Wikimedia Foundation

There are so many great engineers at Wikimedia. The problems are hard and fun. There's a big open-source culture here.

Lots of great travel with the opportunity to engage with really amazing community members. Everyone loves Wikipedia, which makes it really easy to network through lots of open-source communities. It's possible to come up with ideas and fully implement them, assuming you're willing to fight management for it.

I would still recommend Wikimedia to a friend, while giving them a warning about what to expect. It's hard not to want great people working at Wikimedia. I hope that friends can help turn that ship around.

Culture at Wikimedia is difficult to describe. It's amazing if you consider the mission and the culture around that. I wanted to give Wikimedia 5 stars just for that reason. Meeting the community, going to Wikimania, and to the countless global engineering events is incredibly rewarding.

Management at basically every level of the foundation is terrible. Senior management is so inept that the board should really do something about it. Unfortunately, the board is also mostly checked out. The community is heavily negative and completely averse to change, though that may be poor execution of feature launches from the foundation.

You could be curing cancer at Wikimedia and 99% of what you'd hear is why you're an idiot. The rest of the time, you'd have 2-3 people saying that your cure isn't good, then they'd all be working on re-implementing your work and eventually arrive at the same exact solution. You'd get maybe 1-2 compliments. Management would just sit back and watch it occur while the cure took 10 times longer than it would have if they had facilitated collaboration.

Senior management very often hires incompetent middle managers knowingly, against the wishes of the team that manager is going to manage. This is what a large percentage of Wikimedia's turnover is related to. Any reasonable senior management would see this and fire the person hiring the idiots, but it's unfortunately the same people.

Office culture at Wikimedia is absolutely terrible. There's a massive failure in upper management at this level. Almost everything that was once offered in the office is gone because they were "too expensive," all while the upper management has at least three incredibly expensive off-site retreats a year. There's lots of backstabbing, office gossip, political infighting with coworkers trying to get each other fired, and lots of cross-department feuds. It's rare that anyone's work is celebrated, and managers often take credit for their employees' work.

Please leave. Basically, all of you have been around for too long and have driven away countless talented employees.

Sue helped the organization grow to a reasonable size and got the foundation through its necessary fundraising growth, but she's also been a relatively absentee ED when it comes to Wikimedia Foundation's primary function, which is engineering. She's let Erik run that ship into the ground for years.