[ecnahc515]

Oh, and since he's a public employee, you can look up the current salary and history.

https://hr.oregonstate.edu/sites/hr.oregonstate.edu/files/er...

https://www.openthebooks.com/oregon-state-employees/?F_Name_...

I'll summarize it:

$107k in 2017 and $124k in 2023. I don't know about you, but someone with 17 years experience could easily be making 2-5x that depending on the company and role.

[klardotsh]

And it's $124k on the west coast, specifically western Oregon. Coastal PNW is notoriously expensive to live in - sure, Corvallis isn't Seattle, but it's not cheap, either. Folks like to balk at numbers when it comes to publicly (or FOSS-donation-ly) funded salaries, but also balk at tying context to those numbers. It happens almost every time anyone dares try to pay their bills on open-source work: a flame war over "you don't need that number, you could move to your parent's basement in Arkansas and survive on $20k instead!".

[chneu]

I grew up near/around/in Corvallis. $124k is quite a bit there. Food is cheap, you can find pretty cheap land/realty, etc. Overall it's pretty reasonable.

That said, $124k is not a lot for what Lance does.

[readingnews]

I have indeed lived life wrong. I work in HPC as a Systems Engineer (right now, in 2025, with graduate degrees in engineering, and 25 years of systems admin / engineering experience) and do not make what this person made in 2017, much less in 2025, OR 2-5x that amount for that matter (total dream salary, geez)... at one time I was the data center manager and teaching CS classes, at the same time, working 80 hours a week.

How the heck do these people secure these high paying jobs? There is some club, and I am not in it. Sorry to rant, but that 1FTE salary is huge.

[sciurus]

Take a look at salary reports from places like https://www.levels.fyi/2024

If you think $124k a year is high compensation for someone with 17 years of experience in Portland, your compensation expectations are way off.