Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...
I would never have guessed that an app like signal would spend almost 20 million in salaries. I wonder what is the salary of the executives.
Wonder no more, they have it in their 2022 tax filing:
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
from https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840
I mean, without browsing levels.fyi or anything like that you can get 4 to 10 software engineers for 1 million (anything from 100k to 250k depending on location, experience, etc.).
Not all employees are engineers but that would imply 80 to 200 staff for the 20 million they state.
That’s only the component paid to the actual staff though. There are additional costs like Healthcare, unemployment, social security, etc, and other benefits that may not be included in wages (though some portion may be deducted from salaries), but they are including in that statement / summary.
For an app like signal you would/should be at the top of that range. You want to acquire and maintain talent. Not every dev has the chops.
It says that they have 50 full time employees.
It’s not only salaries:
It’s an absolutely surprising amount, because Matrix spends less than that if you just count the people working on the open source offerings.
And that project has significantly more features, is federated, and has a much larger scope.