this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Not trying to be a dick but the Executive Director can take a fucking pay cut.
I found a reddit thread from 4 months ago where he said his salary was $170k/year. I'm not saying he is making obscene money, but if that's nearly 15% of all operating costs he can shave that down to $80k-$100k and still live comfortably if he's willing to accept a more austere standard of living.
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to be paid well, but he's getting a damn sight better pay than moderators and community managers who seem to make up 50% of the budget for multiple people: the trust and safety team as well as the other employees at the foundation.
To be fair, that's the lowest executive salary I've seen in a looong time.
Yeah, it's all grifts for morons by scumbags.
Some idiots were really trying to peddle the lie that infosec.exchange costs $5000/month to host while of course providing no verifiable evidence, just "trust them bro." It's sad watching suckers lap it up without a second thought.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
170k for running a company? Shit. I wouldn't do that. You can make just as much being a halfway competent developer, and it's way less stress.
I guess you live in the USA? No one makes this amount of money
A Senior Developer in any major city makes that amount of money.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-developer-salary-SRCH_KO0,16.htm
Funnily enough, it shows the localised amount.
For me in France it shows 50k€ to 69k€, so $58k to $80k at current exchange rates
It just confirms that this is USA only haha
Btw glassdoor sucks. Forces you to have an account and register work shit
Listed salaries are almost always what the employee pays, not what it costs the company. In the US, this includes the payroll tax, and cost of "benefits," like healthcare and unemployment insurance, and is referred to as the burdened rate. This is separate from the income tax the employee has to pay to the government, mind you.
The burdened rate for most employees at the companies I've worked for in the US is like 20-50% higher than the salary paid. Not sure exactly how it works in France, but I do know there's a pretty complex payroll tax companies have to pay. I think it's something like 40% at the salary you quoted.
And a 80k$ salary in France amounts to around 125k$ cost for the employer. So 170k$ isn't that much - I actually know French developers and network engineers that make similar money. The French ITsec architect I interviewed last year would have cost me (converted) around 150k$.
So 170k$ is absolutely not out of the normal range here.
Talking about France: The French government could start to properly support matrix.org as they use it for tChap. The same goes for Germany with the "Behördenmessenger"
Just looked on that link for the UK. The average is listed as £63k, which is $85k.
So you're not exactly disproving the point that that type of high salary is a US thing.
It must not be that stressful if you have $170k leftover to pay yourself.
Most people work more stressful jobs for considerably less. We should stop giving CEOs a pass.
This shouldn't need to be said, but most people are useful idiots so here we are.
You're missing the point. There are easier jobs in the same industry for the same pay.
We're not comparing tech CEO to roofers. We're comparing them to other people in tech.
Uhh, no.
This is directly the point: Most people work more stressful jobs for considerably less. We should stop giving CEOs a pass.
Oh, and don't forget about this one!
Depends on what that title actually means. Viewing it as a pie chart skews it so you don't realize that $170k in USD is pretty mediocre for a Director of Engineering role. If the project dies without this person, and that's what they need in salary to make it worth it to keep them there, then that's what they get paid.
It's not like they're even making an obscene amount of money ffs. That's a middling engineering salary, and this person is running the whole show. You should see what other "director" jobs at much shittier companies get paid. I think twice this amount would be a weak guess. If this person was a prick, they'd be milking that goat and taking all the free money.
This is an open source project backed by a non-profit foundation, granted, but this person is taking a massive pay cut just by working this job. Think about how that might impact their life to make that choice while trying to have a family.
$170k salary still won't you a fucking house in this country unless you live in the middle of nowhere, and this person is almost certainly in a major tech hub city, so that money means diddly when trying to pay the bills. It's barely above the poverty line in Silicon Valley after taxes for reference.
Everyone in here complaining because they make half this and think it's a lot of money because they live in Bumfuck, Idaho has no idea what it costs to live in the larger tech hubs around the world.
Exactly. I’m nowhere close to the top of the tech ladder, but I make more than that and still have to rent and will be renting for several more years. To buy an average house in this city, it would be like 7k/month without a 20% down payment. And household debt needs to be 30% of your total income so I would need to make $250k to even get approved for a loan for an average house in the city.
That's probably because I live in another country which works very differently, so what I'll say is not a judgement about the veracity of your comment, but I find incredible that $14'000 a month could be in any capacity considered a mediocre salary… the French president earns that in euros!
You don’t have to buy a house every year
No, but you do have to make enough to convince the bank to loan you the money to buy it. Houses in major cities cost WAY more than $170k.
if it's a matter of years and not centuries then in fairly alright. In many countries nowadays, new borns will never have ownership of a house or flat.
Even in europe, $50k yearly would be considered a good pay, and house in major cities would also cost way more than $170k
If they have to pay their Executive Director that much as a non-profit and are failing to meet their funding goals as a non-profit the amount he gets paid has fuck-all to do with where he lives, and has everything to do with him failing at his job to secure funding.
So we're supposed to fund this guys lifestyle as people who donate to the project while the project itself twists in the wind? Give me a fucking break, dude. This is how you set your organization up for failure.
It's not like a bunch of his work couldn't be done remotely. Maybe he should move to bumfuck Idaho so he can afford to run this god damned foundation. But nooooo, he needs to live in some obscenely expensive area, right? Bull. Shit.
Is this thread not about a new attempt to secure funding?
Please don't be that person that runs in here, didn't read the thing, and writes multiple paragraphs of stupidity. Just don't do it.
You're not "funding this guy's lifestyle" (love how you assume it's a guy). You're paying a person a less than fair wage when they can be getting twice the money elsewhere for the same role.
