Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Denis Dupeyron <calchan@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> What I was getting at is trying to identify what aspects of the whole
> recruitment process added the most value and which added the least, and
> adjusting accordingly.  I think that assessing attitude and maturity, and
> providing the tools and education needed are the most critical aspects of
> recruitment.

Agreed. Although the education part should come from the mentor.
Recruiters are only supposed to fill in the gaps because there's only
so much they can do. Nowadays most mentors only really care about
making sure their mentee gets the quiz answers right. That's a big
mistake. I've been mentoring somebody to help me with sci-electronics
for months now (hi Rafael!), and the quizzes are less than 5% of what
we spend time on. So what is it then? English and how to communicate
was the big thing at first but he's doing much better now, then
working on a lot of ebuilds in and outside of bugzilla, but also how
to efficiently deal with people, why things happen in a volunteer
project and most importantly why they don't, how to not get
discouraged by many little annoying things, etc... That's the kind of
things a mentor and thus every gentoo developer should invest time in
because it pays back big time.

I've been toying with a project about training mentors but can't find
the time to set it up. The idea was to have interactive sessions on
irc with a few interested devs.

> That's why I'm all for changing the approach to quizzes - from my experience
> it wasn't the quizzes themselves that really added the most value for me.
>  The interaction that they triggered and getting me to consider some of the
> more critical issues that come up in ebuild maintenance added far more value
> than getting every detail of the answers 100% correct.

I do make sure that answers are 100% correct since I consider that
part of the necessary paperwork to be recruited. However during the
review I use the quizzes mostly as a way to engage conversation on a
lot of topics, not only technical. That's the reason a review with me
lasts anywhere from 5 to 12 hours.

So in a sense what you're thinking of is already happening.

Denis.