On Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 05:53:46PM +0000, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
>
> I just want to chime in and say that a significant portion of my workday too
> is spent doing code review. I do find it relevant and useful, however I
> expect if you asked my employer they would not refer to my time as
> inexpensive... at least I certainly hope they don't see me that way. Code
> review done right takes significant time, and I'm not even sure I'm doing it
> entirely "right" in many cases, but I also prefer not to see the effort I
> invest devalued as "not expensive."
Code reivew at a company is very different from code review for some
open source project on a forge. If someone is a new college grad
working at my company, (a) I know that they were above the hiring bar,
and (b) I know that they are likely going to be around in the future,
so the time and investment in training them via doing a code review is
more likely to have a positive return on investment.
When someone I've never seen before sends me a pull request on github,
neither (a) nor (b) are guaranteed to be true.
I'll also note that at my company, we generally assign a mentor to
each new hire, and the manager and the tech lead very carefully pick a
"starter project" to set up the new hire for success.
Perhaps the best analog for this in the open source world are programs
such as Google Summer of Code or an Outreachy Internship. So if
someone wants to have the goal of being more welcoming to newcomers,
perhaps that person should consider setting up similar programs in
Debian. This is far more likely to be successful than demanding that
Debian Maintainers who are volunteers (not employees of a company)
spend their volunteer time doing the work that someone else wants to
have done. Open source means you get to volunteer your effort to a
common goal; not that you get to demand that others people volunteer
their effort towards your goals.
Cheers,
- Ted
