I like the ideas about setting up a variety of remote clusters as well as remote individual employees. Google, Microsoft and Facebook have remote clusters, and I'm sure that many other companies do this as well. Besides decreasing expenses, improving travel logistics, and improving recruiting, having a distributed workforce increases disaster resiliency such as in case San Francisco had a major earthquake.
Careful planning of the clusters would be important, of course, in order to maximize the benefits. And legal exposure could become more complicated.
Many major tech companies seem to feel that the tradeoffs of distributed workforces are worth it. WMF already makes this work to a degree with individual remote employees, so establishing remote clusters and moving department HQs to better locations than SF would be a reasonable progression.
Cheers,
Pine On Apr 8, 2015 12:08 PM, "Balázs Viczián" balazs.viczian@wikimedia.hu wrote:
My two cents would be that of what evil giant corporations do: move their departments to the best place possible regarding costs/competition. Software development in SF, customer service to India :)
For example keeping the sofware somewhere in the Bay Area would keep the potential to attract highly qualified software guys. While others, for example grantmaking would do better in my opinion in the old continent (that is 'Yurp'). In London or Paris or Berlin, you can select from a wide and deep pool of experts yet still cheaper than SF. Note, about 50-70 percent of the chapters/thorgs/etc. would be within 2-4 hrs of flight and virtually all would be on a direct flight. Lots of saving on travelling costs for those that has to travel the most.
You can play with the rest as you wish. Finance for example don't travel anywhere except the top management (1-2 ppl), so they can be in East St Louis :)
My British company where I work has its finance in the Czech Republic, and its IT support in India for instance.
Balazs
2015-04-08 20:29 GMT+02:00 Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com:
On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 9:58 PM Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Questions:
What happens to the remodel expenses that WMF is paying for at its
current
location? If WMF vacates the premesis, will it be compensated for the remodel by the building owner?
I hope that WMF is contemplating fully exiting the San Francisco market area in order to economize, get better value for our donors' funds,
have
less competition for talent, and lower costs of living for staff. Is
this
being considered?
Keep in mind that the WMF already mitigates the cost and competition of
the
San Francisco Bay Area market by recruiting remote employees.
According to the recent report (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation.pd...
) a large number are based either in other U.S. states or internationally. Out of 202 employees, 77% are US-based in 19 states and 23% are based abroad in 19 countries.
Combine the remote employees in the U.S. and abroad, I wouldn't be surprised if close to half of staff are based remotely. On engineering teams especially, it's not uncommon for a majority of employees to be remote. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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