Depending on how big the organization will be, and where the organization/CEO will be located, $300k may not be that much. I once saw people up in outrage over the CEO of the American Red Cross...
Exemplary
Depending on how big the organization will be, and where the organization/CEO will be located, $300k may not be that much. I once saw people up in outrage over the CEO of the American Red Cross getting paid $600k. Which I thought was insanely low for a CEO of an organization that large. Though that CEO probably also gets other fringe benefits.
As an aside, as someone who spent 17yrs in non-profit employment, I sometime get frustrated when the public at large talks about non-profit salaries. It feels like the public thinks we're all volunteers. Like no. When an organization gets large enough, there is a professional staff that runs the business of the organization. Whether these are more front line people doing program development and managing volunteers or doing fundraising, or support staff such as IT (like me) or accounting, we deserve to get paid a competitive wage. Though we often don't, because of the nature of non-profit finances.
A CEO is still a CEO. Just the same way an IT guy is still and IT guy. Now obviously a CEO in a non-profit pretty much cannot command a 7-8+ figure salary (though I'm sure that exists somewhere). My point is that talent and skill is something that still needs to be paid for. And if organizations don't, well, they get the "talent" they deserve (which I've seen many times, unfortunately).
The real problem is that we allow CEOs to make that much money. If the tax brackets insured a defacto income cap of $500k takehome annually, everything else would sort itself out with time. To be...
The real problem is that we allow CEOs to make that much money.
If the tax brackets insured a defacto income cap of $500k takehome annually, everything else would sort itself out with time. To be clear: That cap is higher than 99% of the population.
And to be real: I'll bet there are 1,000 people working for the Red Cross right now who could be an effective CEO with 0 additional off-the-job education. But they wouldn't be given the time of day for an interview.
Management likes to think their skills are somehow worth more money than everyone else's. They're not...they just the ones getting to vote on everybody elses's value with generally as little transparency as possible.
It doesn't help that we see that CEOs get paid millions elsewhere regardless of how good a job they do. And they don't suffer criminal consequences for doing criminal things.
Depends on how you define the job of a CEO. Under any sane definition (promote the mission and do the work), I agree with you. Unfortunately, and I think this is the "real" problem we've got with...
I'll bet there are 1,000 people working for the Red Cross right now who could be an effective CEO with 0 additional off-the-job education.
Depends on how you define the job of a CEO. Under any sane definition (promote the mission and do the work), I agree with you. Unfortunately, and I think this is the "real" problem we've got with executive compensation, the actual job is usually to promote and protect the interests of the powerful people behind the organization or company, even to the detriment of the organization / company itself. Like, the primary qualification to be a CEO today isn't to be good at running and building a business, it's to be willing to do literally anything the owners ask of you (especially without them having to literally ask), including sociopathic shit like lying to and ripping off employees and customers.
It's all a club. And you're not in it. But yeah. I read a pretty good article long ago on CEO culture and the issue in the US can be summed up as "there's no skin in the game". Most other cultures...
Management likes to think their skills are somehow worth more money than everyone else's. They're not...they just the ones getting to vote on everybody elses's value with generally as little transparency as possible.
It's all a club. And you're not in it.
But yeah. I read a pretty good article long ago on CEO culture and the issue in the US can be summed up as "there's no skin in the game". Most other cultures have shame to be a controlling factor, and others have strong regulations that put the actual leadership in trouble if broken. The US doesn't have much of neither, so things spiral out of control quickly.
Combine that with explosive stock growths being the "real" compesnation, and CEO's can essentially fail upward, making a career out of picking the bones of companies they killed and leaving with a nice exit package to boot.
If we just stopped feeding 90% of people everything else would sort itself out with time as well. This is not a remotely strong argument for this kind of policy and is handwaving a ton, especially...
If the tax brackets insured a defacto income cap of $500k takehome annually, everything else would sort itself out with time. To be clear: That cap is higher than 99% of the population.
If we just stopped feeding 90% of people everything else would sort itself out with time as well.
This is not a remotely strong argument for this kind of policy and is handwaving a ton, especially when you consider global markets, high demand scarce resources (like beach front or high traffic property), and the fact that people probably aren't pro "give the government even more power to decide things" given current and recent admins.
I personally know 3 people who make near that.
None of them are anywhere near the top of their companies (although they are on the high end of their fields).
All of them are in cost of living situations for their career where that income bluntly puts them at upper middle class or the very entry to well off.
All of them have COLOSSAL student debt. They are well aware that they're probably each an example of why you should allow absurd student debt, and also the first advocates of how fucking insane the entire thing is.
Economies are complicated and magic "cap the number" solutions do a massive disservice to the reality and the actual effort being put in to solve these problems.
And to be real: I'll bet there are 1,000 people working for the Red Cross right now who could be an effective CEO with 0 additional off-the-job education. But they wouldn't be given the time of day for an interview.
