| 6 Mar 2024 |
 Jonas Chevalier | 100M per year or so? | 18:45:33 |
 edef | eh, not everyone is fulltime | 18:45:56 |
| edef | we have a pretty long tail of small-time contributors | 18:46:09 |
| edef | i think we probably take in seven figures worth of labour tops | 18:47:17 |
 raitobezarius | and if we consider only the infra team or stuff where we need to incentivize people or everything just disappear, this is even less | 18:47:56 |
| edef | infra and security are the "nobody notices or cares you exist, until you fuck up or disappear" departments | 18:48:28 |
| edef | plus some governance stuff | 18:48:59 |
| edef | but broadly i do think this ecosystem creates a lot of value and can create a lot of value, even if value capture is hard | 18:53:10 |
 hexa | In reply to @raitobezarius:matrix.org
always has been waste of a particular good meme posting opportunity | 19:08:24 |
| edef | look, we all have that image living in our minds rent-free, you only need the referent :p | 19:08:48 |
| edef | * look, we all have that image living in our minds rent-free, you only need the reference :p | 19:09:06 |
|  ˈt͡sɛːzaɐ̯ joined the room. | 23:25:50 |
| edef set a profile picture. | 23:28:24 |
 delroth | re: paying people - I'm not convinced that a self-hosted cache needs anyone to be paid to handle day to day ops (I don't view it as any different from other infra-team-managed services, especially if good DR can mitigate risks on day to day ops), but I think the main difference with existing infra work is the availability needs (which are not currently properly defined, but they exist, and I think we can all agree to say the cache hosting has higher availability requirements than anything else we self host) | 23:41:19 |
| delroth | so maybe what we need is a model where we pay people for oncall response? | 23:41:32 |
| delroth | disclaimer: I have no experience with such a model, I don't know that anyone does because I haven't really heard about any precedents before, but maybe this gives a direction for someone interested to try and explore | 23:43:03 |
| edef | sure, though obvious necessary incentive alignment: you get paid to be responsive, not for the response | 23:44:06 |
| edef | ie we don't pay you for the hours, you win by keeping the hours down | 23:44:22 |
| delroth | it depends how much you think the responders are intrinsically motivated by money vs. keeping costs down - in a for-profit structure I'd definitely agree with you, in the current structure we already have tens of people spending their free time trying to reduce the foundation's spending with no expectation of personal monetary returns | 23:46:22 |
| edef | mmm | 23:46:40 |
| delroth | like, yes, I agree that in theory assuming maximally greedy humans the incentive structure I've proposed is completely broken :P | 23:47:03 |
| edef | my returns are producing a public good, but i know my utility function is insane to most people | 23:47:53 |
| edef | obviously one can interpolate between the models a bit | 23:48:23 |
| edef | broadly, relying on people with unusually high-altruism utility functions is why things are so tight | 23:49:37 |
| delroth | semi-related, checking my intuition: I think "reliance on people with high-altruism utility functions" is not a linear knob - I expect that once you start reaching a certain amount of people with lower altruism, you get the people with higher altruism to leave go do something else. WDYT? | 23:52:56 |
| edef | there's definitely evaporative cooling effects of that nature | 23:53:14 |
| edef | * there are definitely evaporative cooling effects of that nature | 23:53:48 |
| delroth | (why I think it's relevant is that if that's the case, then not relying on high-altruism people means a major shift in the current composition of the teams looking after everything) | 23:53:49 |
 Wanja Hentze | In reply to @edef1c:matrix.org
ie we don't pay you for the hours, you win by keeping the hours down we do that in our on-call rotation at work and it works pretty well | 23:58:35 |
| Wanja Hentze | what we do give people for on-cal hours is time off, not as an incentive but just to make sure whoever is on call is relatively well rested | 23:59:18 |
