[Foundation-l] Vice President?

[Erik Moeller]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Many organizations have dozens or hundreds of vice presidents, like Vice
> President of Vending Machines and Vice President of Pencil Sharpeners.

Heh. I've certainly been in the VP of Odds and Ends role before. :)

A little bit of context. As Stu and Kaldari mentioned, the VP title is
fairly common in the US, where it's actually often situated below the
"C-level" in the org. The reason Sue and I agreed on the title VP of
Engineering/Product for the engineering department has more to do with
the organizational vocabulary in this part of the world, where that
title does carry a very specific meaning relative to the CTO title.
You can read more about the differences in these posts:

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/want-to-know-difference-between-a-cto-and-a-vp-of-engineering/
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engineering.html
http://falseprecision.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engin.html

Right now, we don't have a CTO, but we do have three Lead Architects
in the engineering department (Mark, Brion, and Tim). We may choose to
ultimately create a CTO role again, but it would probably be different
from the way we've treated that role in the past (as architectural
lead/visionary and process/delivery manager combined into one person).
We may also need to split the product/engineering responsibilities if
scale requires it.

-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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