I'll bet it's a lower number by far. Coordinating and managing an environment of 18,000 people is very much a skill, but i'll get more into that in a moment.
Management likes to think their skills are somehow worth more money than everyone else's. They're not...they just the ones getting to vote on everybody elses's value with generally as little transparency as possible.
While there's 100% situations like this there are very real skills that people don't like valuing because they think they're unfair. And they're right, and that doesn't change anything about their value unfortunately.
If I can pick up the phone and get Trump on the other end in 20 minutes with the understanding he'll rubber stamp what I say, or at least listen, because we once went to school together, that's worth millions.
In planned economies, the people who can get things through the bureaucracy are worth millions.
Musk is an overvalued hack BUT his ability to promote and con both people and the government is obviously worth billions because it gets you those billions.
I'm not saying most of these people should be in power or that this isn't fucked, but the problem isn't "oh they're paying the wrong people". The problem is very much on the incentive side as well, and that's NOT an easy fix without kicking the doors open even wider to tyranny. When the goal is "make more money NOW" the people who do that best rise up.
Even with companies like Steam sitting there as proof of an dominate alternative long term strategy (whatever else you think of them, their company size to earnings is fucking nuts, as are many of their other metrics) the system is currently geared towards next qtr's earning report and all the chaos that causes. There's not a magical wand to easily stop that though and boiling it down to 'oh just don't let them' isn't helping.
It doesn't help that we see that CEOs get paid millions elsewhere regardless of how good a job they do. And they don't suffer criminal consequences for doing criminal things.
That's well and good, but for those three there are 297 fighting to make ends meet. So they can deal with being a hair less well off... or pretty much where they are if they are top of field. And...
I personally know 3 people who make near that.
That's well and good, but for those three there are 297 fighting to make ends meet. So they can deal with being a hair less well off... or pretty much where they are if they are top of field. And any one of the top 20 billionaires could wipe everyone's student debt, which just is a good launching point for a real justification.
This is not a remotely strong argument for this kind of policy and is handwaving a ton, especially when you consider global markets, high demand scarce resources (like beach front or high traffic property), and the fact that people probably aren't pro "give the government even more power to decide things" given current and recent admins.
There's plenty of strong arguements I can make, but I did not have time for a proper thesis. It of course is somewhat predicated on a functioning democracy....the kind we could hope to build when this corpse stops shambling. For a quick stab:
For a start, we can look to the not so distant past where in the 1950s tax brackets at the top were over 90%. Is it a coincidence that we were able to do the largest buildout of public infrastuture? Infrastructure that has incidentally been crumbling since tax brackets were neutered. We can see that incredibly high tax rates at the top is not an economic crippler, if anything its an economic driver as the biggest employer in the country can afford to do more. Like provide free high-quality education.
It slams the brakes on that very "make more money now" problem. You've place a hard disincentive in place once you'e hit 10x the median income. You're created an incentive to give more to the employees or it's going directly in tax coffers (which incidentally return back to employees indirectly).
Putting a firm cap on income prevents out of control wealth accumulation which lets individuals build up enough power to exert broad influence across the globe. Combining with asset and estate taxes to insure that accumulated wealth also tops off at a reasonable level prevents a lot of corruption.
As far as high demand resources....its quite a coincidence that the people who have the most money decided that the best way to distribute scarce resources is whoever can pay the most for them. There are better systems: Rations, lotteries, and public ownership.
In the case of beachfront property: It should never be allowed to be privately owned. They should be parks that are publicly accessible 24/7. There are even laws in many states that are intended to enforce this, even if many try to undermine them.
And in the end, a rhetorical: Why are authoritarian monarchies and oligarchies acceptable governance for economic entities, but not for governance itself?
The people doing the actual hard part of ArXiV -- ensuring that the papers are not gibberish, meet some minimum standard of quality, etc. -- are all volunteers. Here's where the rest of the money...
we're all volunteers
The people doing the actual hard part of ArXiV -- ensuring that the papers are not gibberish, meet some minimum standard of quality, etc. -- are all volunteers.
Sure, but it looks like these people aren't volunteers, since they're considered staff. I assume that's where the $3.5mil in personnel expenses are going. But these staff allow the volunteer...
Sure, but it looks like these people aren't volunteers, since they're considered staff. I assume that's where the $3.5mil in personnel expenses are going.
But these staff allow the volunteer moderators to focus solely on "the actual hard work." Which to me feels like an odd value judgment, as if the staff have a lesser role in all this. Given how large and important arXiv is, several someone's have gotta keep everything running smoothly.
Neither here nor there, but I have always wondered how arXiv works and how it's organized. So this is a pretty good opportunity to finally learn something about them!
I've rewritten this response a few times XD I would like to say that yes, I do believe that most of the staff have a dramatically lesser role in this. They aren't reviewing papers, nor are they...
I've rewritten this response a few times XD I would like to say that yes, I do believe that most of the staff have a dramatically lesser role in this. They aren't reviewing papers, nor are they answering support hotlines. They are not directly generating value for arXiv, the organization.
