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
Why does an organization with about 50 employees need 4 C-level executives, totalling about 2M compensation per year? Or perhaps it's 7 C-level executives (3 hiding under the "Software developer" title) totalling about 3,7M compensation per year?
I'm absolutely not donating money to such a thing without an answer to this question. As a counterpoint, I am a member of a local (Finnish) non-profit organization, one of whose many services is Matrix. This costs me 40 euros per year and none of that money goes to C-level executives.
> We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. Simple solution, go distributed.
6M $ for that. Stop doing that. What do dictators control? Mobile phone networks and other infrastructure. And, yes, they really do go after people any way they can.
This "cost" puts people into danger. Coupling identity and operator infrastructure is a critical privacy flaw. And a costly one too apparently. If your #1 goal is to be the most private solution, this cannot be tolerated to continue to be the case. Get rid of it. Your identity should be your cryptographic key.
it's possible to run this from, let's say, Andalusia, and hire competent folks for a fraction of this.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007060632-Wh...
Using signal without verifying contacts is like bit like using HTTPS without verifying certificates. It prevents passive monitoring.
Are they? These salaries are much lower than most tech competitors. I know we like to call out "high" salaries when a useful service is struggling - but they'll struggle even more if they can't retain good talent because their pay is too low. There's a reason tech skill in government is generally lower than that in industry, for instance.
Day-to-day/People is why they keep the registration process familiar to other platforms like WhatsApp/Telegram. "Most" is why they try to compete with Telegram/WhatsApp on features to drive adoption (see Stories and Announcement Groups).
And from the link: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
- Other Salaries and Wages $9,665,761 - Executive Compensation $744,037
So about $10,400,000 a year in compensation and wages, or about 21% of their running costs.
That really depends on the location these people are working from. In most of the world, those are insanely high salaries.
A company like this doesn't need to be based in SV.
Same can be said about many LGBT non profits that have shifted their goals in the developed world on the "T" part of the acronym. On countries where marriage equality is a given, no one is going to fund an NGO focused on gay marriage... so they need a new cause to fight for.
> To sustain our ongoing development efforts, 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.
This only makes sense if you ignore the world outside the Bay area and assume it's a talentless wasteland. Bay area salaries are vastly inflated in terms of value for money.
There is lots of talent elsewhere of course. I live in Europe. Lots of smart people here. I think I personally know quite a few people that could do at least as good a job as Signal has at building a messenger app + platform. No offense, but this isn't exactly rocket science.
And of course the elephant in the room here is that money is running out because this organization has a cost problem. Inflated salaries, insane cost for things that they should arguably get rid off (like the SMS bills), etc. That's a leadership problem. They aren't even getting value for money despite those salaries.
Both because sometimes I don’t have a phone number. And I don’t want participants to know my phone number.
I don’t get why they have this requirement as it’s not like having a phone number means anything significant. For me, I think privacy includes my ability to not reveal my identity to the network.
They're currently in the testing phase of allowing phone numbers not be known by your conversation partners: https://community.signalusers.org/t/public-username-testing-...
I'm sure there are some costs that they could theoretically cut without consequence. Because the same holds for any other product I buy.
What you mean with pay to compete? The goal of Signal to exist is to offer a privacy oriented chat app. Non-profit companies serve a propose, and people not aligned with that, shouldn't be working there in the first place. If you join a non-profit to make money, you are doing it wrong.
They are building a secure communicator that a normal person can reasonably use - and succeeding. Something nobody else before them managed to pull off. If this isn't rocket science I don't know what is. Not to mention that they pioneer cryptographic protocols in this area, which other messengers later use.
>This only makes sense if you ignore the world outside the Bay area and assume it's a talentless wasteland.
I'm also from Europe (and love it, despite its flaws) but this comes off like whining. If it's really so easy, maybe the smart people here should create their own Signal and reap that overinflated salaries, what do you think?
Or maybe smart people are not enough and you also need VCs, reasonable taxes, laws... Oh btw, did you hear about those plans of EU to get rid of E2E encryption?
Why didn't this start from say Mexico? Or Singapore or Vietnam? Or at least Germany which has a good record of freedom conscious tech scene .
My bet is in something related to the "maslow pyramid": people in SV have so much money that have everything solved in their lives, so they have the luxury of spending their time in this sort of problems.
Bandwidth: I took at quick look and see that chat.signal.org resolves to AWS. If they are paying AWS for a lot of bandwidth, that is very expensive. Let's take a quick look:
They say they use 20PB per year of bandwidth for voice calls alone, this costs them $1.7M a year.
According to AWS pricing for great customers (suckers) of over 150TB per month, the cost per GB goes waaaay down to $0.05, yay. 1.6PB per month is 1600000GBs, that's $80K a month and therefore $960K a year.
Very roughly, a 10Gbp/s link to the Internet, from a Tier-1 provider will be around $800 (eight hundred dollars, you're reading this right) a month in a low-bandwidth-cost country like the US, possibly double that in say Asia.
