[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

Tue Mar 8 23:40:07 UTC 2011

> 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