| 6 Mar 2024 |
 raitobezarius | I had a spreadsheet for rudimentary TCO for owned hardware | 18:35:04 |
 edef | because being able to pay people was too obviously out-of-budget | 18:35:19 |
 Wanja Hentze | so infra team is all volunteers? :/ | 18:35:59 |
| edef | like if we had a million bucks a year then i'd build you the whole circus and fully staff it | 18:36:15 |
| edef | but we don't and i can't, we just have people with mysterious motivations who show up, and we don't have enough of those to make it particularly easy on them | 18:37:15 |
| edef | and i name that particular number because $1M isn't "real money" in tech startup land but sounds like it to non-businesspeople | 18:39:56 |
| raitobezarius | In reply to @whentze:matrix.org
so infra team is all volunteers? :/ always has been | 18:40:23 |
 Jonas Chevalier | we're all volunteers | 18:44:36 |
| Jonas Chevalier | how much do you think it would cost to pay everybody involved, including nixpkgs contributions? | 18:45:05 |
| 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 |
|  @julius:mtx.liftm.de joined the room. | 23:25:50 |
| edef set a profile picture. | 23:28:24 |
 @delroth:delroth.net | 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:delroth.net | so maybe what we need is a model where we pay people for oncall response? | 23:41:32 |
| @delroth:delroth.net | 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:delroth.net | 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:delroth.net | like, yes, I agree that in theory assuming maximally greedy humans the incentive structure I've proposed is completely broken :P | 23:47:03 |