I don't have the non-profit experience that you do, but a friend does! They noted how the staff, in their non-profit, largely exist to justify themselves: some ancillary, non-value generating roles were initially necessary, but that ballooned out into reams of middle managers, directors, HR staff, PR staff, etc. to soak up funds they were able to raise (which were then spent on more staff). The value-generating employees were largely kept stagnant, both in headcount and salary. Thus, the staff grew to consume all available funds -- which certainly seems impressive on paper, especially during fundraising! -- but in reality it's a self-assembling money devouring engine.
I appreciate that there's some amount of work that needs to be done to support the core of a business or organization -- roles that seem like cost centres when viewed as a line item, but which are ultimately necessary to the function of the org -- but it seems like that ratio is really close to infinity to one in arXiv's case, given that they lean so heavily on volunteers. This makes me a wee bit cranky, in a way that it wouldn't if we were talking about e.g. an environmental outreach NPO, or like a thrift store or something.
I’m really interested in what seems to have caused expenses to triple. It looks like Cornell must have been indirectly funding it by hosting the servers and general costs around electricity and...
I’m really interested in what seems to have caused expenses to triple. It looks like Cornell must have been indirectly funding it by hosting the servers and general costs around electricity and maintenance. That seems to have ballooned >3x from 2024 to 2025. The cynic in me wonders if AI tooling made it easier to publish and/or scrape content about AI research.
It's certainly made it easier to submit gibberish for the moderators to sift through; as of November 2025 they're requiring that review articles and position papers be vetted by another academic...
The cynic in me wonders if AI tooling made it easier to publish and/or scrape content about AI research.
It's certainly made it easier to submit gibberish for the moderators to sift through; as of November 2025 they're requiring that review articles and position papers be vetted by another academic journal or conference "due to an increase in AI-generated research."
It looks like Cornell must have been indirectly funding it by hosting the servers and general costs around electricity and maintenance.
Yeah, that stood out to me too. IMO though, the hosting costs for this should be trivial: it's a small-ish (~20k sloc) flask app with Fastly bolted on. I expect that they're paying for physical office space, or something to do with the eleven software developers on staff. I'd imagine that that increase in expenses is what's driving them to seek out alternate funding, either at Cornell's behest, or in order to escape whatever is increasing their costs at Cornell.
That's a conseuqnce of the marketing. They very much want people to think these are all volunteer orgs are working out of the goodness of their hearts. So then they will be able to grab more...
, I sometime get frustrated when the public at large talks about non-profit salaries. It feels like the public thinks we're all volunteers.
That's a conseuqnce of the marketing. They very much want people to think these are all volunteer orgs are working out of the goodness of their hearts. So then they will be able to grab more donations from them and say they are helping to "fund progress".
In reality, it's a business delineation used to avoid paying taxes, under the promise that all profit goes back into the business instead of stakeholders.
Hmm... the newly separated organisation is going to be a nonprofit, which is a good start, but the real story here is going to hinge on why they're breaking away from Cornell in the first place. I...
Hmm... the newly separated organisation is going to be a nonprofit, which is a good start, but the real story here is going to hinge on why they're breaking away from Cornell in the first place. I don't think the fact they're hiring a new CEO is inherently a good or bad thing (although it could easily go very, very badly), and the salary sounds high but actually translates to "comfortable middle class lifestyle, from back before the middle class was priced out" for an NYC-based organisation, but I'm worried that this is a step towards the site as a whole exposing itself to broader market forces.
Even with the best of intentions, I don't want the arXiv using its position as the de facto repository for computer science articles to siphon some money off the AI bubble, because unless their plan is to invest that money into a self-sustaining endowment to fund the organisation's future and never touch the capital (in which case what would the people giving them the capital get out of it that they're not already getting now?), it'll just end up creating major conflicts of interest here and now, and an extremely dangerous stumbling block whenever the growth eventually dries up and they have to come to terms with cutting back again.
This exciting transition will allow for faster technological development, greater organizational flexibility, expanded partnerships, and long-term financial sustainability.
I'd rather the tech were more or less static, and partnerships were limited to the bare minimum links to academic institutions to keep the lights on. Maybe the Cornell link is forcing them to fight for limited budget every year, maybe it's keeping them on crusty old servers in a university basement - I could believe both of those as plausible positive reasons for them to want independence. But the timing and the way they're approaching it doesn't give me a good feeling here. I think they're trying to capitalise on the position they've found themselves in, and I think that's going to be detrimental to the true importance of the site in the long term.
I don’t see any reason why they should be in New York City and from the point of view of an organization that needs to keep expenses down, it seems like a particularly bad choice. The cost of...
I don’t see any reason why they should be in New York City and from the point of view of an organization that needs to keep expenses down, it seems like a particularly bad choice. The cost of living is much cheaper in Ithaca, for example, and there are places with better weather than either. It’s an Internet organization, so couldn’t they be based anywhere?
