Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?
On 04/04/2010 02:09 PM, Denis Dupeyron wrote: All ideas regarding improving recruitment are welcome, thanks. However if, during your review, you were not given the impression that your maturity and other social skills were being assessed then you were being blissfully naive. :o) That actually wasn't what I was trying to convey (guess I need to work on those communications skills :) ). I did recognize that you were looking to assess this, and that you felt that this was of critical importance. 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. 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. The quizzes are just a tool - not the ultimate validators of ability. Let's use every tool at our disposal in the best way possible. Rich
Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?
On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Richard Freeman ri...@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.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?
On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Richard Freeman ri...@gentoo.org wrote: I think the problem is that our recruitment process uses the ability to answer complex technical and organizational questions as a way to assess maturity. I think that maturity is far more important than technical skill in a distro - a mature person will recognize their own limitations and exercise due diligence when stepping outside of them. Instead of playing 20 questions and going back and forth with recruits, maybe a better approach would be to cut down the questions dramatically (or more clearly put their answers in the documentation), and then use other approaches like references and interviews. A new recruit might be given the names of 5 devs that they will need to interview with for 30-60 minutes by phone or IRC (preference on phone), and they will need to submit references, who will be contacted. When we hire people at work we don't play trivial pursuit with them, we use an interview to get a feel for what they're like and how they handle situations, and we screen resumes and references to determine experience. I'm sure any of the professional linux distros would work in the same way, but perhaps somebody should ask around and see how it is done elsewhere. All ideas regarding improving recruitment are welcome, thanks. However if, during your review, you were not given the impression that your maturity and other social skills were being assessed then you were being blissfully naive. :o) I use tricks like pretending I don't understand that crystal-clear thing you're explaining to gauge your patience and politeness, I drift off to real-life topics to find out who the recruit really is, and lots of others like background searches (also outside of gentoo) and talks with the mentor. On the other hand, in your particular case, I clearly remember the assessment was easy and thus I didn't insist too much. Which is what probably made it more difficult for you to notice. Denis.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?
esOn Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 07:33:53AM -0400, Richard Freeman wrote: On 04/03/2010 06:19 AM, Tobias Scherbaum wrote: I really think that the Gentoo recruitment process needs improvement. Right now it seems like a LOT of effort is required both to become a Gentoo dev and to help somebody become a Gentoo dev. That means we have great people, but not many of them. I think the problem is that our recruitment process uses the ability to answer complex technical and organizational questions as a way to assess maturity. I think that maturity is far more important than technical skill in a distro - a mature person will recognize their own limitations and exercise due diligence when stepping outside of them. Instead of playing 20 questions and going back and forth with recruits, maybe a better approach would be to cut down the questions dramatically (or more clearly put their answers in the documentation), and then use other approaches like references and interviews. A new recruit might be given the names of 5 devs that they will need to interview with for 30-60 minutes by phone or IRC (preference on phone), and they will need to submit references, who will be contacted. When we hire people at work we don't play trivial pursuit with them, we use an interview to get a feel for what they're like and how they handle situations, and we screen resumes and references to determine experience. I'm sure any of the professional linux distros would work in the same way, but perhaps somebody should ask around and see how it is done elsewhere. I'm not exactly sure how you'd want the references to work, I mean, as in prior jobs/projects worked on? I know that I'd like to help out with development, but as it stands I don't think I have the necessary skills (various programming language etc), so that is something I'm working on. As a consequence I naturally don't have any references (and might not by the time I feel ready) but that wouldn't necessarily mean that I'm not qualified to be working as a dev. Also one could imagine that a number of other people without references, but the necessary qualifications might think To hell with this, I'll just put my effots somewhere else. Another thing, you write that phone is preferred but I know that I act relaxed in text with new people and as myself. Whereas on the phone I hold back a bit, and don't really act myself. So perhaps the preference should be the manner in which the one being interviewed is more comfortable with and will act more naturally. Anyway these are just my 2 cents. -- Zeerak Waseem pgp95WvDeen2m.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?