This person is taking a drastic pay cut to run things AS THEIR JOB. It's how they pay for things, and have kids, and a life. You're making the assumption they are somehow bilking money out of this, and that's not the case from that dollar amount.
You also didn't seem to understand that because it's a non-profit custodial arm of the project, that they are the ones keeping it alive for people like to bitch about this person making a salary ffs. Jeebus, some people, how dare they.
That dollar amount is higher than what several presidents of European countries earn. I'm sorry but if a project is based on donations from around the globe, you can't then think of a salary that's one of the highest in the world.
I read all of the comment chain and I perfectly understand that in San Francisco or LA the rent is huge and that people earn those numbers. If I'll ever consider donating part of my Spanish salary, looking at that stupidly high number heavily disincentives me because what the fuck, living in one of the world's most expensive places and expecting for people that live with a third of that money (with a salary that's considered high!!) to donate is super entitled.
To be fair, Joshua R. Simmons has since changed their name to Robin Riley and now goes by they/them pronouns which I did not notice noted anywhere on the matrix.org website. They're still the same person who has been running the foundation for a long time, so I hope I can be forgiven for not realizing their updated pronoun status. So, you're correct that they are no longer going by he/him pronouns, but I really don't know much past that.
I mentioned in the original post that I found a reddit thread where they talked about their pay and the breakdown of finances. They pull in roughly a million a year for the whole foundation, and 50% roughly goes to staffing, which means with 8 other people in the organization, everyone else is making about $60k a year if we're going to talk about underpaying people for their jobs. That's all the other executives and the entire trust and safety team.
Once again, if they're failing at their job to keep the project funded, that's when you make sacrifices to make it work.
unconfortable but true
Maybe. But $170K isn’t what it used to be, even 5 years ago. Especially if you have kids.
Does that matter if he is failing to secure enough funding to run the non-profit? If they're risking shutting down major portions of what they do as the guiding foundation for the Matrix protocol, isn't that literally his fault since he's in charge? If the non-profit fails are all the people who donated their fucking money in hopes of it succeeding going to be happy that instead of being willing to take a haircut on pay to save the damn organization he was instead using their donated funds to fund his fucking lifestyle instead of, I don't know, living in a more modest area and doing more of the foundation business remotely?
Maybe someone shouldn't be taking on this kind of major risk and asking people for donations for the project if his kids are so fucking expensive. Nobody forced them to have those kids or live in a high cost of living area. Christ.
Not trying to be rude but they are not meeting their funding goals, which is his job. That's the entire point of the foundation existing, is to meet funding goals so they can continue to develop the protocol. If they aren't making enough money, should he take a paycut, or should they shut the whole thing down? It seems to me like they want to save the project he could take a modest pay cut, but that's just me.
Now 9 wonder if there's a similar report for Mozilla
You can pull the form 990 for any non-profit in the US pretty easily. Here's Mozilla's: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200097189
Then I am: he is making obscene money. Converted that's like 125k GBP, you can buy a house for cash every 3 years in the UK from that much money O.o (Ok, every 6 years if you spend half of it one living costs.) It's almost 7 times the minimum wage here.
Employees have to pay for basically everything in the US, so salaries have to be a lot higher here. School, childcare, healthcare, retirement, you name it. Also, all those things are more expensive here because they're provided by companies that need to make a profit. It sucks.
yeah every 3 years is too much!
… well, tax so
every 5 years then!
… oh right rent he’d pay in the interim
fine every 7 years!
… ahhhh food costs money too!
okay okay every 8 years!
… i guess people do tend to pay bills
every 9 years!
… it’s not reasonable to be a shut in for those 6 years and being social costs money
every 10 years!
I make only slightly less than that in American dollars and I’m not at all close to running a company. I’m very solidly lower middle class I will also not be buying a hour for another 5-6 years.
That is a very modest amount of money for his role.
What's with the "Trust and Safety" bit? And are the events really necessary?
Edit: okay, it and "Trust and Safety" has something to do with moderation. They could probably get volunteers to do a lot of that though.
Your solution to someone complaining that the boss is earning too much is to suggest they pay the other workers less (or not at all)?
I'm suggesting that their balance sheet looks off. Matrix should primarily be spending money on developers and infrastructure.
The boss earning what seems to be $170k isn't a ton for that position, and it's a fairly small piece of the pie. Even if the boss took no pay, they're still spending a lot of money on non-development and hosting tasks. I would like to see "Other Staff" increase at the expense of everything except hosting costs.
Ah yes, exploit free labor. Capitalism's favorite way to make money.
My understanding is that Matrix is a nonprofit.
Non-profit organizations still exist within the capitalist system. Just because they don't pay out dividends to shareholders doesn't mean they can't be exploitative. If a non-profit makes a lot of money, the people who run it just increase their own salaries. Happens all the time. And yes, non-profits exploit labor all the time. Local arts councils are an easy example of this. Run an art show where the venue and food are donated. They take a fee at the door, ask for donations throughout, and require a cut of any art sold. If there's a bar, they get a cut of that too. The artists who enabled the show to even exist did all their labor for free in exchange for exposure and maybe selling something. They see none of the take though. Sounds pretty capitalist to me.
I never said it wasn't capitalist, just that being bad nonprofit should afford a little more leniency when it comes to "free labor." Matrix is FOSS, the Matrix foundation exists to drive its development, and its whole point is to provide a replacement for exploitative products. Such an organization soliciting donations makes a ton of sense, and donations can take the form of code, money, or even free labor (moderation).
So yeah, I'm absolutely willing to give them a pass on asking for such donations, and I think they should replace some of the money they're spending on moderation w/ more development time.