The question is about the useful labor market in a place like Ithaca. Can you get a CEO that will accomplish what you want that will accept Ithaca wages and residence? Beyond that, they aren't...
The question is about the useful labor market in a place like Ithaca. Can you get a CEO that will accomplish what you want that will accept Ithaca wages and residence? Beyond that, they aren't just going to be sitting in an office on Zoom. Much of the staff can be anywhere, but the CEO will need to be in a place that works for having in-person meetings with potential funders and the board of directors.
Yeah it’s a good point - if they are going for an NYC office (I’m going by the location on the job listing, so maybe some chance it’s not yet set in stone?) that’s another sign they’re aiming for...
Yeah it’s a good point - if they are going for an NYC office (I’m going by the location on the job listing, so maybe some chance it’s not yet set in stone?) that’s another sign they’re aiming for “gotta spend money to make money” rather than slow burn and sustainable.
I'd love to know what role they intend to play. Just from poking around on Wikipedia and their About page, it seems like the only real cost is paying their moderators -- hosting static pages is...
I'd love to know what role they intend to play. Just from poking around on Wikipedia and their About page, it seems like the only real cost is paying their moderators -- hosting static pages is effectively free, and at this scale, should still only cost them a relatively trivial amount. The Wikipedia article also notes that the annual budget, from 2013-2017, was ~$826000 ... I'm not sure what paying a CEO one third of that will accomplish.
Generally, in thr absence of other specialized staff, the Executive Director will, in addition to setting the direction of the organization, also manage fundraising, manage the employees, be...
Generally, in thr absence of other specialized staff, the Executive Director will, in addition to setting the direction of the organization, also manage fundraising, manage the employees, be responsible for the organization as the primary person that the board of directors has direct influence over, etc. As other people have said, $300k isn't an insane salary for someone who is ultimately responsible for running and managing an organization. If they're going to be independent, having an ED is a requirement, and $300k a year is fairly inexpensive for that.
Fair enough! I'm not sure what their target organizational structure is, and their current budget is rather opaque. I guess I have a very low opinion of CEOs, having witnessed them steer the ship...
Fair enough! I'm not sure what their target organizational structure is, and their current budget is rather opaque.
I guess I have a very low opinion of CEOs, having witnessed them steer the ship directly into the iceberg on more than one occasion. Several of the job roles you'd listed (fundraising, goal setting, managing) seem as though they could either be contracted out, given to people with more specialized knowledge, or eliminated through restructuring internal hierarchies. I totally get that standard, profit-driven corporations need all that overhead ... or, at least, they're expected to have it, and society pays for all of that dead weight in order to avoid rocking the boat ... but the meat of ArXiv (reviewing papers) is done by volunteers. And there isn't a difficult technical problem to solve, here; it's one step away from being a Github Pages website.
So fair enough -- it's totally understandable that a company with infinite money, and no need to produce profit, would select for a job role like this. I just don't understand what ArXiv in particular is going to derive from this seeming change in direction.
It's entirely possible that Cornell was willing to subsidize them when Cornell was providing a few hundred thousand a year, but with costs to Cornell rising into the low millions, ArXiv is being...
It's entirely possible that Cornell was willing to subsidize them when Cornell was providing a few hundred thousand a year, but with costs to Cornell rising into the low millions, ArXiv is being encouraged to manage their own finances? That's just a guess based on the publicly available budget, but we'll know more in a year or two when they release their 990 as a nonprofit.
Agreed! I'm hoping that it winds up working out for them, too. There are a tonne of other preprint repositories, but they've been around for a while, and it'd be a shame to see it go up in flames.
Agreed! I'm hoping that it winds up working out for them, too. There are a tonne of other preprint repositories, but they've been around for a while, and it'd be a shame to see it go up in flames.
Makes sense. Arxiv has grown too big to be an arm of Cornell specifically. This should give it more flexibility in where it can get funding, as well as cut potential conflicts with interest in...
Makes sense. Arxiv has grown too big to be an arm of Cornell specifically. This should give it more flexibility in where it can get funding, as well as cut potential conflicts with interest in preference towards one university over another.
Hm, so who would be the current head of arxiv be if it was a public service? Oh yeah, it would be Donald Trump. …yeah, imma take the independent non-profit version.
Hm, so who would be the current head of arxiv be if it was a public service?
Oh yeah, it would be Donald Trump.
…yeah, imma take the independent non-profit version.
Could the title be updated from "the arXiv" to just "arXiv" or perhaps "research/e-print sharing platform arXiv"? There is no "the" in the name (as evidenced by the job listing linked to in the...
Could the title be updated from "the arXiv" to just "arXiv" or perhaps "research/e-print sharing platform arXiv"? There is no "the" in the name (as evidenced by the job listing linked to in the Mastodon post).
For what it's worth I hear people use the "the" probably 70% of the time when it comes up in conversation - it's pretty common usage even if not the official way of referring to it.
