Re: [gentoo-dev] Recruitment process is moving back to quizzes

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 7:56 AM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jul 2012 13:15:26 +0800
> Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> The first time I did the quizzes, it took me 9 months. After having
>> been away for a couple of years, I recently returned as Gentoo
>> dev, and the second time I did the quizzes it took me 3 months.
>> I've seen others take a long time doing them as well. Davide (pesa),
>> one of our most valued contributors in the Qt team, took close
>> to two years I think.
>
> If it's taking you that long, you're doing something wrong... The
> quizzes are pretty easy, and only test the bare minimum of what you
> should know. They shouldn't take you more than a couple of hours.

I'd be interested in why it was taking so long as well.  I took the
quizzes first when becoming an AT, and later when becoming a dev.  The
level of rigor was much higher of course when becoming a dev - which
was appropriate.  I did struggle because policies were not always
spelled out, so many of the questions took interaction with my mentor
to resolve.  Sometimes the indirectness of some of the questions was
frustrating, but it didn't take more than maybe 8 hours in total with
revisions/etc.  I'd give it my best shot, my mentor would review and
offer hints/suggestions, and we'd iterate.  I learned quite a bit in
the process.

Random thought here - it probably wouldn't hurt to have some kind of
ebuild tutorial that works through a few examples to explain how
ebuilds work, and demonstrate good technique.  That could be useful
not just for developer candidates, but for the community in general.
Our ebuild docs aren't bad at all actually, but they're mainly in the
form of reference now, and something that was more oriented to
teaching might be useful.  Maybe we need something that starts with
"hello world" and goes from there...

Rich