+1 Scott As a new hire at WMF, I consider it to be a privilege to be doing work that supports the efforts of the community and the movement, but I am also proud of the fact that what I am doing allows me to support my family without compromising my personal values. Doing good and making a living are not mutually exclusive and not everyone has the luxury of coding purely as a hobby.
From what I have seen, most of the engineers who work at the foundation could easily get higher paying jobs elsewhere, but they choose to work at WMF because they believe in the movement and its mission. To imply that these people's contributions are somehow less ethical or meaningful because they get paid seems to be rather uninformed and frankly a little offensive. Furthermore, as someone who has been working in the localization field for over five years, I can validate Scott’s point that how much attention a given coder gives to localization has more to do with his or her personal integrity and commitment to that end than anything about his or her employment status. This holds generally for other aspects of software development, I would argue. With the proper legal structures in place, I see no reason why an “Engineer in Residence” program at WMF could not succeed. Having such a program would not only provide an influx of engineering talent (without adding more WMF employees), it might also allow us to positively influence the culture of several corporate entities, which would seem to be a good thing. Joel On Aug 10, 2014, at 2:32 PM, C. Scott Ananian <canan...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 9:27 AM, svetlana <svetl...@fastmail.com.au> wrote: >> I feel that having development carried out by "employees" hinders >> programming the same software as a hobby: for instance, they work in a >> single language, and don't need localised documentation > > Good localized software is a commitment of the > project/community/coders, irrespective of coder's employment statuses. > > I have certainly worked on software which was localized *only because* > a company paid people to do the localization. And, of course, I'm > sure the converse occurs as well. > > As a software engineer who enjoys his work, I'm rather put off by the > idea that it is somehow wrong for me to make a living using my skills > to further a cause I believe in. Are all employees of non-profits > somehow polluting the non-profit's ideals? > > I contributed code to mediawiki as a volunteer before I became an > employee. I did not have any problems doing so. It is true that some > "community" projects have trouble accepting contributions from > non-employees, but this is not the case for WMF in my experience. But > again, this is due to the values and commitment of the > community/organization, not who is (or is not) being paid. > --scott > > -- > (http://cscott.net) > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
