Of course, judging performance like that is very difficult, and predicting it in advance is even harder, so it's possible that the highly paid executive would actually perform worse than a volunteer (or a random number generator), but if the complaint about "lavishness" is really about inequality (i.e. the executive's standard of living being much higher than they need / the median citizen's) then that criticism should probably be directed at the tax policies of the relevant governments.
Probably any tech company of note is paying "executives" far, far more than that, at least in the US.
SDEs with a few YOE are getting this no problem at top companies. Why wouldn't the CEO of the fifth biggest website on the internet?
But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive.
The difference is who is in control and what are their priorities and influences. Since "the organization" is making the decisions - and, completely incidentally, "the CEO" is the head of "the organization" - it just so happens that "the organization" finds that "the CEO" should be paid lavishly.
Rich people gonna prioritize rich people.
True, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that's a realistic hypothetical at all.
They are all a bit over-the-top.
In fact, I would argue that an executive at a small operation has more responsibility than one at a large operation.
Why does it matter what that hypothetical "normal" person thinks? Does that "normal" person have insight into how much it costs to hire a competent executive?
They're not though. Especially not multiple of them providing the same service.
Parag has around 3900 employees. Wikipedia has around 550. Around 7x multiplier.
$30m / 7 = ~$4.3mil
Sundar has around 135k employees. 245x multiplier.
$250m / 245 = ~$1mil.
$350k seems like a steal no matter how you put it.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...
Wikimedia Foundation (2019): 291 employees, $56M salary costs.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...
Less than twice the US employees, more than five times the salary costs. (Both orgs also have some non-US employees included in the salary costs total, but they are a small minority of the staff.)
Salary costs don't need to be looked at as something to aggressively push down. You can treat your employees well while still being a non-profit.
(Though I'm not claiming wikipedia treats their employees well, I have no idea.)
Individual persons are not orders of magnitude more productive on their own, they're just in environments that allow them to be more productive, for example by giving them control over more resources.
They're not in the business of selling/providing tech and there's nothing technologically novel about what they do. What they do is providing and managing an encyclopedia. Their value proposition isn't some tech, it's their content.
In fact you've got it the wrong way around, because if the bar to being a "tech company" was using or maintaining some sort of technology, then pretty much every company would be a tech company nowadays. In that scenario the category would be truly meaningless.
The easiest way to spot a tech company is looking at their R&D spending: a tech company is constantly exploring instead of just maintaining.
YouTube however is a subsidiary of Alphabet, which is a tech company.
You can just keep moving the goal posts every time you get proven wrong.
Also, you were complaining about Wikipedia being in the US/SF, when the Internet Archive is also in SF.