[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
Arthur Richards
arichards at wikimedia.org
Tue Mar 8 23:40:07 UTC 2011
> As Wikimedia's paid staff continues to grow, the decision to move to San
> Francisco (and its consequences) actually gets amplified, doesn't it? It
> would only be offset by the benefits that Wikimedia gets for being in that
> particular location (partnerships with other San Francisco-based companies,
> presumably).
Since I wasn't an employee when the Foundation made the move to San
Francisco, I can't speak for all of the motivations. From my
perspective as an open source software developer working on such a novel
project, there are a lot of advantages to being in the Bay Area - namely
proximity to lots of other projects with similar values (for
partnerships, support, networking, etc) as well as a large pool of
excellent developer talent. Of course, excellent developer talent is
not unique to SF (evidenced by the fact that so many of our developers
are remote), I believe it exists here in a much more concentrated
fashion than elsewhere. Also, the Bay Area has a ton of non-engineering
talent with non-profit and community focused experience. I can only
speak from my own experience and anecdotal evidence, but I would argue
that the Bay Area is a hub (at least in the US) for both engineering and
community development/non-profit professionals.
> I think the (relatively) low salaries make it even harder to
> attract people when the cost of living is as high as it is in San Francisco
> as well. There are plenty of other people on this mailing list who could
> speak better to this than me, though. Maybe some of them will chime in.
Again, I can only speak from my experience and anecdotal evidence - it's
true that the salaries for engineers are significantly lower than they
would be if we working for for-profit software projects - particularly
at any of the other top-5 websites. At the same time, it means that our
engineers (and I presume this is true for the other departments as well)
are not here for the money - we're here because we truly believe in the
mission.
Arthur
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