I like the ideas about setting up a variety of remote clusters as well as
remote individual employees. Google, Microsoft and Facebook have remote
clusters, and I'm sure that many other companies do this as well. Besides
decreasing expenses, improving travel logistics, and improving recruiting,
having a distributed workforce increases disaster resiliency such as in
case San Francisco had a major earthquake.
Careful planning of the clusters would be important, of course, in order to
maximize the benefits. And legal exposure could become more complicated.
Many major tech companies seem to feel that the tradeoffs of distributed
workforces are worth it. WMF already makes this work to a degree with
individual remote employees, so establishing remote clusters and moving
department HQs to better locations than SF would be a reasonable
progression.
Cheers,
Pine
On Apr 8, 2015 12:08 PM, "Balázs Viczián" <balazs.viczian(a)wikimedia.hu>
wrote:
My two cents would be that of what evil giant
corporations do: move their
departments to the best place possible regarding costs/competition.
Software development in SF, customer service to India :)
For example keeping the sofware somewhere in the Bay Area would keep the
potential to attract highly qualified software guys. While others, for
example grantmaking would do better in my opinion in the old continent
(that is 'Yurp'). In London or Paris or Berlin, you can select from a wide
and deep pool of experts yet still cheaper than SF. Note, about 50-70
percent of the chapters/thorgs/etc. would be within 2-4 hrs of flight and
virtually all would be on a direct flight. Lots of saving on travelling
costs for those that has to travel the most.
You can play with the rest as you wish. Finance for example don't travel
anywhere except the top management (1-2 ppl), so they can be in East St
Louis :)
My British company where I work has its finance in the Czech Republic, and
its IT support in India for instance.
Balazs
2015-04-08 20:29 GMT+02:00 Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 9:58 PM Pine W
<wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Questions:
What happens to the remodel expenses that WMF is paying for at its
current
> location? If WMF vacates the premesis, will it be compensated for the
> remodel by the building owner?
>
> I hope that WMF is contemplating fully exiting the San Francisco market
> area in order to economize, get better value for our donors' funds,
have
> less competition for talent, and lower costs
of living for staff. Is
this
being
considered?
Keep in mind that the WMF already mitigates the cost and competition of
the
San Francisco Bay Area market by recruiting
remote employees.
According to the recent report (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation.p…
)
a large number are based either in other U.S. states or internationally.
Out of 202 employees, 77% are US-based in 19 states and 23% are based
abroad in 19 countries.
Combine the remote employees in the U.S. and abroad, I wouldn't be
surprised if close to half of staff are based remotely. On engineering
teams especially, it's not uncommon for a majority of employees to be
remote.
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