is a new low. Make use of your endowment! And get rid off your political bias.<p>For many moons, am using more and more alternative sites for looking things up, even if there are obvious quality issues. WP shouldn't be trusted, you'll find this out when you are competent in certain areas and cross-reference with them.