For what it's worth I hear people use the "the" probably 70% of the time when it comes up in conversation - it's pretty common usage even if not the official way of referring to it.
Could well be actually - now that you say it I am more used to hearing it from UK-based physics and comp sci people, I can't remember whether or not it usually gets a definite article in front...
Could well be actually - now that you say it I am more used to hearing it from UK-based physics and comp sci people, I can't remember whether or not it usually gets a definite article in front when US colleagues mention it!
In my personal experience in theoretical physics and astronomy in various European countries too few people add a "the" for me to notice a pattern, though I am feel it's more common amongst older...
In my personal experience in theoretical physics and astronomy in various European countries too few people add a "the" for me to notice a pattern, though I am feel it's more common amongst older folks (think ~50).
In any case it's a bit of a peeve of mine; it suggests to me that people either ascribe it more authority than it actually has or that they take the platform for granted.
I didn't hear it mentioned much at all back when I was in the US, as it wasn't widely used by linguists outside of computational linguistics, but in studying ML and NLP in Germany I can't recall...
I didn't hear it mentioned much at all back when I was in the US, as it wasn't widely used by linguists outside of computational linguistics, but in studying ML and NLP in Germany I can't recall ever having heard a "the" before it. But I find it believable enough that people would do that elsewhere. I've never heard someone pronounce "LaTeX" like the English word "latex" but I believe people who say that happens too lol
Wait, how do you pronounce LaTeX if not like the normal word latex? Ha, fascinating. I love coming across things like this where I'm apparently weird (or maybe you are!).
Wait, how do you pronounce LaTeX if not like the normal word latex? Ha, fascinating. I love coming across things like this where I'm apparently weird (or maybe you are!).
Every professor I had in undergrad (which was in the US) pronounced it like /lɑtɛk/, with the first vowel being an "ah" sound like the "a" in "father". I've heard different pronunciations of the...
Every professor I had in undergrad (which was in the US) pronounced it like /lɑtɛk/, with the first vowel being an "ah" sound like the "a" in "father". I've heard different pronunciations of the final consonant since then, with some people doing a /ks/ and others doing a /x/ (like the ch in "Bach" or "loch") but I've never actually heard someone using the English "ay" sound for the first vowel when referring to the programming language.
The "ech" in "tech" is usually pronounced in English with just a /k/ at the end and a short e, which is what I usually hear, but I'm surprised someone would mix that sound with the "ay" vowel!
The "ech" in "tech" is usually pronounced in English with just a /k/ at the end and a short e, which is what I usually hear, but I'm surprised someone would mix that sound with the "ay" vowel!
Appreciate the clarification with the proper linguistic symbol. I tried to ensure it would be correct for a couple different English accents but was writing it from the context of generic Southern...
Appreciate the clarification with the proper linguistic symbol. I tried to ensure it would be correct for a couple different English accents but was writing it from the context of generic Southern and general Northern UK accents.
Depending on how big the organization will be, and where the organization/CEO will be located, $300k may not be that much. I once saw people up in outrage over the CEO of the American Red Cross getting paid $600k. Which I thought was insanely low for a CEO of an organization that large. Though that CEO probably also gets other fringe benefits.
As an aside, as someone who spent 17yrs in non-profit employment, I sometime get frustrated when the public at large talks about non-profit salaries. It feels like the public thinks we're all volunteers. Like no. When an organization gets large enough, there is a professional staff that runs the business of the organization. Whether these are more front line people doing program development and managing volunteers or doing fundraising, or support staff such as IT (like me) or accounting, we deserve to get paid a competitive wage. Though we often don't, because of the nature of non-profit finances.
A CEO is still a CEO. Just the same way an IT guy is still and IT guy. Now obviously a CEO in a non-profit pretty much cannot command a 7-8+ figure salary (though I'm sure that exists somewhere). My point is that talent and skill is something that still needs to be paid for. And if organizations don't, well, they get the "talent" they deserve (which I've seen many times, unfortunately).
The real problem is that we allow CEOs to make that much money.
If the tax brackets insured a defacto income cap of $500k takehome annually, everything else would sort itself out with time. To be clear: That cap is higher than 99% of the population.
And to be real: I'll bet there are 1,000 people working for the Red Cross right now who could be an effective CEO with 0 additional off-the-job education. But they wouldn't be given the time of day for an interview.
Management likes to think their skills are somehow worth more money than everyone else's. They're not...they just the ones getting to vote on everybody elses's value with generally as little transparency as possible.
It doesn't help that we see that CEOs get paid millions elsewhere regardless of how good a job they do. And they don't suffer criminal consequences for doing criminal things.
Depends on how you define the job of a CEO. Under any sane definition (promote the mission and do the work), I agree with you. Unfortunately, and I think this is the "real" problem we've got with executive compensation, the actual job is usually to promote and protect the interests of the powerful people behind the organization or company, even to the detriment of the organization / company itself. Like, the primary qualification to be a CEO today isn't to be good at running and building a business, it's to be willing to do literally anything the owners ask of you (especially without them having to literally ask), including sociopathic shit like lying to and ripping off employees and customers.
