On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Richard Freeman <[email protected]> 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.
