Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer Retirements

[Doug Goldstein]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Lukasz Damentko <rane@g.o> wrote:

> Okay, let me explain in detail.
>
> Undertakers contact devs who didn't touch CVS for at least two months,
> are considered inactive in the bugzilla and have no current .away set.
>
> After the initial contact, something like 3/4 of e-mailed people
> respond very quickly and explain why they are gone (usually family and
> work trouble, weddings, army service, health issues, moving out/in and
> so on, so called real life) and in such cases we do not retire them
> but let them resolve whatever trouble they are in and return to the
> project afterwards.
>
> There are dozens of devs in the project who had such a conversation
> with me or other undertakers and all can confirm retirement was
> abandoned right away after they gave valid reasons for their absence
> and the only consequence was poking about missing .away and asking
> when they are planning to get back to work.
>
> Those people wouldn't even be contacted if their .aways stated why
> they are gone and for how long. Therefore a REMINDER: Please do set
> your .away. Thanks.
>
> The rest are usually people who already gave up on the project, just
> for various reasons didn't say bye yet. They often have no commits for
> many months despite undertakers poking them a bunch of times. Half a
> year period without even touching CVS and bugs isn't that uncommon for
> them. I can give you specific examples if you really want some. I'd
> prefer to avoid pointing fingers at people though.
>
> Those folks either say goodbye to everyone after being contacted by us
> or do not respond at all, in which case, if we get no response to our
> two e-mails and an open retirement bug from them after more than a
> month, we consider them missing in action and go on with their
> retirement. If they appear suddenly at any point of this procedure and
> say they want to stay, we either abandon retirement completely or only
> send them to recruiters to redo their quizzes if their absence was
> extremely long.
>
> I don't think how we can proceed differently in above kinds of
> situations. Do you suggest we stopped e-mailing people who seem gone
> from the project (how would we find out those who are really gone
> then?), stopped retiring people who mail -dev/-core and say goodbye or
> stopped retiring people who aren't responding to their mail and bugs
> named "Retire: Person's Name" for months?
>
> There's only one controversial group of inactive devs:
>
> There are some people who would prefer to stay in the project although
> they can't really give a good reason what for. Usually they claim they
> belong to a number of projects although they don't put any regular
> work into any of them and leads of this projects often haven't even
> heard there's such a person on board. They sometimes were members of
> this projects years ago, sometimes wanted to be members and sometimes
> only imagine they are members of them. I can give specific examples if
> you insist.
>
> Those we try to encourage to find a new job within Gentoo and often
> they do. I can name one who yesterday did start his new Gentoo work
> after years of slacking. :-)
>
> They are the smallest group of those we contact and process, I could
> maybe name 5 or 6 of those currently in Gentoo and that's it. There's
> no pending retirement of such a person currently.
>
> Really. Situation you name, when someone wanted to stay in Gentoo
> despite not doing any actual work and got retired happened once or
> maybe twice during the last year out of about a hundred retirements we
> have processed. And all were extreme cases of close to zero activity
> over many years with no promise of it ever increasing. We consider
> those very carefully, they are always consulted with devrel lead. This
> kind of decision isn't made lightly I can assure you.
>
> Finally, if someone really wants to be a dev but got retired, he can
> return to Gentoo within couple of weeks by reopening his retirement
> bug, submitting quizzes to recruiters and waiting to get useradded.
> Recruiters process returning devs extremely fast so returning to
> Gentoo if someone really wants to isn't a problem at all. And there's
> absolutely no way anyone from undertakers could stop someone from
> being recruited again.
>
> So summarising, the situation you're complaining about is extremely
> marginal. You are invited to subscribe to retirement@ alias and read
> its logs on bugzilla and see for yourself how rare occurrence it is.
>
> I hope I explained everything completely. I'm happy to take questions
> if you have any, and of course am open to suggestions.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Lukasz Damentko
>
>
Granted the people I've recently talked to about this or the people I
remember bringing this issue up in the past had this happen to them before
we had this firm policy in place so really you're addressing a lot of the
issues.

But the whole act of making them go through all the hoops as a brand new
developer is somewhat put off-ish to people wanting to come back. I honestly
can't think of one developer that's come back and hasn't been up in arms
about being made to go through all the hoops of a new developer.