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The salaries of Wikimedia executives are sparking an online debate about tech sector wages
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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700k? For being in charge of one of the biggest websites in history?
That doesn't seem awful at all.
I'm not saying I agree with the grandparent commenter that Wikipedia execs are overpaid (in fact, I probably don't agree), but I am skeptical of the assumption in general that executives of large companies deserve to get paid more than executives of small ones. Who's to say that a big company is inherently more complicated than a small one? Who's to say that big-company execs' jobs couldn't be the same complexity or even simpler because they benefit from economies of scale?
As far as I can tell, the only difference we can be sure about is that a bigger entity would generally have a bigger budget and therefore be able to afford to pay more, but for me, that's far from sufficient justification to argue that they should.
I got my BA in organizational communication, so I feel that I can speak to this. There is definitely a direct correlation with the size of a company and the complexity of running the company. It gets compounded when your company is high profile like Wikipedia is because it winds up becoming political really quick, as stupid as that is. The only way to keep a company ‘not complicated’ is to keep it perfectly flat, which is impossible once you get up to around 25 employees, at which point the CEO is directly managing everyone and can’t do their job running the company.
Now the question of deserving to get paid more is pretty nuanced imo. Does a person deserve to be paid more because they work harder? If so, service industry workers should be some of the top paid people. Or should compensation be determined by impact to the companies bottom line? Or perhaps correlated with personal risk in the role? What about volume of work? Or difficulty of work? I don’t think it’s as simple as asking if they deserve it so much as asking what the company can pay and the value add the executive makes. But this is a bit of a blue sky scenario where there’s equity in how we pay people rather than this obscene good old boys club where executives all smell their own farts and pat each other on the back for doing so.
I do think that higher level positions with higher levels of responsibility (which will be different based on numerous factors, including size and complexity of the company) should be paid more than lower levels. But I also think there should be a cap on the wage disparity between the lowest and highest earners.
One of my favorite fiction series of books broke it down as follows. You get paid for danger, skill, and annoyance. In this case annoyances are everything that makes the job undesirable.
Service industry has limited personal danger, relatively accessible skills, and limited annoyances.
Meanwhile deep sea fisherman has extremely high personal danger, again relatively accessible skill set, but it also has moderately high annoyances.
Because of this, the fisherman should be paid more than the chef.
I'm not entirely certain this actually works out in real life. CEO may have a high skill set, but personal danger and annoyances are both relatively low.....
I don't think execs at bigger companies should be paid more because it's more complex, I think a big part of it is the pressure/stakes are higher because you have to answer to more employees/shareholders if you make the wrong decision.
In many cases their narcissistic personalities make this argument moot, but I wouldn't want to be responsible for decisions that affect the lives of thousands of employees.
Seems obscenely low, tbh.