On 04/03/10 11:16, Tobias Scherbaum wrote: Hell no, but ... We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way. Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead. So what are _you_ doing to make it better? For example: - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist. Yeah, we do have people working on hardened stuff, but if people just take what's happening in the portage tree they might think that the hardened stuff they're relying on for their business isn't supported any longer. With Zorry we just got a new recruit for working on hardened things, especially toolchain. It's not as dead as you make it sound ... - Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat maintained, but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both to our docs, but also to our docs-team) for years. People are constantly asking for a documentation wiki, but ... yeah, as long as no one just creates a wiki there won't be one. People are waiting on other people, who are waiting for Godot. Just do it. I remember the long and whiny road to get a blog aggregator - what killed the waiting deadlock was simply karltk setting up one (unofficial etc.etc.) and suddenly people saw that it was good. - Understaffed herds: For example net-mail, netmon and others - were missing lots of developers and their support in lots of areas. Sadly those areas are mostly those ones, one might need packages for their business servers from. And still, when someone tries to fix things in such an understaffed herd people go all territorial and are like omg u touched my package. Right now I'm quite confused what our project strategy seems to be, as far as I can tell there's one group aiming for an aesthetical optimum and the other group just wants to get things fixed. And they are not cooperating well ... So - what to do now? For me it's simple. I try to - dedicate time to fixing things. Takes lots of time, can be demotivating - try to motivate and recruit new users - hard to motivate them, and with our current recruiting setup it's hard to keep them motivated - not get demotivated by the OMG it's all bad attitude some people radiate And don't just start discussing how to discuss things. That's not going to work. You'll end up with a pretty specific plan how to discuss the whole thing, then get bored and not discuss it at all. Just start fixing things. Set yourself some personal goals (do on average one commit a day? fix one bug a day?) and try to reach them. If you do, set yourself some new goals. I have found some pretty amazing proxy-maintainers in the last weeks, there's quite a lot of progress happening. There's still lots of potential, but most people only start interacting with us once we have started to show some activity. Right now we might be in a not-that-excellent position, but it won't just go away. It needs all of us to _do_ something. wkr, Patrick
Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?
Am Samstag, den 03.04.2010, 11:46 +0200 schrieb Patrick Lauer: We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way. Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead. So what are _you_ doing to make it better? I started to maintain those unmaintained packages which are important to me myself and ended up in the net-mail/netmon herds for example. Postfix, Cyrus-Imap, Bind, Nagios and several others are packages i put my hands on - just because noone else did and those were and still are essential to me. - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist. Yeah, we do have people working on hardened stuff, but if people just take what's happening in the portage tree they might think that the hardened stuff they're relying on for their business isn't supported any longer. With Zorry we just got a new recruit for working on hardened things, especially toolchain. It's not as dead as you make it sound ... Good to see there's something happening in hardened - but still, the user outside of Gentoo still only is seeing: Oh, no hardened-sources update for nearly a year. - Understaffed herds: For example net-mail, netmon and others - were missing lots of developers and their support in lots of areas. Sadly those areas are mostly those ones, one might need packages for their business servers from. And still, when someone tries to fix things in such an understaffed herd people go all territorial and are like omg u touched my package. Right now I'm quite confused what our project strategy seems to be, as far as I can tell there's one group aiming for an aesthetical optimum and the other group just wants to get things fixed. And they are not cooperating well ... I for one can't say I had any territorial problems when touching packages belonging to other devs or herds - it's just a problem if you screw up. - Tobias -- Praxisbuch Nagios http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/pbnagiosger/ https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?
