There's nothing intrinsically wrong with nonprofits paying high salaries to senior leaders. You will find very well compensated people at the top of many large charities. That's because they are big orgs with hundreds of employees, with all the same problems as similar-sized big orgs. They employ a lot of people, and the job of managing and leading a lot of people isn't easy. It's in the charity's interest that the job is done well, and so they pay well to get the best talent, because they're competing with for-profit orgs for this same talent. And yes, severance is negotiated as part of the employment contract - it's a tool to attract talent.
There are a lot of armchair CEOs who think leadership is trivial and doesn't deserve high pay. All I can say is: try it, and then decide whether you feel like doing it for a pittance.
Maybe you think running a large-scale website is a solved engineering problem. But Wikimedia is more than a website. It's a global top 10 website, and that puts a target on their back. They have lawyers. They have an HR department. They have a Finance department. These departments do complex real-world stuff that needs planning, management and strategy. Maybe you know how to scale an SQL database, but do you know how to sue the Turkish government?
Now, if you want to direct your discontent somewhere useful, their grant money spending could use some scrutiny:
You could submit your CV to an executive search agency.
But wouldn’t it be remarkable if what you are saying was true? If there really is a pool of 100,000’s of equally skilled people lining up to do the same job for much, much less, then that would make the board of every major corporation fools. Remember, these are the cut-throat capitalists who’ll sell their mother for a percentage, who relentlessly optimize their businesses and seek to drive down wages in pursuit of profit - and yet they have been duped into paying over the odds for something they could easily get for much less?
It just doesn’t add up, does it?
Because of course there is not such a large pool of equally skilled people.
"If there really is a pool of 100,000’s of equally skilled people lining up to do the same job for much, much less, then that would make the board of every major corporation fools. "
Don't forget that a lot of board members sit on a lot of other boards or are executives somewhere. It's an insider club that protects themselves.
Your hypothesis is that these skilled potential-CEOs have not found a way to leave India or China? The existence and popularity of visa schemes undermines your point - companies are very willing to source labor from overseas. Why have they done this for engineers but not CEOs?
There are a lot of armchair CEOs who think leadership is trivial and doesn't deserve high pay. All I can say is: try it, and then decide whether you feel like doing it for a pittance.
Maybe you think running a large-scale website is a solved engineering problem. But Wikimedia is more than a website. It's a global top 10 website, and that puts a target on their back. They have lawyers. They have an HR department. They have a Finance department. These departments do complex real-world stuff that needs planning, management and strategy. Maybe you know how to scale an SQL database, but do you know how to sue the Turkish government?
Now, if you want to direct your discontent somewhere useful, their grant money spending could use some scrutiny:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start