Re: [gentoo-project] Recruitment issues and potential improvement

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 12:31 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Feb 2015 11:21:37 -0500
> Michael Orlitzky <mjo@g.o> wrote:
>> I'll start with the silliest:
>>
>>   Explain briefly the purpose of the following tools: grep, cut, sed,
>>   cat, wc, awk
>
> This is in no way silly when viewed in its proper historical context. It
> was added because before the quiz existed, someone recruited a couple of
> developers for Gentoo/Alt who didn't know what grep was, and they broke
> the tree in a horrific way.

This is why a big part of recruiting has to be about assessing
responsibility/etc.

If a developer manages to get in without understanding what grep is,
they should be an incredibly unproductive developer, but they
shouldn't break anything.  That is because anybody responsible who is
editing an ebuild and encounters a "grep" command isn't going to touch
it unless they know what they're doing. They would also be testing the
stuff they touch before they commit it.

I'm not diminishing the importance of technical skill here.  I'd just
take somebody who is smart enough to not commit anything over somebody
who thinks they're too smart to have to use care before committing
them any day.


-- 
Rich