It's all a club. And you're not in it.
But yeah. I read a pretty good article long ago on CEO culture and the issue in the US can be summed up as "there's no skin in the game". Most other cultures have shame to be a controlling factor, and others have strong regulations that put the actual leadership in trouble if broken. The US doesn't have much of neither, so things spiral out of control quickly.
Combine that with explosive stock growths being the "real" compesnation, and CEO's can essentially fail upward, making a career out of picking the bones of companies they killed and leaving with a nice exit package to boot.
If we just stopped feeding 90% of people everything else would sort itself out with time as well.
This is not a remotely strong argument for this kind of policy and is handwaving a ton, especially when you consider global markets, high demand scarce resources (like beach front or high traffic property), and the fact that people probably aren't pro "give the government even more power to decide things" given current and recent admins.
I personally know 3 people who make near that.
None of them are anywhere near the top of their companies (although they are on the high end of their fields).
All of them are in cost of living situations for their career where that income bluntly puts them at upper middle class or the very entry to well off.
All of them have COLOSSAL student debt. They are well aware that they're probably each an example of why you should allow absurd student debt, and also the first advocates of how fucking insane the entire thing is.
Economies are complicated and magic "cap the number" solutions do a massive disservice to the reality and the actual effort being put in to solve these problems.
I'll bet it's a lower number by far. Coordinating and managing an environment of 18,000 people is very much a skill, but i'll get more into that in a moment.
While there's 100% situations like this there are very real skills that people don't like valuing because they think they're unfair. And they're right, and that doesn't change anything about their value unfortunately.
If I can pick up the phone and get Trump on the other end in 20 minutes with the understanding he'll rubber stamp what I say, or at least listen, because we once went to school together, that's worth millions.
In planned economies, the people who can get things through the bureaucracy are worth millions.
Musk is an overvalued hack BUT his ability to promote and con both people and the government is obviously worth billions because it gets you those billions.
I'm not saying most of these people should be in power or that this isn't fucked, but the problem isn't "oh they're paying the wrong people". The problem is very much on the incentive side as well, and that's NOT an easy fix without kicking the doors open even wider to tyranny. When the goal is "make more money NOW" the people who do that best rise up.
Even with companies like Steam sitting there as proof of an dominate alternative long term strategy (whatever else you think of them, their company size to earnings is fucking nuts, as are many of their other metrics) the system is currently geared towards next qtr's earning report and all the chaos that causes. There's not a magical wand to easily stop that though and boiling it down to 'oh just don't let them' isn't helping.
Fully agree.
That's well and good, but for those three there are 297 fighting to make ends meet. So they can deal with being a hair less well off... or pretty much where they are if they are top of field. And any one of the top 20 billionaires could wipe everyone's student debt, which just is a good launching point for a real justification.
There's plenty of strong arguements I can make, but I did not have time for a proper thesis. It of course is somewhat predicated on a functioning democracy....the kind we could hope to build when this corpse stops shambling. For a quick stab:
For a start, we can look to the not so distant past where in the 1950s tax brackets at the top were over 90%. Is it a coincidence that we were able to do the largest buildout of public infrastuture? Infrastructure that has incidentally been crumbling since tax brackets were neutered. We can see that incredibly high tax rates at the top is not an economic crippler, if anything its an economic driver as the biggest employer in the country can afford to do more. Like provide free high-quality education.
It slams the brakes on that very "make more money now" problem. You've place a hard disincentive in place once you'e hit 10x the median income. You're created an incentive to give more to the employees or it's going directly in tax coffers (which incidentally return back to employees indirectly).
Putting a firm cap on income prevents out of control wealth accumulation which lets individuals build up enough power to exert broad influence across the globe. Combining with asset and estate taxes to insure that accumulated wealth also tops off at a reasonable level prevents a lot of corruption.
As far as high demand resources....its quite a coincidence that the people who have the most money decided that the best way to distribute scarce resources is whoever can pay the most for them. There are better systems: Rations, lotteries, and public ownership.
In the case of beachfront property: It should never be allowed to be privately owned. They should be parks that are publicly accessible 24/7. There are even laws in many states that are intended to enforce this, even if many try to undermine them.
And in the end, a rhetorical: Why are authoritarian monarchies and oligarchies acceptable governance for economic entities, but not for governance itself?
The people doing the actual hard part of ArXiV -- ensuring that the papers are not gibberish, meet some minimum standard of quality, etc. -- are all volunteers.
Here's where the rest of the money is spent.
Sure, but it looks like these people aren't volunteers, since they're considered staff. I assume that's where the $3.5mil in personnel expenses are going.
But these staff allow the volunteer moderators to focus solely on "the actual hard work." Which to me feels like an odd value judgment, as if the staff have a lesser role in all this. Given how large and important arXiv is, several someone's have gotta keep everything running smoothly.