A 10Gbps link fully utilized (minus some overheads), translates roughly to 3 Petabytes per month, that's 36 petabytes per year, almost double their advertized amount of bandwidth needed for calls per year.
So we have ~$10K a year (negotiable) for 36PB which is double their bandwidth needs but let's not forget that AWS graciously (geniously) charges for egess only, this means that their actual bandwidth needs are 40PB per year for whatever they are reporting. So we have $10K for 36PB a year vs $960K a year for 20PB (actually 40PB) of bandwidth from dear Amazon.
1. Not sure why they are saying the cost is $1.7M per year.
2. Even at 960K it's daylight robbery.
3. AWS makes an absolute killing on bandwidth costs. Best. Business. Model. Ever.
4. Don't these guys have a Devops pro at $300K+ a year? weird :)
Takeaways: - Storage is something you should buy and maintain (Thanks B!), you swap out old/dying storage devices. See Backblaze.
- Bandwidth, compute and storage costs at your favorite CSP are absolutely f'ing *outrageous*
- If you care about your money, your bottom line, do things differently than the *insane* mainstream way of clickity-click on some UIs to provision services without understanding what's really happening under the hood (not saying Signal doesn't understand that part, I'm sure they do), or caring about the added costs of whatever gets so easily "added" to your "infrastructure".
- By having your stuff on a CSP you don't even have "infrastructure", but that's juts me.
Signal, mail me at m aaaat zynk.it if you'd like to talk.
They know this, but it's likely a precondition of not getting Joe Nacchio'ed. It's a feature, not a bug. Signal's partners* in FVEY IC/LE have given them a lot of latitude in developing a very solid e2e cryptographic protocol and application as long as the users themselves are identifiable.
The pigs don't need to backdoor the protocol or the keys as long as there is more than one party to a conversation and each party is identifiable. The prisoner's dilemma, in real life, almost always gives the pigs a defection.
My pet conspiracy theory is not that Signal is evil, but that Signal is being allowed to operate by the pigs as long as account identifiers are very difficult to anonymize. They are likely very good people with good intentions, but when the FBI or NSA makes you an offer you can't refuse, you do the best you can.
*: I'm not suggesting Signal is in bed with IC. Just that if you operate a communications service of any scale, IC/LE will be your partners whether you want them or not.
I understand this is napkin math, but shouldn't we consider that the load isn't evenly distributed? - in which case 50% average utilization seems extremely high
Signal foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3). It is literally and legally a charity.
100k a year for 100GBps, leaving it up to you to calculate how many petabytes per year you can pass with that.
> talented leaders.
In Bay Area? I'm quite sure you get great people all around the World, or in USA, by much less.
We are talking about C*, Engineer Manager, getting almost 700k/year. Not developers.
In fact, I would consider it transphobic to not call out organizations with ulterior motives.
• Telegram - Founded: Russia, Headquartered: Dubai, Users: 500M+
• WeChat - Founded: China, Headquartered: Shenzhen, Users: 1.2B+
• LINE - Founded: Japan, Headquartered: Tokyo, Users: 84M (Japan)
• Viber - Founded: Israel, Headquartered: Luxembourg, Users: 1B+
• KakaoTalk - Founded: South Korea, Headquartered: Jeju City, Users: 52M+
• Zalo - Founded: Vietnam, Headquartered: Ho Chi Minh City, Users: 100M+
• ICQ - Founded: Israel, Headquartered: Cyprus, used to have big market share
• Skype - Founded: Estonia, Headquartered: Luxembourg/USA, Users: 40M daily
Non profit employees aren’t monks, they don’t need to be talking vows of poverty.
One just have to get over the feeling that I'm donating to a charity of people who make 50x more money than I do with a comparable skill set.
2. It's probably a matter of Venture capitalists. Even if you aren't from SV, you may strive to go there to get funding for a pitch or find talent. Similar to your prospective actor that moves to Hollywood. Go where the crowds are.
Now, we can ponder why SV became a tech hub, but current market forces makes it ripe for tech startups.
But it's hard to compare EU and US salaries directly. You got taxed way more and your health care isn't bound to your job.
It's also how and why long ago they tried to outsource a lot of engineering. They still do try. But that's not an easy transition either.
Non-profit simply means that every bit of revenue made goes back into the company instead of given out to shareholders. Which includes paying your labor.
It being a non-profit is exactly why we can view the operating expenses and salaries of the public facing executives. For accountability.
What is the problem of managers of a non-profit company earning around 700k/year and the company is writing blog posts complaining that the the company operation is too expensive? I think if you read it aloud, you will understand it.
But sure. What do you think is a fair salary or totalccomp for a founder and CEO of a popular, privacy focused app?
From a company living from donations... It is illusion (probably a California thing), to think that you are going to compete salary wise with FAANG. The time will tell (well their complaining about money, is already hinting it)...
I don't even work at a FAANG and I was making almost as much as the director there who lists 200k or so total comp. Probably with 20 years less experience to boot. I don't live in SF either; High CoL area but not SF.
That's why I asked you what's a "reasonable" salary. I'm wondering what your POV here is in terms of compensation.