I’m really trying hard to see the point that’s being made. Is it just the “high” salaries, or is there some other implication? The OP seems to be insinuating that Signal is a honeypot or something. I am going to need a lot more proof than, “hey, these guys work at a non-profit and they aren’t underpaid!” Given that most tech jobs offer stock options in addition to normal salary, it would make sense that base salary should be higher at a non-profit (where stock options don’t exist). Their salary structure also seems much flatter than other non-profits that I saw within the propublica link.
What am I missing here?
We already know it’s a honeypot, this is circumstantial evidence about their role in sapping donations from the wider open source ecosystem. Keep donating to them if you don’t value your money.
We already know it’s a honeypot
Oh?
Yeah that’s why you guys focus on shit like “I was able to convince my grandma to use it” - you don’t understand what is wrong with Signal technically.
I don’t know the intricacies of signal as a company or if they support any bad actors or whatnot, but I do hate to see flack for non-profit leaders and employees getting paid competitive salaries. Like if people are actually worth that much in the economy, why not try to stack the team so they’re incentivized to do well? Especially in the shit pot that is America.
I would be curious to see the spread of overhead between salaries and fundraising, outreach, etc to actually get their product out there. Because if those are balanced in favor toward actually running the business, marketing it well, and fundraising, I’d say these people more than deserve these salaries.
A CEO should be paid enough to live comfortably if you work at a non-profit, but if you need to be paid market rate then you’re probably not passionate about the position. When your job is fulfilling a public good rather than delivering shareholder value, that and a decently generous salary should be reward enough.
That said, I think Signal is better than Mozilla on this front, because they don’t have a long history of terrible decisions each of which coming with increased executive compensation.
EDIT: Also the CEO of Mozilla made 6-7 million per year (haven’t checked the new CEO though). Way more than Meredith Whittaker’s $750,000. So honestly Signal is an order of magnitude better on this front.
The company asks for donations while receiving funding from the US government and scraping metadata from activists. You people are absolute marks.
Also maybe no stock options like other corps? So more salary compensation
And now let’s focus on the only player who is a bit transparent instead of asking how are the others…
How does this compare to salaries for comparable positions at comparable for-profit companies?
It’s kinda the point of donations that they can afford to hire people whose labor costs that much.
Ah another hitpiece on Signal huh? They must be doing a lot right.
well yes, taking millions from the US government to dupe people like you into slathering yourself in metadata is the right move. redditors will justify anything once locked into the circlejerk
Signal is the only way I’ve been able to get my friends and family onto an E2E messaging app. Before this, they were all using SMS and WhatsApp. Signal is how we survived ICE in Minneapolis and organized to stop a bunch of jackbooted fascists from kidnapping all of our neighbors and deporting them to unknown countries. I have a lot of respect for the folks at Signal as a result.
I get that you all are on better platforms or whatever, but I don’t appreciate the dismissive shit that I’m seeing in these replies. Especially when it’s about one of the first privacy-oriented apps that normies get started with. You have some information about Signal that shows it’s shitty or a honeypot? Great, then post it. I’d genuinely love to see it (and not in a “post it so I can argue with you like an annoying redditor” kinda way). But this shit about high salaries at a non profit is not convincing to me and none of your replies here are doing your cause any service.
Literally all the shit talking in this thread is all from that guy. Lots of shit talking, didn’t link a single source to back it up.
my family and friends are intractable
You’re probably annoying + not my problem. You clearly aren’t very knowledgable about this, so I doubt you would even be able to explain it to them. XMPP and Delta Chat are easier to set up. You’re just arguing that laziness is a virtue.
Signal is how we survived ICE in Minneapolis
Serious “it was revealed to me in a dream” shit that most people would think was excessive if I made it up as a joking example of Signal defenders. Signal is funded by the US government and collects + leaks metadata. The US government uses metadata to target hacking of the device itself. Metadata is more valuable for surveillance than message content, it is used by police + intelligence to fabricate evidence of “terror networks” including teenagers in Chicago texting each other. Minneapolis drove out ICE because they had guns and physically planted themselves between the psychos and the people they wanted to terrorize. If they were stupid enough to use Signal (or encouraged by people like you) or bring their phones downtown, they will be mopped up before they can do anything useful. Fortunately for the feds, Americans barely even bother to walk around with signs.
The ability of these companies to operate centralized services in countries that serve gag orders should make things obvious, but fortunately you people have been trained by social media to require epistemological proof of wrongdoing.
“President of Signal getting paid less than a principal engineer” must be the take here.
The same argument applies to Wikipedia: it’s a blessing these people accept working for <1M. They could easily get a job for triple the salary elsewhere but choose to forfeit it for principles.
Way better than Mozilla.
I could also make a lot of money stealing peoples organs but its a blessing that I don’t do that
Guess adb never worked for a non-profit before.
adb is currently main developer for a fork of Delta Chat, a messenger that actually gives you privacy.
you got your messenger recommendation from congresspeople. think about that for a second and how it makes you look to technically competent people like us
Removed by mod
Nice argument dude, unfortunately I don’t share your tendency to form parasocial relationships with US government-funded “privacy software” and prefer recommending open source projects utilizing extensible internet standards for longevity + reliability, so I’m unlikely to be convinced by your playground “what is he your boyfriend” antics. You’re clearly suffering from some serious cognitive dissonance, so take a step back. I don’t know you, I shared this with the community publicly in the hopes people can defend themselves better against surveillance. What motivates you, seriously? Why turn to personal attack? How did you end up at this point in your life?
