On Tue, 2014-09-16 at 13:18 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: > that's not really a competitive salary for an experience developer, > since we're talking about improving the developer experience of the > platform. it may be barely enough for a part time developer, like it's > barely enough for a part time system administrator (we were very lucky > to have Andrea cover the role), but for a full time employee you're > ignoring the fact that a salary before taxes translates to at least > 1.5x to 2.5x the cost for the employer, depending on the geographical > location of the Foundation and of the employee. since the Foundation > is in the US, it would also imply a lot of administrative costs in > order to employ somebody who's not US based, and who may be able to > ask for less. > > in short: 40k dollars of Foundation money do not even remotely cover a > full time employee.
I know you're living in an area of the US with a dramatically higher than usual cost of living and also higher than usual salaries, and also that the Foundation's current employees are well-paid, but that's actually a completely normal income for a full-time American. This is actually pretty difficult to Google; the relevant statistic would be median personal wage for only full-time employees (which would be pre-tax; except for the employer half of social security and Medicare taxes, which I did forget: that'd be -6% I guess, so let's say $37000 remains for salary), which I couldn't find after about 15 minutes of searching, but I bet it's somewhere in the $40000-$50000 range. (Most "income" statistics are indeed after-tax, but those would show lower medians. E.g. [1] is combined after-tax income for an entire household (so often more than one worker): not what we're comparing here, though. The blue columns in [2] are the stat we want, but I bet that number includes part-time jobs and is therefore too low.) It's not *competitive* for a software developer, like I said, but it's surely sufficient. (How did we wind up at the $40000 number anyway? Surely that's much more than an OPW. I guess that's the cost for an entire GUADEC?) I'd also be concerned that the money would only be sufficient to hire one full-time developer, as opposed to several students, and it's not really encouraging to volunteer developers that the Foundation pays one particular developer. I'd rather direct it towards specific projects instead. > we can also have public bids for working on specific areas of > interests — like we did for accessibility and privacy — and those bids > can be answered by companies and individuals. the issue, at that > point, becomes defining goals and deliverables, in order to award the > money. This is the approach I think would be more beneficial. The question is whether spending part or all of our OPW money on a particular contract project would or would not be more valuable to GNOME. I have no clue. I like it when students continue to contribute after the end of the project, though. Michael [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income [2] http://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
_______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list