this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023

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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)

submitted 11 months ago by u_tamtam@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] Infiltrated_ad8271@kbin.social 37 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I would never have guessed that an app like signal would spend almost 20 million in salaries. I wonder what is the salary of the executives.

[–] kariunai@feddit.nl 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I wonder what is the salary of the executives.

Wonder no more, they have it in their 2022 tax filing:

Compensation

Key Employees and Officers Base Related Other

Jim O'leary (Vp, Engineering) $666,909 $0 $33,343

Ehren Kret (Chief Technology Officer) $665,909 $0 $8,557

Aruna Harder (Chief Operating Officer) $444,606 $0 $20,500

Graeme Connell (Software Developer) $444,606 $0 $35,208

Greyson Parrelli (Software Developer) $422,972 $0 $35,668

Jonathan Chambers (Software Developer) $420,595 $0 $28,346

Meredith Whittaker (Director / Pres Of Signal Messenger) $191,229 $0 $6,032

Moxie Marlinspike (Dir / Ceo Of Sig Msgr Through 2/2022) $80,567 $0 $1,104

Brian Acton (Pres/Sec/Tr/Ceo Sig Msgr As Of 2/2022) $0 $0 $0

from https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840

[–] BlackAura@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I mean, without browsing levels.fyi or anything like that you can get 4 to 10 software engineers for 1 million (anything from 100k to 250k depending on location, experience, etc.).

Not all employees are engineers but that would imply 80 to 200 staff for the 20 million they state.

That's only the component paid to the actual staff though. There are additional costs like Healthcare, unemployment, social security, etc, and other benefits that may not be included in wages (though some portion may be deducted from salaries), but they are including in that statement / summary.

[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago

For an app like signal you would/should be at the top of that range. You want to acquire and maintain talent. Not every dev has the chops.

[–] wintermute@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 11 months ago

It says that they have 50 full time employees.

[–] wintermute@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's not only salaries:

about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.

[–] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Still, the cost equals almost 400 000 dollars per employee. That is a LOT of money. Even half that (twice the employees or half the cost) would still be a lot.

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Believe me, one seriously awesome software developer for 400k achieves more than 10 shitty ones at 100k each.

[–] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't need to believe, I work with these guys on a daily basis (not the Signal guys, but devs) and I know your statements to be true. Still, I very much doubt that they need 50 devs with that salary. It's a chat app! Of course they have other people too, like marketing, project leads, blah blah - still doesn't put the price into my mind.

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

They develop a lot of software themselves. They aren't just throwing together a few established libraries and call it a day like 80% of software development. They also take the hard and correct way every time instead of the fast, easy and bad way. Quote from the article:

The same dynamic played out again when Signal introduced support for animated GIF searches on Android and iOS. Instead of quickly and easily integrating the standard GIF search SDK that most other apps were using, engineers spent considerable time and creativity developing another unique privacy-preserving technique that hides GIF search terms from Signal’s servers, while also hiding who is searching for those terms from the GIF search engine itself. We later expanded those techniques to further obfuscate GIF search information by obscuring the amount of traffic that passes through the proxied connection.

When Meta acquired GIPHY, and many other apps were scrambling to contend with the privacy implications of the deal, Signal employees slept soundly knowing that we had already built this feature correctly several years earlier.

[–] wintermute@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 11 months ago

Yes, I agree it's a lot.

I think that with "recruiting" and "HR services" they mean outsourced services, so maybe not all of it goes directly to the employees.

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

~~Don't forget the CEO's salary is $5.7M. If you subtract the CEO's and other execs' salary from those $20M total, the salary of ordinary employees would probably way less than $200k.~~

[–] Tyfud@lemmy.one -5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

That is not that much in this industry.

I've got roughly 25 years in the software development industry and depending on what talent market you're working in, that 400k may not even be enough for one engineer or architects salary.

[–] justJanne@startrek.website 1 points 11 months ago

It's an absolutely surprising amount, because Matrix spends less than that if you just count the people working on the open source offerings.

And that project has significantly more features, is federated, and has a much larger scope.