Neither here nor there, but I have always wondered how arXiv works and how it's organized. So this is a pretty good opportunity to finally learn something about them!
I've rewritten this response a few times XD I would like to say that yes, I do believe that most of the staff have a dramatically lesser role in this. They aren't reviewing papers, nor are they answering support hotlines. They are not directly generating value for arXiv, the organization.
I don't have the non-profit experience that you do, but a friend does! They noted how the staff, in their non-profit, largely exist to justify themselves: some ancillary, non-value generating roles were initially necessary, but that ballooned out into reams of middle managers, directors, HR staff, PR staff, etc. to soak up funds they were able to raise (which were then spent on more staff). The value-generating employees were largely kept stagnant, both in headcount and salary. Thus, the staff grew to consume all available funds -- which certainly seems impressive on paper, especially during fundraising! -- but in reality it's a self-assembling money devouring engine.
I appreciate that there's some amount of work that needs to be done to support the core of a business or organization -- roles that seem like cost centres when viewed as a line item, but which are ultimately necessary to the function of the org -- but it seems like that ratio is really close to infinity to one in arXiv's case, given that they lean so heavily on volunteers. This makes me a wee bit cranky, in a way that it wouldn't if we were talking about e.g. an environmental outreach NPO, or like a thrift store or something.
I’m really interested in what seems to have caused expenses to triple. It looks like Cornell must have been indirectly funding it by hosting the servers and general costs around electricity and maintenance. That seems to have ballooned >3x from 2024 to 2025. The cynic in me wonders if AI tooling made it easier to publish and/or scrape content about AI research.
It's certainly made it easier to submit gibberish for the moderators to sift through; as of November 2025 they're requiring that review articles and position papers be vetted by another academic journal or conference "due to an increase in AI-generated research."
Yeah, that stood out to me too. IMO though, the hosting costs for this should be trivial: it's a small-ish (~20k sloc) flask app with Fastly bolted on. I expect that they're paying for physical office space, or something to do with the eleven software developers on staff. I'd imagine that that increase in expenses is what's driving them to seek out alternate funding, either at Cornell's behest, or in order to escape whatever is increasing their costs at Cornell.
That's a conseuqnce of the marketing. They very much want people to think these are all volunteer orgs are working out of the goodness of their hearts. So then they will be able to grab more donations from them and say they are helping to "fund progress".
In reality, it's a business delineation used to avoid paying taxes, under the promise that all profit goes back into the business instead of stakeholders.
Hmm... the newly separated organisation is going to be a nonprofit, which is a good start, but the real story here is going to hinge on why they're breaking away from Cornell in the first place. I don't think the fact they're hiring a new CEO is inherently a good or bad thing (although it could easily go very, very badly), and the salary sounds high but actually translates to "comfortable middle class lifestyle, from back before the middle class was priced out" for an NYC-based organisation, but I'm worried that this is a step towards the site as a whole exposing itself to broader market forces.
Even with the best of intentions, I don't want the arXiv using its position as the de facto repository for computer science articles to siphon some money off the AI bubble, because unless their plan is to invest that money into a self-sustaining endowment to fund the organisation's future and never touch the capital (in which case what would the people giving them the capital get out of it that they're not already getting now?), it'll just end up creating major conflicts of interest here and now, and an extremely dangerous stumbling block whenever the growth eventually dries up and they have to come to terms with cutting back again.
I'd rather the tech were more or less static, and partnerships were limited to the bare minimum links to academic institutions to keep the lights on. Maybe the Cornell link is forcing them to fight for limited budget every year, maybe it's keeping them on crusty old servers in a university basement - I could believe both of those as plausible positive reasons for them to want independence. But the timing and the way they're approaching it doesn't give me a good feeling here. I think they're trying to capitalise on the position they've found themselves in, and I think that's going to be detrimental to the true importance of the site in the long term.
I don’t see any reason why they should be in New York City and from the point of view of an organization that needs to keep expenses down, it seems like a particularly bad choice. The cost of living is much cheaper in Ithaca, for example, and there are places with better weather than either. It’s an Internet organization, so couldn’t they be based anywhere?
The question is about the useful labor market in a place like Ithaca. Can you get a CEO that will accomplish what you want that will accept Ithaca wages and residence? Beyond that, they aren't just going to be sitting in an office on Zoom. Much of the staff can be anywhere, but the CEO will need to be in a place that works for having in-person meetings with potential funders and the board of directors.
Yeah, from the outside, it seems fine the way it is, but perhaps they have more ambition?
Yeah it’s a good point - if they are going for an NYC office (I’m going by the location on the job listing, so maybe some chance it’s not yet set in stone?) that’s another sign they’re aiming for “gotta spend money to make money” rather than slow burn and sustainable.
They could just as easily have an office just outside NYC where it's exponentially cheaper and most of their staff doesn't have to commute as far.