My advice is learn how to take advice from people who know better than you. It can change your life, and it’s important for operating in communities that value authority from expertise rather than business jargon and ideological slapfighting.
Isn’t 1M per year upper middle class in america now?
Oh look the Americans are here to pretend that highly-paid tech workers are normal human beings. I wonder if that has anything to do with the demographics of the Reddit-fuelled Hitler instances. Worth consideration. 🤔
Damn, I don’t think I’ll make 1M in my lifetime combined.
That’s because you live in Europe and stretching a month’s paycheck is easier than a week’s and the Euro is an strogner currency with better anti-gouging laws.
To sum up, 70k euros a month is a lot.
70k euros a month is insane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage
To sum up, 70k euros a month is a lot.
Even 10k euro per month is a lot and will be far better than most other people in Europe and allow you to live more than comfortably.
not my circus, not my monkeys
but them positions… as mr. cici famously quipped, that’s alot of buffers
you really need a VP of eng and then a director of eng and further liaisons until you reach an actual engineer for a shop that has one product?
again, what do I care, spend it in good health
Just hire from the EU. It’s cheaper and they are as competent. A lot more money will be left to hire more staff. I’ve already moved my signal donation to matrix.
The US is a money sink.
is the argument they shouldn’t be paid money for their work? or maybe signal shouldn’t be hiring at competitive salaries for highly skilled labor?
Well, the only person on the list with “developer” in their title has the lowest salary, the executives are paid more. And you will not in a million years convince me that corporate suits are doing skilled work in a way to deserve more compensation than people actually making the product.
Well, the only person on the list with “developer” in their title has the lowest salary,
Unsurprisingly.
that’s a fair comment I don’t know what they do either.
having seen a few of these org charts this could be much worse. there are 4 salaries related to software and technical improvements of the app and platform.
most ppl underestimate what kind of infrastructure is required to make anything work at planet scale, including auxiliary functions. I’d be much more interested in where the funding is coming from.
You should also link Ariadne’s post saying she rather use signal, but that would be against the tone of your post, right?
https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/116043045098562878
Yes, posting wrong opinions would be against the theme of the post, and in fact my account as a whole. That’s pretty standard for programmers who wear bunny suits. If we keep going here one of them is going to show up and post that Soatok person’s blog.
Ugh. I’ve always liked Matrix (and was not bothered too much by the metadata leaks because my home server was not federated anyways), but after noticing some issues and finally reading up on the actual protocol spec a couple of weeks ago… oof. Yeah. No.
Set up XMPP for now. Works really well and the protocol seems so much saner. Unfortunately, it too has some annoyances that are unacceptable to me in the long term. I’m this close to saying “fuck it” and wasting the next couple of years of my life on a new protocol that no one is gonna use. (Cue the XKCD here.)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA https://lemmy.ml/comment/24436351
I FUCKING KNEW IT YOU PEOPLE ONLY KNOW THAT ONE BLOG
Works really well and the protocol seems so much saner.
Ha, thanks, I’d already read that. And I do, mostly, agree; the OMEMO implementation is not great both from the security perspective discussed in the post, as well as the UX (not being able to decrypt old messages on new devices at all).
That being said, I primarily want a selfhosted, federated messenger which also takes privacy and security seriously, and at least for the former, XMPP is really refreshingly good.
Yeah no shit you already read it they post it every single time. I don’t think any of them have actually read it, the problems he is complaining about were solved ages ago or by two clicks, once. The guy actually argues for people to use Telegram because they have disabilities and software is hard. An absolute masterclass.
Meanwhile Discord in it’s entirety is unencrypted
I can’t believe that worked. Well, it’s a good thing we have more than three options
To be fair, Discord has e2e encrypted voice calls using their “Dave” protocol.
Dude, don’t start
They’re still far more encrypted than literally every other alternative.
You people have zero awareness of the limitations of your own knowledge.
LMAO @ everyone who would have denied this was true groveling at the feet of the US government’s spectacularly abd inexplicably generous Open Technology Fund after devoting 3000 comments to bashing what remains of Firefox for [checks notes] making the UI better so the community doesn’t need to spend their time making sidebars and vertical tabs… You guys are worms. Today I get to be the rock. 🥴
It’s a branch of the US military-intelligence-propaganda-industrial complex. Or was—I’m not sure if Trump’s executive order to eliminate it stuck.
Unbearable: This was the last time i donated to signal. Next time i’ll donate to some small foss-projects.
What would be the downside if all companies were non-profit? At first sight, it sounds like a great idea.
What would be the downside if the world was made of pudding
The conventional answer is that there would be much less incentive to fund new ones.
Some things need a large investment to start: power plants, cities, factories, space stations, etc. Sometimes more money than the people involved can afford, and you need to ask someone to front the money, they typically get paid with a share of the profits.
Thanks, that sounds very reasonable.
Some companies will be invisible and/or “boring” - nobody ever said: “Oh, I just love my office building’s cleaning supplies delivery contractor, I should donate them again!”
To be fair non-profit doesn’t mean you can’t charge for your services. You just can’t pay profit out as dividends so there’s no incentive to overcharge.
