TLDR: the compensation that Signal Technology pays its staff is quite high – perhaps too high. I am slightly jealous at the $240k salary + $192k bonus for a software development job, but mostly bewildered that Signal asks for donations to pay these kinds of salaries.
One of my favourite chat apps, Signal, prompted for a donation this morning. Financial support for open source software, especially for this kind of projects (privacy focussed, “this should be the app everybody is using”), is of critical importance, so I almost donated instantly.
It is however, good financial hygiene to do a quick check on what you are donating to; where would your money actually be spent on? A quick search shows that Signal is created by Signal Technology, the non-profit organisation behind the popular app. Why that fact is not mentioned anywhere on their website is somewhat of a mystery to me. The latest Signal Technology financial statement reveals an 2023 expense that is almost equal to their revenue; about 32$ million. This seems like a lot of money, and maybe it is.
Whatsapp famously scaled to a billion users with 50 engineers. Checking the contribution pages on some of Signal’s most popular repo suggests the number at signal might be lower, with only a handful of active “-signal” developers per repo. Let’s widen that to DevOps and other support engineers, and assume a headcount of 20. Expand that with design, marketing, HR, management, let’s say a total of 60 employees (a high estimate imo). Located in California US, so an average $200k salary/expenses/tax etc, would lead to 12$ million in salary expenses. There should be some overhead, but not $20 million. Again, none of these numbers are public; there is no Linkedin page, no company website, practically nothing. Which might make sense from a privacy standpoint, but if you are asking people for donations, a bit more transparency would be appreciated.
Coming back to the financial statements, I had a little jaw drop at the management compensation chart, shown below. $785k a year for the CEO, and $489k for the highest paid software engineer. Mind you, not the CTO, not the VP of engineering, nor the Director of engineering, all whom earn more. This hardly compares to average salaries for similar companies in the same region, which seems in the $180k-$240k range, depending on which website you ask.
I appreciate the need for talented people to design, engineer and market this critical piece of privacy-guaranteed software, and a decent-to-good salary is needed to attract and keep those people. But shouldn’t a non-profit be about.. non-profit? About following your ethical standpoint? Not just for the company, but the staff as well? Paying employees more than double the median salary (in a profession that is already well compensated) doesn’t seem to align with that idea.
Despite their great work, Signal Technology gave me a bad smell during this search. Thanks for the wonderful app Signal, but I’ll take my donation money elsewhere. And if you happen to hire, please consider me!