I'd love to know what role they intend to play. Just from poking around on Wikipedia and their About page, it seems like the only real cost is paying their moderators -- hosting static pages is effectively free, and at this scale, should still only cost them a relatively trivial amount. The Wikipedia article also notes that the annual budget, from 2013-2017, was ~$826000 ... I'm not sure what paying a CEO one third of that will accomplish.
Generally, in thr absence of other specialized staff, the Executive Director will, in addition to setting the direction of the organization, also manage fundraising, manage the employees, be responsible for the organization as the primary person that the board of directors has direct influence over, etc. As other people have said, $300k isn't an insane salary for someone who is ultimately responsible for running and managing an organization. If they're going to be independent, having an ED is a requirement, and $300k a year is fairly inexpensive for that.
Fair enough! I'm not sure what their target organizational structure is, and their current budget is rather opaque.
I guess I have a very low opinion of CEOs, having witnessed them steer the ship directly into the iceberg on more than one occasion. Several of the job roles you'd listed (fundraising, goal setting, managing) seem as though they could either be contracted out, given to people with more specialized knowledge, or eliminated through restructuring internal hierarchies. I totally get that standard, profit-driven corporations need all that overhead ... or, at least, they're expected to have it, and society pays for all of that dead weight in order to avoid rocking the boat ... but the meat of ArXiv (reviewing papers) is done by volunteers. And there isn't a difficult technical problem to solve, here; it's one step away from being a Github Pages website.
So fair enough -- it's totally understandable that a company with infinite money, and no need to produce profit, would select for a job role like this. I just don't understand what ArXiv in particular is going to derive from this seeming change in direction.
It's entirely possible that Cornell was willing to subsidize them when Cornell was providing a few hundred thousand a year, but with costs to Cornell rising into the low millions, ArXiv is being encouraged to manage their own finances? That's just a guess based on the publicly available budget, but we'll know more in a year or two when they release their 990 as a nonprofit.
Agreed! I'm hoping that it winds up working out for them, too. There are a tonne of other preprint repositories, but they've been around for a while, and it'd be a shame to see it go up in flames.
Makes sense. Arxiv has grown too big to be an arm of Cornell specifically. This should give it more flexibility in where it can get funding, as well as cut potential conflicts with interest in preference towards one university over another.
Well, countdown to enshittification :/ the arXiv should be run as a public service.
Non-profit organizations are run for the public good. That's their whole point.
Hm, so who would be the current head of arxiv be if it was a public service?
Oh yeah, it would be Donald Trump.
…yeah, imma take the independent non-profit version.
Interesting. Is this a good thing? Bad thing? Inconsequential? I know the arxiv has been a huge force for good in the sciences. Who does this benefit?
Could the title be updated from "the arXiv" to just "arXiv" or perhaps "research/e-print sharing platform arXiv"? There is no "the" in the name (as evidenced by the job listing linked to in the Mastodon post).
For what it's worth I hear people use the "the" probably 70% of the time when it comes up in conversation - it's pretty common usage even if not the official way of referring to it.
Fwiw, my experience is the opposite -- I don't think I've ever heard people use "the" with it. Wonder if that's regional or field-dependent.
Could well be actually - now that you say it I am more used to hearing it from UK-based physics and comp sci people, I can't remember whether or not it usually gets a definite article in front when US colleagues mention it!
In my personal experience in theoretical physics and astronomy in various European countries too few people add a "the" for me to notice a pattern, though I am feel it's more common amongst older folks (think ~50).
In any case it's a bit of a peeve of mine; it suggests to me that people either ascribe it more authority than it actually has or that they take the platform for granted.
I didn't hear it mentioned much at all back when I was in the US, as it wasn't widely used by linguists outside of computational linguistics, but in studying ML and NLP in Germany I can't recall ever having heard a "the" before it. But I find it believable enough that people would do that elsewhere. I've never heard someone pronounce "LaTeX" like the English word "latex" but I believe people who say that happens too lol
Wait, how do you pronounce LaTeX if not like the normal word latex? Ha, fascinating. I love coming across things like this where I'm apparently weird (or maybe you are!).
Every professor I had in undergrad (which was in the US) pronounced it like /lɑtɛk/, with the first vowel being an "ah" sound like the "a" in "father". I've heard different pronunciations of the final consonant since then, with some people doing a /ks/ and others doing a /x/ (like the ch in "Bach" or "loch") but I've never actually heard someone using the English "ay" sound for the first vowel when referring to the programming language.
And with yet another possible local variation I've heard it mostly with a long "ay" and ending in a "ech" from tech.
The "ech" in "tech" is usually pronounced in English with just a /k/ at the end and a short e, which is what I usually hear, but I'm surprised someone would mix that sound with the "ay" vowel!
Appreciate the clarification with the proper linguistic symbol. I tried to ensure it would be correct for a couple different English accents but was writing it from the context of generic Southern and general Northern UK accents.