On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 12:33 AM, Brian Wolff <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
What I mean by that is that being a
WMF employee/contractor wouldn't get you any special treatment -
trusted people would get special access where needed because they're
trusted and have demonstrated their competence. A WMF staffer would
have to go through the same procedure as anyone else would have to to
get any sort of special access. Much of the people who have special
access would still be WMF employees, since WMF employs most senior
developers, but it wouldn't be "you're a wmf employee = here's access
to everything even if you don't need it", "you're not a WMF employee =
have to jump through a million hoops plus sign something in blood plus
bribe someone to get access to things that would be extremely helpful
to your work".
Note this is my own personal view as a WMF software developer, and not any
sort of official statement.
The situation already isn't "you're a wmf employee = here's access
to everything even if you don't need it". For example, for a good while
after I was hired I didn't have access to security bugs. Eventually there
were enough "hey, look at this" "sure, CC me so I can see it?"
conversations that we realized I should be given the access.
There's a security IRC channel (existence of which is publicly
acknowledged), which again you need a reason better than "WMF pays me" to
get access to.
Or consider root access to anything outside of a few labs projects: I don't
have it and if I were to ask for it there'd be a discussion that I'm sure
would rightly conclude that I don't need it. Probably an extremely short
discussion.
And don't forget that at least some of the hoops to jump through (e.g.
demonstration of competence, NDA, idenfitication, privacy policy agreement)
is also part of being hired in the first place. It's like how international
travel is easier for someone who already has their passport than for
someone who needs to get one.
+2 for example is this way: Getting hired as a developer usually gets +2 on
the repos that you've been hired to work on, yes. But if you can't convince
the hiring managers that you are competent, can contribute high quality
patches, and have good judgment in knowing when to merge something (i.e.
the sort of things that are listed at [[mw:Gerrit/+2#Granting]] for
community members), why are they going to hire you?
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation