Re: [gentoo-dev] Recruitment process is moving back to quizzes

[Theo Chatzimichos]

On Saturday 14 of July 2012 10:32:04 Markos Chandras wrote:
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> Dear Gentoo Community,
>
> If you are not a recruit, mentor, or wannabe mentor you may stop
> reading now.
>
> We (recruiters) decided to revert back to the quizzes for the
> recruitment process. The web application does not work as we expected.
> There are a few open bugs, nobody is working on improving this
> application and it's been quite a bit of pain to use it during the
> (long) recruitment process. We understand that quizzes is not an ideal
> way to "hire" people either, but they worked ok for all these years
> and it is the only alternative we have at the moment. Hopefully, we
> will manage to improve the web application on a future GSOC project.
>
> If you have already submitted your answers on the web application,
> that is fine. However, I would strongly advise future recruits to
> complete the quizzes instead. If you don't, we will ask you to do so
> when we pick you up. Obviously, this will lead to extra delay and
> frustration.
>
> This does not apply to Arch Testers. The recruitment process for Arch
> Testers will still be through the web application

Hello,

for the past two years I am constantly mentoring two-three people at the same 
time at least. Here is my feedback about the webapp:
1) It needs many UI improvements. But every thing that needs improvement 
(along with possible solutions) is already reported in bugzilla
2) Despite its UI being not good, the webapp has proven a way better medium 
for mentor-mentee communication. With the quizes as text files I had to deal 
with random text files spread around (and try to find the most recent one), with 
discussion being split in IRC, various mails etc. Now with the webapp I can 
easily leave my comment there (which is better as there is more async 
communication now), I have consistent history of our discussion, and I have 
all the answers of all my mentees in one page, which is awesome because I can 
compare answers and say quickly to my mentee what he forgot to write down.
With that being said, I am proposing the following:
1) I'll announce a call for volunteers, we really need a web designer on the 
project.
2) Please keep the questions in sync between the text quizes and the webapp. 
I'll continue to use the webapp to communicate with my mentees (as it is doing 
more good than harm), and will write a script to extract the answers in the 
text files so you can be happy as well.

Theo