[Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split

[Sean Whitton]

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 01:43, George Herbert<george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal
> discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops
> side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more
> about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel
> 24x7 ;-P ).  The team seems to function well - servers seem decently
> stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is
> up to industry standards for large website operations.  At some point
> tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and
> organizational knowledge.

I have a question on this for the tech team: as a rule, do you have a
high turnover of volunteers on the sysadmin rather than the dev side,
or has it remained mainly constant over the past few years?
Considering the future, better documentation (assuming you don't
already have such things privately) would be no bad thing.

The rest of Wikimedia and our projects have extensive procedural
documentation because while there are old-timers around, there are
also people who have less time to give and move around between
activities, which has both advantages and disadvantages within a
largely volunteer organisation such as ours.

S

-- 
Sean Whitton / <sean at silentflame.com>
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