On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 2:16 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:

On 07/11/12 22:21, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

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Terry Chay, 07/11/2012 21:04:

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You aren't the only one. It turns out we use a lot of industry

terminology, without realizing that we are poorly communicating what that means to most people. [...] First of all, this will help greatly to the others (you already read it): http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors.

Thanks for your explanation but personally I'm more confused than before about the difference between Engineering and Product, also because the terminology didn't appear internally consistent. :-)

I feel like you, Nemo. I am glad by Terry explanation, but as I went on reading it, the less I felt I understood it. It would benefit from a more layman explanation. Maybe it's just complex to everybody.

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So, to keep it simple, that page has:

2 Engineering and Product Development 2.1 Platform 2.2 Features 2.3 Technical Operations 2.4 Mobile and Special Projects 2.5 Language 2.6 Product

and as first approximation "Product" would be something like 2.2+2.6 and "Engineering" something like 2.1+2.3, with 2.4 and 2.5 aside?

I thought that 2.4 (Mobile) would also be Product.

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[...] On the "Engineering" side, there exists an amalgam of

specific focused groups with their own directors. The focused groups are: Language (formerly "i18n and Experimentation", internationalization/localization/globalization is a cross-cutting concern), and Mobile (formerly, "Mobile and Special Projects: the mobile web, the mobile app, also including Wikipedia Zero). The "area" focused ones are: Operations (keeping the lights on), Platform (keeping the code working) and Features (ostensibly new features). [...]

What you call the Engineering side here, at a first glance, could seem product development, and in fact those two "focused groups" currently have some members which are under 2.6 (Product). Surely the same happens for the other areas you mentioned.

You can see several teams in that page, with members from multiple "sections". Which leads to the (naive?) question on what's the purpose of being splitted in those sections if then the work is done in teams with a completely different organization.

After staring for a while to [[Staff and contractors]] and trying to match people with its work, my only conclusion is that I don't know what most employees do.

It often (not always) helps to click through to the employee's user page and read the "My work" section there. Earlier this year, Gayle harassed us all a lot to put something informative there ;)