Re: [all candidates] DPL salary
Stefano Zacchiroli z...@debian.org writes: Due to time and travel demands, there are blockers in being DPLs. Most of them are work related. Within that category of blockers, some could be solved by a salary but many (according to your judgement) could not. If we agree on this, it means that we are losing many potential good DPL candidates due to those blockers. The broader question is than: what can we do to loose those blockers and profit more from the abilities that we do have in our community? First, we need to know those blockers. We can figure some of them out on our own (travel time, work, etc) - but the best way would be to ask, as I said so in my earlier reply too. Once we have more input, we can try to find a solution. Most likely you have way more information about the matter than I do, but right now, I don't feel we have enough knowledge to start thinking about how to remove the blockers. Maybe the answer is nothing; it's just the way it is, and we should accept a deficit on that front wrt other communities. But maybe there is something else we could do... what? One thing that does come to mind, is that people need to realize that the DPL is not a one man army. The DPL does not need to do everything alone, and is not expected to do that, either. (Or if so, we're doing something terribly wrong) The DPL must know his or her limits, and - with the help of the project - find ways to counter them, be that delegations or something else. It is not, and should not be a one man show. -- |8] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/878v5nfxel@galadriel.madhouse-project.org
Re: [all candidates] DPL salary
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:03:36AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: I know this question isn't particularly aimed at me, but I'll answer anyway: I really don't think that would help most of the time. I'm clearly not particularly good at posing trick question to the candidates; aj was much better than me at that! ;-) That said, given you already unraveled part of the arguments I was interested in seen discussed (and still am!, especially by the candidates), let me try to enlarge the scope. Due to time and travel demands, there are blockers in being DPLs. Most of them are work related. Within that category of blockers, some could be solved by a salary but many (according to your judgement) could not. If we agree on this, it means that we are losing many potential good DPL candidates due to those blockers. The broader question is than: what can we do to loose those blockers and profit more from the abilities that we do have in our community? Maybe the answer is nothing; it's just the way it is, and we should accept a deficit on that front wrt other communities. But maybe there is something else we could do... what? Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [all candidates] DPL salary
Stefano asked: The ground shaking question to all candidates is then: what do you think of providing a DPL salary using Debian funds? Here are some comments on a few of the aspects that worry me about this idea. Some could be addressed by making other changes, but some seem more fundamental. Pool of candidates I fear that this could in fact shrink, not increase, the pool of good candidates, by creating a new expectation that the DPL should work full-time on Debian. - As Russ already noted, there are few employers where it is easy to take a year out. Even where employers permit it, there will often be an associated step backwards in career progression. Look at the number of laws written to attempt to protect women who take time out of a career to have children, but the apparent careeer disadvantage that still comes from it. - Someone working freelance would be likely to lose most of their clients. - An academic would suffer afterwards if they didn't continue to keep up with the latest research, and continue to help push forward publications or other projects that are already in progress. - With the current one-year term, some people might have to use up a high proportion of the time to look for a job for afterwards. Governance The other organisations you mention as examples have more complex governance than the current Debian constitution. - What happens if the new DPL isn't seen to be doing a good job, or goes MIA? Who assesses if the DPL is doing a good job? - How much time is the payment intended to be in return for? Is the DPL allowed to take other paid roles during the year? Does the answer to this change depending on how large the payment is compared to the DPL's usual outgoings? Does the DPL needs to fill in timesheets to show that work is being done, even if the results are slow? - If the DPL is full-time, it would make sense to schedule much more travel. We would need constitutional changes first to avoid accusations of impropriety surfacing sooner or later. Priorities If cash is available, is this the best way to use it to benefit Debian? - Could we get more benefit from spending it on sprints/DebConf travel sponsorship/buying hardware? This isn't only a question of internal justification, but of persuading our donors that we are using their money well. Maybe if we increased fundraising by 10x first, this aspect would be less of a concern. - If we are paying roles, why choose the DPL role to pay first? Why not e.g. a sysadmin, where availability for rapid response would be useful, as well as more time for projects that aren't currently interesting priorities for the individuals involved? Why not pay a release manager? I don't see that Debian is being held back by a lack of DPL time, but the release process does seem held back compared to if the same people had more time for it. Why not pay for a professional fundraiser? Practical These questions would have to be resolved, creating different types of unfairness/problems depending on the answers chosen. - How will we set the level of payment? Will it depend on the country of residence? Who will decide by how much it increases over time? - Even within one country, different people can have very different recurring costs depending on their other circumstances, such as family life, number of dependents, previous salary level, whether they rent or are a property owner, previous propensity to spend or save, etc. - Will the amount include e.g. office costs and healthcare costs, or will these be paid in addition? If uninsured healthcare costs arise during the year, while a DPL has no other means of support, will we help with those from Debian funds? What about healthcare/insurance costs for dependents? - If the DPL doesn't have another job ready at the end of the term, will we do anything to help them meet their costs? - Will Debian pay for the lawyers and accountants involved in sorting things out for each country, or will those costs come out of the payment? What happens if the final answer from the lawyers after some time is that it's not possible for a given country? - If there is a single predetermined level of payment, as seems most likely, this would presumably increase the number of young applicants from poorer countries, and discourage people with senior positions in richer countries from applying. That might not be a bad thing necessarily, but it doesn't sound like it was what you intended? Stefano asked later: The broader question is than: what can we do to loose those blockers and profit more from the abilities that we do have in our community? It makes more sense to me to try to reduce the time required for the leadership role(s), whether by delegation, by having the DPL just do less and the rest of the project adjust, or by constitutional changes such as moving to a board of equals. -- Moray -- To UNSUBSCRIBE,
Re: [all candidates] DPL salary
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 08:50:33AM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: Due to time and travel demands, there are blockers in being DPLs. Most of them are work related. Within that category of blockers, some could be solved by a salary but many (according to your judgement) could not. If we agree on this, it means that we are losing many potential good DPL candidates due to those blockers. The broader question is than: what can we do to loose those blockers and profit more from the abilities that we do have in our community? To the problems with paying a DPL, I want to add another one: how does a DPL know they're earning their keep? If I were elected DPL and given a salary, I'd feel compelled to do stuff, or to care too much, even when perhaps the best thing to do would be to do nothing and just trust others to do their job. We've definitely come to expect too much from a DPL, and we need to break that up. It cannot be that we only have one person in the project who holds the big picture, motivates everyone, monitors everything, and does accounting. The way out I can see is delegation. Delegation makes you more involved, gives you responsibilities, holds you up to them. A delegated person can be expected to have a vision of the future of their field, to know what is going on, to ask for help when help is needed, to suggest successors and step down if they become inactive. A delegator's responsibility is to help maintain a high standard among delegates, which doesn't only mean to undelegate them if they don't do a good job, but also to thank them for a job well done, ask for bits from $TEAM posts, have a chat every once in a while about the state of things and give feedback from the outside. A DPL who delegates means more people get involved and responsible. A DPL who is good at all that also sets a nice example for others to follow. We need that: doing delegation right is something that is hard to learn. Count me among the ones who'd eagerly thirst to see a good delegator at work, and take notes. So, besides knowing how to delegate, a DPL would mostly need to be someone who knows who does what in Debian, or knows who to ask in order to find out. And who can tell when they're about to reach their limit, or their day has been difficult enough already, and delegate the right person to take care of that yet another urgent thing that popped up at lea...@debian.org just while they were about to go wear some gloves and clean their bathroom. Or, if you reall want to invest money on this, perhaps we could consider paying someone to do the DPL's housework instead :) Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini enr...@enricozini.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [all candidates] DPL salary
Hi Russ, while I do agree with the rest of your post, there's one part which I'm not sure to understand correctly: Le mercredi, 13 mars 2013 18.03:36, Russ Allbery a écrit : For example, I live in the SF Bay Area. Fair market compensation here for the sort of senior IT person that we would elect DPL is *at least* $100,000 US per year, and at $100,000, people would generally be taking a substantial pay cut because they believed in the organization. the sort of senior IT person that we would elect DPL is the part that puzzles me: with both the extension of the DD status and the diversity statement, we made it clear that we welcome all sorts of contributions from all sorts of contributors: I, for one, would be very happy to elect a DPL who is not necessarily that senior IT person. I'm not hereby saying that senior IT persons become bad DPLs or that other professions have lower costs than the above figures, just that I think it's very important to keep the potential DPLs set wide enough. Cheers, OdyX -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201303141243.19633.o...@debian.org
Leadership in Debian (was Re: [all candidates] DPL salary)
On 2013-03-14 13:10, Enrico Zini wrote: We've definitely come to expect too much from a DPL, and we need to break that up. [...] Thanks. Your message explains better what I've mentioned, that (even ignoring the associated problems) I don't see it as healthy for us to push for a DPL with more and more time, but rather to fix the job to be more possible on available time. I don't say that because of my own situation, but because I want us to continue to be able to have a good set of DPL candidates to choose from. The more people see an expectation of a full time role, the fewer people will be willing to run -- in my view, this would be true for the most appropriate candidates even if we paid the DPL a salary. I believe that Debian is at its best when it is a flat organisation where different groups and individual contributors work together directly as needed. The DPL and others can help by following progress, speaking to delegates, suggesting help where it is needed, and so on. But in each case they should be aiming to nurture healthy teams that function well without intervention, not to make themselves continually indispensable in every area. I think this type of leadership can be tricky for many of us, partly due to tendencies in wider geek culture. When we see something non-ideal, we tend to be quick to think of solutions that seem better to us, and to want to share them, and it tends to be hard for us to leave things alone to be implemented once we have made some input that might be forgotten or misunderstood. We tend to think in terms of the elegance of a correct solution, and be suspicious of lessons on social leadership for being too often expressed in pop psychology.[1] I used to take more of a do everything approach myself as a student, but I learnt from seeing an society where I'd taken on most of the work run into immediate problems when I had to step back from it. In recent years in DebConf, since I know that I have limited time, I have tried not to over-commit myself with too many specific tasks, but to be a good coordinator by following overall progress and allocating my time to the specific needs at each moment, and finding people to help look at problems where needed rather than trying to push my own solutions. If I am elected DPL, I will continue the same approach in that position. The same factors encourage us to hold on as long as possible to other roles in Debian, in the fear that if we give them up someone might mess up all the work we've put in or neglect important tasks. However, the best way to ensure that our work carries on well is to train up successors and pass on tasks to them early, and to make sure that there is a real team of people working on a task rather than only one indispensable person. For both the DPL and other Debian roles, we need turnover of people to bring in new ideas, and teams which pool ideas rather than just listen to top-down leaders. -- Moray [1] Of course, there is also some academic literature on leadership that's at least as rigorous as non-theoretical computer science. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/0cf335070d92a21473727e146aeb6...@www.morayallan.com
Re: [all candidates] DPL salary
Didier 'OdyX' Raboud o...@debian.org writes: Le mercredi, 13 mars 2013 18.03:36, Russ Allbery a écrit : For example, I live in the SF Bay Area. Fair market compensation here for the sort of senior IT person that we would elect DPL is *at least* $100,000 US per year, and at $100,000, people would generally be taking a substantial pay cut because they believed in the organization. the sort of senior IT person that we would elect DPL is the part that puzzles me: with both the extension of the DD status and the diversity statement, we made it clear that we welcome all sorts of contributions from all sorts of contributors: I, for one, would be very happy to elect a DPL who is not necessarily that senior IT person. I'm not hereby saying that senior IT persons become bad DPLs or that other professions have lower costs than the above figures, just that I think it's very important to keep the potential DPLs set wide enough. Sorry, I didn't phrase that very well. What I was trying to get at is that the DPLs we select are skilled people. We encourage our best developers to run, and then we try to select the best person among that mix. The bar is rather higher than being a Debian developer. It's not necessarily higher along the metric of technical ability; it could be higher along the metric of people skills, or clarity of expression, or financial management, or organizational skills. But clearly we're trying to select among our stronger members, and I consider the general competence of DDs to already be quite high. (For example, when deciding whether to hire someone, knowing that they're a DD would be a substantial plus.) All of those skills, whether technical or organizational or social, are worth money. They make you a senior employee, which in US corporate lingo doesn't mean that you've been doing it for a long time, but rather is an indication of responsibility and pay grade. Anyone with any of that mix of skills that makes a good DPL could easily command a six-figure salary here if they so choose, in some job or another. (If their skills are primarily social and organizational, it might be a management instead of a technical position.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87y5dphoyy@windlord.stanford.edu
Re: [all candidates] DPL salary
On 13/03/13 at 11:56 +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 01:31:08PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: For example, I would question whether one could do the role of DPL with a conventional full-time job in IT, at least if you want to keep any other hobbies outside of those two jobs. The amount of media and expected travel to represent Debian is rather intimidating (particularly to an introvert), as are the number of things that are relatively time-sensitive and require a lot of effort. Thanks for providing the background for a question I wanted to ask! I totally agree with you and I'm worried about that. I've been lucky in having the flexibility needed to be DPL and I wish the same flexibility to the next DPL. But, in terms of Debian sustainability, I'm worried that we de facto rely on people having that kind of flexibility to be good DPLs. I believe we are losing, via preemptive self-selection, many good candidates (from IT or other fields) for precisely that reason. The ground shaking question to all candidates is then: what do you think of providing a DPL salary using Debian funds? I know it is a touchy topic, and I propose it on purpose :-P In another mail: The broader question is than: what can we do to loose those blockers and profit more from the abilities that we do have in our community? I think that providing a salary to the DPL would be an inefficient solution to a real problem. Yes, we need to make the DPL position more manageable. More DDs should be able to apply. But there are many problems with this proposed solution (the implication that the DPL is supposed to work full-time and quit his/her job, for example). I would rather prefer the DPL to share the load with others, using more delegations and relying on a DPL helpers / Debian Driving Force team. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130314192749.gb...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: [all candidates] DPL salary
Stefano Zacchiroli z...@debian.org writes: I totally agree with you and I'm worried about that. I've been lucky in having the flexibility needed to be DPL and I wish the same flexibility to the next DPL. But, in terms of Debian sustainability, I'm worried that we de facto rely on people having that kind of flexibility to be good DPLs. I believe we are losing, via preemptive self-selection, many good candidates (from IT or other fields) for precisely that reason. The ground shaking question to all candidates is then: what do you think of providing a DPL salary using Debian funds? I know it is a touchy topic, and I propose it on purpose :-P I know this question isn't particularly aimed at me, but I'll answer anyway: I really don't think that would help most of the time. For example, if I were to consider running for DPL, the problem isn't as much the income. Rather, it's that I have a job I like, and I don't want to leave it. I have a hard time imagining circumstances under which I'd quit my job to be DPL, and then be faced with having to find a new job after a DPL term ended. Some people may be able to take an unpaid leave of absence, in which case being paid to be DPL might help, but now we're back to only talking about people with unusually flexible work situations. The major problem with volunteer roles that take more time than one can reasonably do on the side of a full time job isn't so much the lack of compensation as it is the lack of more hours in the day and the fact that quitting one's job to concentrate on this sort of temporary work is rarely a viable option for people who are holding full-time jobs. Even if the work is paid, it's not permanent; you give up massive amounts of stability and job security, and while some people will be in a position to do that, most won't. If one is supporting a family, for instance, taking a job for one year and then having no idea what one is going to do next is the sort of arrangement normally only considered if one is already unemployed. Another, unrelated problem is that fair wages vary *wildly* based on where one is physically located. It wouldn't surprise me if they varied by more than a factor of 10. That creates a really awkward situation when determining what to pay a given DPL, or again limits the field of candidates. For example, I live in the SF Bay Area. Fair market compensation here for the sort of senior IT person that we would elect DPL is *at least* $100,000 US per year, and at $100,000, people would generally be taking a substantial pay cut because they believed in the organization. Competitive wages would be more like $150,000. I suspect similar ranges in Boston or New York. But that would be most likely be far, far above competitive pay rates in many other places. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87ehfjz0yf@windlord.stanford.edu
