Talk:2012 Developer budget

£20/hr for a sysadmin sounds like a lot. That equates to a FTE salary of about £40k. I know you pay a premium for part-time, especially with unpredictable hours, but are sysadmins really that expensive? It's not like we need someone with lots of experience, they would just be running a couple of servers for us. I've always felt that getting a full-time general tech person is the way to go. That way you always have someone when you need them and they can easily do quick tech jobs for any initiatives that need them (eg. need a quick website throwing together, need some AV equipment set up for an event, etc.). They can do mediawiki development in any spare time, so they wouldn't be sitting around twiddling their thumbs. You don't need to have all that much more than 10 hours a week before it becomes cheaper to go full-time, especially if you're ending up with more than one person (remember, things like payroll and other HR costs tend to be fixed per person, rather than per hour worked). --Tango 00:17, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

I really don't know the answer here - I don't have much experience with wages for sysadmins (I've only been one on a volunteer basis), hence why I've put down a range of hourly rates rather than a specific value, at the contractor's rate that I gather is reasonable based on my understanding of the sector. I'm sure that others have a better understanding of the hourly rates here than myself - so please help us out here (ideally with links to examples for other organisations)!

I'm strongly against having a single person hired full time to cover general tech issues, though. As someone that is engaged with technology at a high level on a day-to-day basis I'm unconvinced that a single person would be able to cover all of the problems that we will be facing over the next few years (I know that I couldn't cover them all as much as would be needed, and I view myself as being a jack-of-all-trades person). Hence why I would like us to be engaging a larger number of individuals that can tackle the various different issues. I would also like to see us using volunteers wherever possible here, and I think having a full-time staff member would be rather counter-productive there.

But I'd really like to see an active discussion about these issues, since I don't think they've taken place at all for any Wikimedia chapter thus far (if they have, please share a link to that discussion!), let alone for WMUK yet. If that can take place here, then that would be absolutely fantastic. :-) Thanks. Mike Peel 01:36, 9 January 2012 (UTC)