One quick note on the recent DW update

[jenett]

I've seen comments in several places expressing concern that mark is not going to be working full-time for Dreamwidth. (See his post and the news post).

One thing that might help to know is that mark was working full-time elsewhere for a lot of Dreamwidth's earlier development.

(He went full time for Dreamwidth in October 2009, so was working elsewhere full time during all of the closed beta + about the first four months of open beta. During which time he was actively involved in a whole bunch of coding and planning and other activity. You can see the post where he announces that change here. Reading news, it's very clear how active he was in getting cool and necessary stuff done.)

The goal with him going full-time for Dreamwidth was to be able to push through code reviews and other tasks more quickly that really took someone with extensive focused time to spend on them. Now that fu has had time to settle in, I can easily see that it'd be possible to step back to still keeping a hand in, but earning a salary doing something else (and continuing to let him develop his skills in other ways beyond what DW would allow him to focus on.)

He isn't specific about the reasoning for the change now, and I really don't want to speculate on someone else's reasons for their decisions, but I'm delighted the site is flexible enough to allow the people who've built it this kind of choice.

One of the things that most attracts me to DW as a project is the goal - through design, through accessibility, through code choices - of opening up choices, not restricting them needlessly. That includes mark and denise and their personal lives.

(post public, in case anyone wants to link, and I'm crossposting to LJ as I've seen some comments over there, too.)

Comments

[adelheid]

~nodsnods~

RL is RL - and I know that dividing into RL and not-RL is artificial.

Anyway, good post. Seconded, liked, and otherwise endorsed.

[silveradept]

Concern might be in the same way that when Brad left LJ, things went to pot. DW's given no indications, though, that they plan on selling out, so it's probably vapors rather than concerns. I think it's a good thing that he can go elsewhere and do other things and the site doesn't crash and burn. New skills he gets in Outer Space might translate to new cool things for the Fraggles back at the Rock.

[jenett]

True.


Though it's worth noting: Brad sold LJ to SixApart (and then worked for them for about a year before going off to do other things.) Very different situation than this one, where Mark is going to continue to be involved, just not to the level of 'this is the full-time job'.

The dw_biz entry at http://dw-biz.dreamwidth.org/332.html has a lot of useful info about the ownership agreement that might be reassuring to anyone who's got questions, too.

I will also say: DW's business side stuff is going about as well as they'd hoped (allowing for the payment system glitches, etc.) but they've also been clear that there isn't a lot of spare income yet. I can definitely see trading off someone who could benefit from (and benefit the site with) other experiences (and who might have reasons of his own for wanting a more stable income for a while, whatever they might be), so that that money could go other places. Complex decision, and one that the owners get to make, not me. :)

[synecdochic]

Mark isn't leaving, though! He still owns his half of the company, still has a bunch of responsibilities (he handles first-responder tech problems and fixes server issues, so more sysadminy stuff than developer stuff), and is still there to chime in when we need him. Him going full-time on DW was a gamble that we decided on trying for a while, to see if it could work, and the gamble was very necessary for the time that he was doing it (when Mark was pretty much the only person doing code review etc), but has become less necessary over time; we have fu now, who can do everything Mark was doing, and the magic of exchange rates means that we can pay fu a working salary for a lot less than we were paying Mark, which frees up a lot of cash to handle other things. (jenett is right; we just flat out can't afford to pay Bay Area salaries yet, but what we can pay turns out to be much more than market rate for fu where she is.)

It was also a grand experiment for him in that kind of self-employment where you're your own boss, making your own schedule and doing your own thing on your own time with no outside office, just your living room. It is absolutely not for everyone; I've been doing it for almost a decade now, and I thrive on it, but Mark had never tried it before. He thought he'd do well with that kind of setup, but he turned out to actually hate it and he was getting more and more miserable as time went on, which was something he couldn't know until he tried. So, by going back to working on DW part-time and working outside of the home full-time, he can be a lot happier, rather than starting to resent DW for putting him in such a situation where he's so miserable.

I'm really glad that he tried it while he did, because having him full-time on DW was absolutely necessary at a critical junction. But we don't need him full-time as critically anymore, and yeah, absolutely, the things he picks up elsewhere can translate back to awesome things for DW.

[jenett]

You rock for more info :)

And yes, I figured it was something like that - but even more, one of the things I adore about DW is that sense of possibility and choice. And I think that absolutely *has* to be as true for you and Mark as it is for everyone else on the site, within the bounds of your absolute commitments.

In other words, I think there's lots of different ways to be really good owners / creators / people making the site work - and people get to decide which ones suit them right now, as long as the basic movement forward that's necessary continues to happen.

[silveradept]

Oh, I did kind of make it sound like he was leaving, didn't I? I was aiming for something a little less parallel - people get worried when founders step down or delegate their workload, because they don't know that the new people will carry the same attitudes in. (Not us, mind you. We think you guys do excellent work and would find someone to do similarly excellent work.)

It's good that Mark has the option to say "No, this isn't working for me, it's making me resent it, and that's bad, I need to find something else." Because few things suck more than burnout or feeling trapped at your job.