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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an apartment costs like $200,000 per year.
When I used to visit the Meta campus in Menlo Park, the QA folk I worked with were commuting 2 hours each way just to be able to afford housing. I've no idea how far away the janitorial staff must have lived to do the same
Being able to afford unpredictable expenses and not have it bankrupt you. In the US, that would include healthcare. Everywhere in the world, that would be useful if you were laid off.
Not really a tenable long-term situation for a senior employee with plans to start a family. Family homes of decent size and area are literally millions of dollars.
No one is sitting around and setting salaries based on the intrinsic human dignity of the people working jobs.
Bigger problem in the SF area is that a bunch of folks who owned property before the gold rush have ended up real-estate-rich, and formed a voting block that actively prevents the construction of new housing (on the basis that it might devalue their accidental real estate investment)
Besides, I did already say that everyone else was underpaid relative to costs. But that's not unique to the Bay Area. Cost of housing relative to income is terrible in almost all of the major European cities too.
Once cities become wealthy enough to develop a home owning class, they seem to cease being able to provision adequate housing supply in general.
To some extent, maybe, but often not. For example, London has similar cost of living to the Bay Area, and when I was at Meta experienced folks like Dan Abramov over in London were making about the same as fresh college hires in Menlo Park...
To be fair though, Dan specifically is kind of notorious for messing up his comp negotiation. Did you not see the Twitter pile on at the time?
Indeed, but having seen the infamous spreadsheet, he didn't have all that much headroom (unless he agreed to move to the US)
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.
It's still the land of opportunities. It's easier to find ways to reduce your living costs than ways to increase your salary.
It is actually quite common to come across HAL in subfields of mathematics in my experience.
Can you elaborate on that?
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.
arXiv does not need to and should not optimize for “shareholder value”, which is at least nominally the justification for outlandish CEO pay packages.
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
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.
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.
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.
Though, saying that, I suppose all the reputation data is kind of public. Apart from emails/accounts.
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.
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.
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840
I could even make those cards tradeable like NFTs, use DynamoDB as the ledger, and not worry about the cost at all.
On the other hand if you are talking about something bandwidth heavy forget about AWS. Video hosting with Cloudfront doesn't seem that difficult, even developing a YouTube clone where anybody could upload a video and it gets hosted seems like a moderate sized project. But with the bandwidth meter always running that kind of system could put you into the poorhouse pretty quickly if it caught on. Much of why YouTube doesn't have competition is exactly that: Google's costs are very low and they have an established system of monetization.
I am keeping my photo albums on Behance rather than self-hosting because I lost enough money on a big photo site in AWS that it drove my wife furious and it took me a few years to pay off the debt.