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)

One of the main advantages of staff over volunteers is that they are more reliable. You have to be very flexible with volunteers and let them help out how they want and when they want. It's difficult to get a volunteer to do exactly what you need exactly when you need it, particularly at short notice. With staff, there's no problem there at all. I think that is particularly significant with technology (especially sysadmin work). Technology problems tend to need to be solved quickly and you can't afford to spend ages asking around to see if anyone feels like helping out on that particular issue and whether they might, please, be able to do it sometime today. If you have a full-time staff member sitting in the office, you can get them to fix it within the hour. You can get the same thing with a part-time contractor, but you will end up paying them a lot because they have to be on-call all the time even through they are only doing a few hours a week of actual work for you. With full-time staff, you don't have to pay extra for that because its just other work for you that they have to put to one side in order to fix the problem. We also haven't had a great deal of success in the past with volunteer tech work. For Britain Loves Wikipedia you had to put together the website yourself, which resulted in it having the bare minimum of functionality and looking very primitive because you didn't have time to do anything more. For the recent fundraiser, we never did get that API for direct debits. For a lot of other things, we have managed quite well, but at the expense of you not being able to do other work because you were having to do them yourself. So, volunteers doesn't really work, part-time contractors would be extremely expensive, so you are left with getting one person full-time. I think you could find a suitable jack-of-all-trades. It might make sense to hire additional tech staff in a year or two, so you don't necessarily need to find someone that you think can meet all our foreseeable needs for the next several years (eg. get a decent developer now that can also do some basic sysadmin work [our sysadmin needs are only basic at the moment] and then in a year or two hire someone else that can do the sysadmin work and can also handle the office IT for the office that will probably be large enough to need some decent IT support by then). --Tango 16:30, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

I will admit that a lot of this reads like witchcraft to me but I want to say a big thanks to Mike for pulling all this together. I hope we can find solutions and it would be great if they come from within the community either as a contractor(s) or a sympathetic consultancy. From my point of view I need someone/an organisation that responds as quickly as possible to emergencies, offer security of supply and data and will understand normal English especially when I am sobbing.

Jon Davies WMUK 11:45, 13 January 2012 (UTC)