Re: [gentoo-project] Question for 2020 council candidates: Dev recruitment status

[Aaron Bauman <bman@gentoo.org>]

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On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 02:43:16PM +0300, Joonas Niilola wrote:
> This is the yearly repeating question: How do you view the current
> recruitment status in Gentoo?
> 
> In your opinion...
>  - are we getting enough new devs on board?

No, I do not believe we are seeing enough recruits come on board. Given
the unique year that is 2020, we are obviously seeing an even lower
amount of recruits. 

While I do not believe we are seeing enough recruits, I do not have a
good reasoning as to why. Quizzes to much of a barrier? Easier to simply
push items through p-m? Not even interest in Gentoo overall?

Just a few thoughts...

>  - does the current recruitment system work?

I believe it does and to attest to zlogene's comments, it really matters
on the quality of the mentor and the recruit. There are, of course, a
few individuals who say the quizzes are not an effective method and have
"held out" because of this. Ultimately, I think spending the time to do
it is worth while and regardless of an individuals background... you
will learn something. Whether from the quiz directly or from your
mentor and recruiter.

>  - can the current devbase handle "everything" (we have a lot of
> low-manned projects)? If not, how could council aid in?

Absolutely not! This is not to imply that our devs are not capable, but
the amount of devs to ebuilds is not an effective ratio... this is
magnified by the fact that we all (mostly) volunteer our time here.

>  - why do we have hundreds of contributors who'll never become devs? (is
> there a problem in "marketing", or is the recruitment process too hard,
> or something else?)

See above for my thoughts.

>  - should council stay away from this topic, and leave every decision to
> recruiters? (If I remember correctly, recruiters project were dropped to
> 1 person because they had internal issues deciding how to handle future
> recruitment). I'm also asking this because I have a suggestion to renew
> recruitment process a bit. Should I post my suggestion to -core for
> every dev to see, -project for everyone to see, or contact recruiters
> who can silently approve/disapprove/modify my suggestion, without anyone
> else knowing what I suggested?
> 

I have had this same discussion with the recruiters and through the
insight of zlogene I began to understand it more. Once a recruit is
properly prepped and quizzes are done the process is pretty seamless...
if the mentor and recruit fail in this phase then it will cause
slowdowns. I have seen recruits submit their quizzes and within a week
or two are onboarded by the recruiters. Further, I have seen quite the
opposite. It works.

-- 
Cheers,
Aaron

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