- That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV.
That $19M/year was total employee costs which, as best I understand these things, can often work out to be double the raw salaries which would bring the average down to a slightly less excessive $170k/year.
To give one example of a (not that cheap) market, outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK. Even accounting for additional costs like taxation and equipment, that's likely to be under $100k fully loaded.
Actually it does usually. Because when people see real meaning in their work, as opposed to find yet another way to manipulate people on other peoples behalf, then you don't have to buy their consciousness as well.
So sure, it is awesome, that signals employers get to have meaning and money. But I would bet, you would find competent people working for less. (And maybe somewhere else)
But .. they do have a working app and organisation right now and drastic changes could destroy that.
For top-notch security developers, I call bullshit. Signal would be worthless if it started offshoring development to nickel and dime.
I don't think there's industry numbers for that set of people in the UK, as it's not a big enough set. However I'd be surprised if they were 150K plus though, that's a very rare salary in the UK.
Also there are cheaper countries than the UK who have great devs.
The people behind Signal pioneered end-to-end encryption, and as is pointed out in the blog post, there's still a lot of novel cryptography development involved in building a privacy-first messenger. You can't do that without top-notch talent.