> 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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
