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> The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today. Exactly. What, are they all

> The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today. Exactly. What, are they all working sales and marketing? What marketing and sales does wikipedia need to do? The engineering headcount at companies utterly baffles me sometimes. Mozilla laid off ~350 developers in the last year or two. That's probably well under half their total dev staff. What are all these developers doing? Mozilla is almost entirely Firefox and Thunderbird, so they had hundreds of people working full time Firefox and Thunderbird? Sure, there's some platform-specific stuff so you've got iOS, Android, MacOS, and Windows specific people...but the number still seems wildly high. How about Twitter? What are all the engineers doing at twitter? We're talking about a company whose product hasn't significantly changed in a decade. Instagram was ~40 people when they got bought up. What do you suppose the engineering headcount is now? I recently read that Wayfair has over 2,000 programmers. Two. Thousand. Programmers. What the fluff are they doing? Maintaining an online furniture store, or developing sentient furniture?

akolbe 5y ago
The comparison to the increase in the Mozilla headcount is quite commonly made. There are now (incl. Fundraising technology, only linked on that page) 50 people working in Wikimedia Fundraising alone: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising Some of the staff will now work on the Wikimedia Enterprise for-profit arm, selling API services to Big Tech companies. That's arguably honest work – they're intending to earn money like anyone is. They've hired "Disinformation" staff to look at instances of systematic disinformation on various Wikipedia projects. They're working on Abstract Wikipedia/Wikifunctions, a new project based on Wikidata: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing_discussion https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing... This is intended to produce basic Wikipedia articles written in a programming language that are designed for easy translation into many presently underserved languages. And yes, they have lots of programmers, and by and large the community always complains that they don't work on their wishlists but on other stuff they don't want. Compared to the early days, there has also been a huge increase in bureaucracy layers and management-consultant-speak ... some of the output, like the proposed "Universal Code of Conduct", is just hair-raisingly bad. See e.g. this discussion thread https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/AAGTJLSWDFKTQDUG7BHNOQ4ZYMIULYIF/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... The management culture of the place has always been iffy. People don't tell the truth, or at least not the whole truth.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> Mozilla is almost entirely Firefox and Thunderbird Mozilla doesn't contribute development work to Thunderbird.

akolbe 5y ago

The comparison to the increase in the Mozilla headcount is quite commonly made. There are now (incl. Fundraising technology, only linked on that page) 50 people working in Wikimedia Fundraising alone: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising Some of the staff will now work on the Wikimedia Enterprise for-profit arm, selling API services to Big Tech companies. That's arguably honest work – they're intending to earn money like anyone is. They've hired "Disinformation" staff to look at instances of systematic disinformation on various Wikipedia projects. They're working on Abstract Wikipedia/Wikifunctions, a new project based on Wikidata: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing_discussion https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing... This is intended to produce basic Wikipedia articles written in a programming language that are designed for easy translation into many presently underserved languages. And yes, they have lots of programmers, and by and large the community always complains that they don't work on their wishlists but on other stuff they don't want. Compared to the early days, there has also been a huge increase in bureaucracy layers and management-consultant-speak ... some of the output, like the proposed "Universal Code of Conduct", is just hair-raisingly bad. See e.g. this discussion thread https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/AAGTJLSWDFKTQDUG7BHNOQ4ZYMIULYIF/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... The management culture of the place has always been iffy. People don't tell the truth, or at least not the whole truth.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> Mozilla is almost entirely Firefox and Thunderbird Mozilla doesn't contribute development work to Thunderbird.