Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Report, June and July 2008

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Pace of hiring[edit]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> There have been a lot of hirings recently and are several more
> advertised - is the rapid hiring going to slow (or even stop) now, or
> are there more expansions planned once the latest are out the way?

Yep, there will be some more. If you look at the annual plan here http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Image:FY_2008_09_Annual_Plan.PDF - page 16 shows planned hiring for 08-09. Here's a quick recap:

July: Plan is to hire Head of Major Gifts, Head of Community Giving, Software Developer 1. We did that, hiring (respectively) Rebecca Handler, Rand Montoya and Tomasz Finc.

August: Software Developer 2, Development Specialist. The Development Specialist has been hired and will be announced soon; we currently are scheduling interviews for the software developer job.

October: Software Developer 3, Systems Administrator. These two jobs are now posted, so they will probably start work a little ahead of schedule.

January: Chief Program Officer, Head of Partnerships. The Chief Program Officer role will be responsible for leading mission-driven community-and-public-facing initiatives (basically everything except tech and finance/administration). Because it's a senior job with highly-specific requirements, it will probably take a long time to find the right person. So I will probably try to post it early -in September- and keep the posting up for several months at least. But I aim at this point to fill it by January, as per the plan. The Head of Partnerships, Sara Crouse, was hired in July, ahead of schedule.

February: Software Developer 4. We will probably post and hire this role on track in February.

Our plans may change: as the year goes on, we may find that we're missing particular skills we didn't anticipate needing, or we may refine our thinking in general. And we will need, obviously, to keep an eye on how we're doing financially: deferring hires is a good short-term way to save money if we need to. But what's above is the plan, for now. - Sue