I do think that it's doesn't particularly match up for the Foundation to base itself in one of the most expensive cities in the world, citing the local talent pool, when a lot of the tech staff are being recruited elsewhere and are working remotely. I did feel that a lot of the motivation to moving to SF in the first place was because for some high level staff, leading a tech-based organisation in SF looked better on the old CV than leading a tech-based organisation in Flint, Gary, or East St. Louis would.
With that said, I concede that it's probably much too late to unscramble this particular egg, as relocating now would probably end up costing more than would be saved by moving to a lower cost centre, which is unfortunate.
Regards, Craig Franklin
On 10 April 2015 at 01:47, Garfield Byrd gbyrd@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Fae,
We have 215 staff in total, with a hub of activity in San Francisco and other staff in several other states and 18 countries. So I agree talented people can be found globally and WMF does hire the best talent it can find wherever they are located. At this point adding offices in other locations add cost without any benefits to the community or the Wikimedia Foundation. We also do not have the luxury of Mozilla's $300 million budget that can support a London office or Microsoft's billions to have a globally distributed workforce with offices. So we are not closing the door to anything. Based on our test project of trying to develop centers of activity in other parts of the United States there is no need for additional offices. We do need and will continue to hire a globally distributed staff of talented people to support our global community of talented volunteers.
Regards,
Garfield
On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
On 9 April 2015 at 01:16, Garfield Byrd gbyrd@wikimedia.org wrote:
... The advantages of having good access to talented people and organizations WMF interacts with far outweigh any advantages to moving
to a
lower cost location outside of the San Francisco market area.
I find the world-view expressed here slightly odd to read, perhaps because I am more European than American in background.
My background includes working for long periods with many companies in the U.S. (such as Microsoft) and we managed to do that perfectly with a handful of employees in a Seattle office, and most developers and internal operations such as HR, finance etc. in Europe (very few of these people ever had a need or desire to talk directly with customers or partner organizations). It was easy enough for me to visit the U.S. a couple of times a year when there was a lot going on there, and work on a daily basis within a lively virtual team spread out in offices across London, Paris and New York.
"Talented people" can be found in many places including San Francisco, and though Google is incredibly important, there many other critically important potential open knowledge partners without headquarters in SF (Europeana springs to mind). Even Mozilla has a very nice office to work with here in London. The idea that having all functions in SF has advantages that "far outweigh" all other considerations seems to over-egg the case, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave the door open a crack for alternative ways of working to be possible in a far future.
Fae
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