The work required to keep IA infrastructure operating is full time: these are full-time positions. IIRC they were at ~70 racks of stuff just in the California locations and apart from on-call and emergency response there's growth to keep up with, future planning etc.
There's no reasonable world where this is a few hour's per week volunteering like your local boat club. It's a Top 200 website, around the size of the Guardian newspaper -- never mind that Wayback is only a small portion of what they do. (Book scanning, inter-library loans, paid services for other GLAM organizations and governments etc.)
I worked there (as a software developer) for 3 months and took a 75% pay-cut from my previous tech job. Luckily I don't live in SF! IIRC California employees were paid a little more, but not even remotely SV money.
They are idealists but also like cryptocurrency and decentralization. I recognize that's pretty rare since the late 2010's reputation of various coins and their environmental impact but IA is heavily associated with (and received much money from) FileCoin:
(and I am not saying it's bad, or indeed good, just that the usual expectations of being pro- or anti- cryptocurrency or AI don't easily map to things like the Archive)
Steel workers, pipe fitters, air-traffic controllers, electricians? There are LUs for each of these popping up all the time. Admittedly they are new chapters for existing large unions but also these jobs have existed for a lot longer, in larger numbers, than "software developer" and barista.
The larp is that software unions are anything like blue collar unions, and that socialists want to selectively act as the voice of blue collar when they are in a completely different class and do not interact with them.
I’ll note one key difference. Software output and skills vary on a power scale. Blue collar work is often heavily defined by formal procedures and codes so that trained personnel are largely interchangeable from a business perspective (not always or completely true). So without a union it’s a constant race to the bottom because the labor is fungible and the only requirement for success is passing minimum criteria.
I think that this fundamentally comes from thinking that unions are only there for the worst possible jobs in the worst conditions, or where outright abuse occurs. And also from the (imo incorrect) idea that you should have those bad conditions before organizing.
Unions even the balance of power between the executives and labour at an organization. Even if WMF conditions are perfect and there's never any abuse of power (which seems unlikely) -- you should want a union in place _before_ an org decides to do layoffs, or force a practice on its workers that they don't want.
I worked at a tech company a few years ago and the standard anti-union cliche from execs was "we already treat you well" but then about 20 months later they laid off 2000 people, including folks on parental leave. A bit late to try and organize a union at that point.
Yes, but if you don't allow corporations to lay off people when it makes sense you end up with low salaries, meaningless jobs, and economic stagnation (like Europe).
Europe is nice to visit but a giant pain in the ass to do business in. Certainly don't even consider aspiring to anything. If you can manage that, then yeah...France, Spain, and Italy are cheap and have good food and weather :-)
As someone who has worked in tech in the EU and Canada (and for US companies, and ran a small company in Europe) -- I agree. The extremely high bar for letting someone go in Europe is a significant problem. It does lead people to hire slowly and fire slowly, however.
But having a union doesn't mean "never do layoffs" either -- it just means that they are negotiated. Usually that means severance packages are standardized and the layoff process is transparent. It also often means you have to try and place suitable employees internally, rather than let people go while you are actually still hiring for roles that they could be doing.
In general, even with a union, the company has far more leverage anyway (they control the money) -- a union makes it a negotiation between two organizations (one of which, the company, has more power) vs. a negotiation between the HR & legal departments of a company and one individual employee.
You can fire people when it makes sense, for example if there is not enough work, but you cant lay off half of your workers and demand that the rest work twice as hard.
In my country we don't have minimum pay in law, but union contract defines minimum pay and they also negotiate collective salary increases.
So everyone (even non-union workers) gets higher pay because of unions.
I worked at Shopify during this period and their Shop app (the one that helpfully tracks your packages arriving) was a victim of these emails becoming vague.
At the time it felt like a specific reaction to Shopify mining this information to compete. (I have no insider knowledge if they were or were not).
Of course, the answer can be many things -- now it's AI, back then it was 17track, Google, Shopify, etc.
That website is really struggling. Very tempting to go to a mirror on archive.org to view it :)
This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.
Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.
IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.
I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?
Can you share more about your time at the Canadian one? I feel like there was a big hullabaloo about it years ago, but it's not really clear what they do.
Not sure what hullabaloo -- they do provide a bunch of services to Canadian institutions (including Libraries and Archives Canada) and they perform physical services like book scanning and in the last few years I believe they are the parent organization for the physical Canadian datacentre _somewhere in BC_.
For my work, I worked in their Archiving & Data Services department, on https://archive-it.org/ -- I didn't know this before I joined, but Internet Archive offers various for-pay services to other cultural institutions, mostly around archiving their stuff or white-labelling playback of archives.
On one hand this is neat, as IA have expertise around this, but on the other hand (as a Canadian) I don't like that it's not actually sovereign and that it looks like it's run by our government but that it's not. Tradeoffs, I guess.
You can't register a ch domain with fewer than 3 characters. It's showing as available because that thing that checks available only looks if it's registered, not if it's allowed.
I'm in the same situation as GP and while I think you're right (we're some of the last well paid software developers who aren't also founders) it doesn't help with feeling less guilty!
It's a weird kind of guilt because it's not like we individually created these economic conditions; we were just there at the right time to take advantage of them before they were gone. I tend to think of this as "useless guilt" (vs. guilt about taking a transatlantic flight or other high-impact activity -- which I still do, but I think that guilt is societally useful)
There's no reasonable world where this is a few hour's per week volunteering like your local boat club. It's a Top 200 website, around the size of the Guardian newspaper -- never mind that Wayback is only a small portion of what they do. (Book scanning, inter-library loans, paid services for other GLAM organizations and governments etc.)
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