Just a personal opinion about "talent retention" at the WMF.
There are not many factors contributing to retention in an organization like this, in a context like ours:
- Tech sector is very competitive. Not even high pays, bonuses, stocks and perks are any assurance of keeping people around for long. - SF Bay Area is especially crazy. Guess why LinkedIn or Glassdoor were founded here. - Average age of hires: young. Retaining people in their 20s is more complex than retaining people in their 40s. - High % of remote workers. I have no data but I bet this adds to the complexity. - "Open source style for real" is a key factor WMF has almost like no other mid sized employer. I can see why many qualified professionals may think this is cool when being interviewed, only to realize some months after that they are not really made for that. - Young & fast growing organization. Lots of hiring with time pressure brings a higher risk of people leaving.
Looking at the numbers is not enough. The question is: are people leaving the WMF happy about their time here or not? Is the first motivation "leaving" or going to a new exciting challenge?
One thing is if someone leaves the WMF happy about the experience, and that experience actually helps that person getting an interesting offer. A very different thing is if someone leaves frustrated, escaping to anything else as long as it pays the rent. Both cases would count as "1" in the numbers.
Do I believe we should change the factors above? Actually tech, SF, young, remote add radically open were very positive factors when I considered joining the WMF some weeks ago. I'm very happy of working in a place like this! I'd rather keep the HR department busy trying to figure out how to work in a peculiar organization like this, instead of trying to become a more standard org you can run by the book.
The growth factor is another thing. I wish we were at the end of a crazy growth curve, prioritizing consolidation, sustainability and quality instead. The 'Narrowing Focus' strategy points in that direction, as well as the fact that we just ended a fundraising campaign before the planned date because we had reached the objective. I'm hopeful.
PS: what if there was a parallelism with Wikipedia editors? There, like at the WMF, you can see trustful oldtimers still around and then many newcomers, but a difficulty to keep these as mid time contributors. Just another personal idea without any data to back it. :)
-- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
