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
_______________________________________________
foundation-list mailing list
foundation-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list