Re: [all candidates] DPL salary
Stefano Zacchiroli z...@debian.org writes: On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 01:31:08PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: For example, I would question whether one could do the role of DPL with a conventional full-time job in IT, at least if you want to keep any other hobbies outside of those two jobs. The amount of media and expected travel to represent Debian is rather intimidating (particularly to an introvert), as are the number of things that are relatively time-sensitive and require a lot of effort. Thanks for providing the background for a question I wanted to ask! I totally agree with you and I'm worried about that. I've been lucky in having the flexibility needed to be DPL and I wish the same flexibility to the next DPL. But, in terms of Debian sustainability, I'm worried that we de facto rely on people having that kind of flexibility to be good DPLs. I believe we are losing, via preemptive self-selection, many good candidates (from IT or other fields) for precisely that reason. We're losing out on a lot of good candidates for many, many reasons, and I do not believe that a DPL salary would help in any way, quite the contrary! I'll explain below. The ground shaking question to all candidates is then: what do you think of providing a DPL salary using Debian funds? I know it is a touchy topic, and I propose it on purpose :-P I do not think this is a good idea, and I would strongly object to such a proposal. While it does solve one particular problem, that of the DPL being able to focus all his time on Debian, it also presents quite a lot of problems, that make the whole thing not worth it. For me, Debian has always been something I contribute to because I love doing it. It never was, and never felt like a job. Getting paid to do it would ruin that for me: I have a job that pays my bills, a job I love, a job I don't wish to leave. Havin a day job also means I'll have pension once I'm willing to stop hammering on keyboards. There's plenty of other things a day job provides, that would be hard for Debian to accomplish, if for nothing else, then the geographic diversity of DPLs. Some further thoughts to foster the discussion: [...] - some of the dunc-tank objections do not apply to this case, because the DPL is the sole elected role in the project. As such it is already different from other volunteers, the difference will not be created by the salary, only acknowledged to make the job sustainable and more appealing. It is also a role that de facto demands to take significant time off your day to day job (on that front, however, it is not the only one --- DSA and security come to mind due to the need of handling emergencies, and there are others) I do not agree that the DPL position would be different from any other important role within Debian. The only difference is being elected, and that's about it. Other roles take quite a lot of time from one's life too, I would find it worrysome to single out one particular position, no matter what that position may be. Yes, the DPL likely travels and speaks a lot more (but that's also a perk, as far as I'm concerned) than people in other roles may, and these should not be paid out of one's own pocket, much the same way as people attending Debian Sprints are often sponsored too. This does not, however, require a 'DPL salary'. - several other, volunteer driven, independent organizations are paying their leaders using donated money since quite a while: both GNOME and the FSF pay their executive directors, and there are other examples Both the FSF and the GNOME Foundation have a different structure than Debian. What makes sense there, does not necessarily apply to Debian. They also have more than a single employee. (As opposed to the DPL being the only one in Debian's case.) - invariably, the salaries paid in those settings are significantly lower than IT market salaries; but they still allow to be in that role full-time, although surely not for greed when compared to alternatives However, there's one thing a DPL salary does not provide: a stable job. Noone served as DPL for more than three years yet, and only you served that long. With a job, one can feel secure, does not need to worry yearly about the election (or look for another job, would one decide not to run again). That stability is something I do not wish to give up, and something that being paid for being a DPL would not provide. I mean, even if one's confident about his or her provess to be elected year after year, history tells us that none held the office longer than three years. On the other hand, a lot of people held their job for far more than that. Also note that salaries vary wildly around the world, one won't be able to find a good balance. (For example, with my current salary, if I'd move to the US, I'd be broke within a few months, yet I can sustain a convenient life here in Hungary.) - deciding to pay the DPL is likely a one-way step,