On 04/03/2010 06:19 AM, Tobias Scherbaum wrote: And still, when someone tries to fix things in such an understaffed herd people go all territorial and are like omg u touched my package. Right now I'm quite confused what our project strategy seems to be, as far as I can tell there's one group aiming for an aesthetical optimum and the other group just wants to get things fixed. And they are not cooperating well ... I for one can't say I had any territorial problems when touching packages belonging to other devs or herds - it's just a problem if you screw up. Agreed - if you ping the herd in advance, and get an OK (or at least no reply for a few days), and then you make some simple fixes to their packages, it is very unlikely that you're going to have any complaints. If you send the the proposed patch in advance and let them review it, and you get no complaints, you're even more clearly in the right. If you don't notify them at all, or you notify them and do a cvs commit 3 minutes later, or if you completely redesign their ebuilds in addition to fixing a 1-line problem, then you're going to get complaints. Nobody minds help. People do mind when somebody drops by to help them for 5 minutes and they're stuck with the aftermath. We don't own our packages, but existing maintainers have at least shown a long-term commitment to them (however strong) and that should at least be respected. On other topics in this thread: I agree wholeheartedly that whenever possible just do it is a good approach - especially when you're talking about documentation and external websites/etc. Modifications to things that already exist are less amenable to just do it. I really think that the Gentoo recruitment process needs improvement. Right now it seems like a LOT of effort is required both to become a Gentoo dev and to help somebody become a Gentoo dev. That means we have great people, but not many of them. I think the problem is that our recruitment process uses the ability to answer complex technical and organizational questions as a way to assess maturity. I think that maturity is far more important than technical skill in a distro - a mature person will recognize their own limitations and exercise due diligence when stepping outside of them. Instead of playing 20 questions and going back and forth with recruits, maybe a better approach would be to cut down the questions dramatically (or more clearly put their answers in the documentation), and then use other approaches like references and interviews. A new recruit might be given the names of 5 devs that they will need to interview with for 30-60 minutes by phone or IRC (preference on phone), and they will need to submit references, who will be contacted. When we hire people at work we don't play trivial pursuit with them, we use an interview to get a feel for what they're like and how they handle situations, and we screen resumes and references to determine experience. I'm sure any of the professional linux distros would work in the same way, but perhaps somebody should ask around and see how it is done elsewhere. So, now instead of a recruiter having to spend hours helping somebody through quizzes without giving them answers, instead they just send them a list of interviewers, and collate the results. Any interviewer will just need to spend 30 minutes on an interview and 10 minutes on a writeup. Plus, the whole process will make Gentoo a bit more human. Rich
Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?
On 04/03/2010 02:33 PM, Richard Freeman wrote: I think the problem is that our recruitment process uses the ability to answer complex technical and organizational questions as a way to assess maturity. I think that maturity is far more important than technical skill in a distro - a mature person will recognize their own limitations and exercise due diligence when stepping outside of them. Instead of playing 20 questions and going back and forth with recruits, maybe a better approach would be to cut down the questions dramatically (or more clearly put their answers in the documentation), and then use other approaches like references and interviews. A new recruit might be given the names of 5 devs that they will need to interview with for 30-60 minutes by phone or IRC (preference on phone), and they will need to submit references, who will be contacted. When we hire people at work we don't play trivial pursuit with them, we use an interview to get a feel for what they're like and how they handle situations, and we screen resumes and references to determine experience. I'm sure any of the professional linux distros would work in the same way, but perhaps somebody should ask around and see how it is done elsewhere. The sessions also teach them a lot. I regularly get feedback that people learned a lot during the sessions. Reading a lot of technical documentation doesn't motivate many but the reviews do. Regards, Petteri signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?
lördag 03 april 2010 12.19.19 skrev Tobias Scherbaum: - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist. Yeah, we do have people working on hardened stuff, but if people just take what's happening in the portage tree they might think that the hardened stuff they're relying on for their business isn't supported any longer. With Zorry we just got a new recruit for working on hardened things, especially toolchain. It's not as dead as you make it sound ... Good to see there's something happening in hardened - but still, the user outside of Gentoo still only is seeing: Oh, no hardened-sources update for nearly a year. How long did it take for Hardened GCC to move to 4.X? And we are still lacking SSP support in the tree. We have lost almost all dev's in the herd the past years. As for hardened-sources we are working on it but that work has not hit the tree yet and that not a good situation. It will hit the tree soner or later. We work on our free time to and we don't have all the free time in the world to work on it. There is a long todo list. It is very time comsuming work on the toolchain, kernel, docs, bugs, recruit and help users at the same time. As tree dev that do all the work but we have users and some devs that help out too and that we are thankful for ther help. Hopefully we have something on the hardened-sources after next meeting. @ Paweł Hajdan, Jr. you could ask in hardened-ker...@gentoo.org what thay need for help or join #gentoo-hardened @ freenode.net And the hardened-sources in the hardened-development overlay have some regreesions that we are working on to fix. Sorry if i bing roude. Hardened at gentoo.org Magnus Granberg (Zorry) zo...@gentoo.org
