Erik, Thanks for the explanation. Let me ask about this issue from another angle.
Is it much of a problem to have a requisition planned to fill early in the year with the possibility that it won't be filled until late in the year? The delay likely provides some excess financial capacity but I don't know if the amount would be large enough to be significant. Also, similar one of your points, I wonder about the downsides to unrealistically precise predictions of when requisitions will be filled. I imagine that HR has unplanned turnover during the year that they are tasked to deal with, and demanding that they fill planned vacancies on a tight schedule might have the undesirable effect of limiting their flexibility to deal with unplanned vacancies as turnover happens. Pine > ------------------------------ > > Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:58:12 -0700 > From: Erik Moeller <e...@wikimedia.org> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Mid-Year Financial Statements > Message-ID: > <caeg6zhmd4dntsec+-f+z4yjapd2pbxrgo+pt27clw1+-hs8...@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 11:12 PM, ENWP Pine <deyntest...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > > Hm, I guess a planning problem could be the root cause, but since Erik > > seems to be saying that WMF has found a number of good candidates > > outside of SF and yet the statement in the FAQ for the mid-year financials > > said that the competition in the SF region for engineers is the reason for > > WMF > > hiring being slower than planned > > On the tech side, we've filled 11 position in the first half of 12-13, > and we'll have filled another 6 by end of March. I'm confident that > we'll have filled at least about 20 positions by the end of the fiscal > (some of those are replacements for people who've left rather than new > positions). We've also made 9 of 10 planned conversions of temporary > contractors. > > While the competition for local talent does affect our velocity to > some extent, I actually don't think the problem is with hiring > velocity per se (we're hiring at a pretty reasonable rate), but rather > with being more data-driven in how we construct the estimates for the > plan, both in terms of # of requisitions, and in terms of calculating > the spend for the planned hires. > > In the 12-13 Plan (and that was also largely the process before), > hiring managers were generally asked to fill in estimated start dates > for each hire. These estimates, with a little buffer to correct for a > known tendency to optimism, were then used as the basis for the > financial input into the plan. > > That may sound reasonable, but it essentially turns the question of > hiring velocity into guesswork at the level of the individual hiring > manager. Moreover, it has had a weird incentivizing effect of > budgeting hires as early as possible, because that would give hiring > managers the runway to open a position early, and the buffer to fill > any backlogged requisitions in the second half of the fiscal year. If > you review the hiring plan on the last page of the 12-13 plan, you'll > notice that almost all start dates are in the first half of the > fiscal. That's risk mitigation -- but not a very good way to do it. > > For 13-14, I've asked for finance and HR to work with us in applying > performance metrics based on our hiring velocity and attrition rate in > 12-13 against the hiring plan for the purpose of estimating the actual > dollar spend. I've applied those same metrics to our total req # ask, > as well. Instead of attaching unrealistically precise timing to each > position, we'll develop a hiring plan that's focused on an a rough > overall prioritization of requisitions. > > So there's definitely potential for a more accurate estimation while > moving away from false precision. That said, I always caution people > about the delusions of planning. An exercise like the "Narrowing > Focus" this year was both very necessary, but has also had a > significant impact on the organization as a whole and many planned > expenditures, for example. We need to retain the flexibility to make > conscious decisions that deviate from the plan, and the realism to > acknowledge uncertainty. > > On the second point, while we have a record to look back on, obviously > we don't really know what our true hiring velocity and attrition rate > are going to be for 2013-14, and we can reasonably expect to be off by > a few positions. I would much rather acknowledge that explicitly in > the plan than pretend that this uncertainty doesn't exist. > > For this reason, I've proposed to Sue an explicit stage-gating of a > set of hires. By that I mean that we would unlock a set of > requisitions (we're considering building out a new team that could be > easily gated) only if specific hiring objectives are met by a given > date, and we'd clearly flag the associated expenses as being > stage-gated in this fashion. I don't know if Sue or the Board will > accept that proposal, but it would give us the flexibility to make > certain hires if we perform well against the base-level plan. > > Erik > > -- > Erik Möller > VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation > > Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate > > > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
