Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] recruitment process

[Denis Dupeyron <calchan@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Jon Portnoy <avenj@eris.oppresses.us> wrote:
> Which is all well and good -- the "you wrote some ebuilds so here's
> your commit privs and @gentoo.org" approach to recruitment worked great
> when Gentoo had a few dozen developers.
>
> Today QA is a bit more important, and development is often rather more
> complex than "new version, bump the ebuild" -- it's important that new
> developers have a firm understanding of ebuild complexities.

That's a very important point. On one side there are developers and
would-be developers who want an easier way to recruit people. Most
ideas revolve around lowering the technical/social barriers. On the
other side there's QA and a bunch of other developers who want fewer
people screwing up the tree. Those are proponents of being stricter
during the recruiting process (i.e. in the end recruiting fewer
people) and firing more devs.

None of them though help the poor guys in the middle. Those are the
recruiters who could swing completely one way or the other for
simplicity, or be more subtle and try and make the best out of the
situation and resources.

When you're all done barking, and in case you really consider helping
here are two things you can do:
 - join the recruiters
 - actually *mentor* people to become developers. And by that I don't
mean passing them your quiz answers, but really training them and
preparing them to become good and well behaved developers. When people
ask me how to go about that my usual answer is do as you were teaching
your son/little brother how to fly fish (or replace fly fishing with
what you do best). Start from the start, progress from there, don't
overlook any aspect of the art (there's more to being a dev than
writing ebuilds), and be ready to spend hours explaining and
re-explaining. If your recruit doesn't get it then it can only be your
fault, so try harder.

Before you replace/change a system you should first try and make it work.

> II don't even like resurfacing to post to -dev.
> Just here to offer some insight on why we originally kept the quiz system.

Hi Jon, long time no see. Thanks for doing that.

Denis.