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
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