Re: [gentoo-dev] Making the developer community more open

[Alin Nastac]

Daniel Drake wrote:

> We have a large expense on both sides when adding a developer to the
> project. I personally have lost developer candidates, undoubtedly more
> technically experienced than myself, who simply did not have the time
> to go through a month-long recruitment process which involved studying
> various documents not even relevant to the small area they would be
> contributing to. On the other side, it's a fair expense to add a
> developer to the project due to all of the
> quizzing/assessing/account-creating/access-elevation/...

Technical ability isn't the only requirement for gentoo devs. They also
must be motivated individuals and these high barriers you are talking
about test this quality of the candidates.
If they quit just because recruitment process is long, what makes you
think they will stay active long enough to actually worth adding them to
dev corpus?

>
> Additionally, a significant percentage of developers who have joined
> recently have gone AWOL after a few months. That hurts us, given the
> expense we went through recruiting and adding them, and the time
> needed to reverse that and retire them.

Yes, it is hard to find the right people. Yes, a big percentage of
recruiting team's time will be lost on useless additions/removals. But
the only solution is scaling the recruiting team to gentoo needs.
IMO recruiting team is too small to cope with the current size of the
project.