I looked through the weekly reports for six months and, based on the reports, came to the conclusion that about 15 people are fully employed (more often - less).
If the rest goes to the developer coordinators, why aren’t they reporting? In addition, a question arises for administrators and coordinators: why, when full-time, they cannot plan the work of the studio efficiently? Some projects that were planned for early 2019 have not even begun yet.
If absolutely all donation goes to the salaries of key developers, then there are no questions. All are great fellows! Many programmers are simultaneously leading several areas of program development, while also managing to process bug reports. We are looking forward to the announced features. Thanks you!
I won’t begin to answer your question - sorry! - but think that the operational model where the answer lies has more parts than those reflected in Blender itself or the weekly reports. The render farm manager Flamenco keeps people busy. Ditto Blender Cloud, development operations, the Blender studio… Go to the project listings and review the project member lists. You’ll encounter names of people engaged full time but whose names don’t appear very often in the weekly reports - Francesco Siddi, for example, a long time employee who appears busy enough with things around and about Blender, but not so much Blender itself, currently. Then too, names that appear in the weekly reports quite frequently, but by their commits also support projects in the ‘around and about Blender’ category. Then there are the developers on other company’s payrolls - so I think the picture of how money flows around gets a bit more complicated than what you have. I’m sort of reminded of Captain Disillusion’s spoof of the Blender Institute’s / Foundation organizational chart. This question can keep you busy for awhile. A good thing, I guess, in that it promotes transparency. Good luck!
You have to take into account the fact that Facebook became a corporate patron, only since last month.
So, the number displayed on development fund page was not the same, one month ago.
People were recruited this summer.
But their job may not be shared into weekly reports.
Yes. Weekly reports started as a tracking of Blender Institute employees.
But during 2.8 development, some developers became coordinators and weekly reports evolved to become supports for developer meetings.
As a result, developers not present during meeting may not share their recent work, in meeting notes.
Everything evolved a lot quickly.
You can’t expect to have somebody integrated to team at second the counter rises a certain threshold.
New members of staff can’t be immediately productive.
So, it may be true that amount of money is growing. That is comprehensible that developers amount will follow with a delay.
They have to identify most interesting position to add to current team and how it can be integrated without redefining too much currently existing positions.
Blender Developers are delivering a new blender release, every trimester.
But they will not reconfigure their team and organization, every trimester.
We are much behind with updating the website, this info has not changed in 2 years.
I have been out of the running most of this year, as you might know, I need a lot of time to work away all backlog in communication.
The annual report of 2019 also needs to be published.
Short answer: not every developer makes weekly reports. We pay people better. There are other costs too, people now who work on backend (dev ops, sysadm) and overhead (HR, coordination,release logs and communication…).
I think one of the most notable examples would be Pablo Vazquez, who is in charge of PR, CM many front-end web things, and UI fixes from time to time I believe. You don’t see him on those reports but everyone knows him since he’s one of the most visible people of the team.
Also I don’t seem to find Howard Trickey on those screenshoots, he did the bevel profiles and new precise boolean.
Projects like Flamenco and the Blender Cloud are Blender Studio projects and do not get funded through the Development Fund. The Development Fund is only for core Blender development and projects.
Francesco is employed at the Blender Studio and Pablo (since he was mentioned here too) at the Institute, neither of them gets payed through the Development Fund.
Thank you all for your answers!
Ton, good health and strength to you!
For more than 5 years I have been carefully following the development and I know about almost every patch and who made it, so all the names in the reports are familiar to me, I also know the developments of those programmers who do not have a separate line in weekly reports.
My question was, rather, not how the money is spent, but why (taking into account the funds raised) new developers do not appear for a full working day. Those people who were contracted in 2020 are not new to Blender development and have been contributing to the development of the project for several years.
But I heard the answer and the fact that developers are paid better, as Ton said, is good news. On behalf of my colleagues, I express my deep gratitude to all programmers for the development, improvement and implementation of new features in Blender. Good luck and inspiration!
It may be not easy to hire developers for such projects as blender. A lot of stars must line up to make it happen. For example, if you hire random 5 people now, what should they do? Not only they have to coordinate with the rest of the team, but they should have meaningful tasks. Also they have to be familiar with blender codebase to get to the job. And you can’t kidnap or capture people to force them to work for you. So until stars line up rightly, not much will happen. I bet if some skillful developer shows up tomorrow and picks up something abandoned like texture editor, there will be no problem in hiring. Consider the fund as hiring potential. Today there are 15 devs, next day it may be 30 for 3 months, if there will be manageable tasks. At least it’s how I see it from a perspective of working in small companies. You can’t just hire people out of nowhere.
