Re: ’Pond Jobs & Their Descriptions

[Wols Lists]

On 06/02/20 13:24, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> Why not let someone less experienced — and thus less "valuable" — start with 
> that job as a "softball" to ease their way into the development pool, freeing 
> up higher-level developers to (as you say) spend your time where it matters? 
> To me, doing that sounds like a win-win situation.
> 
> In any case, I’m going to build the list for my own benefit; if, when I’m 
> done, it helps the greater community, all the better.

Rather than jobs as in people, why not jobs as in tasks?

Take your list of jobs like "Patch Formatter", and change it into a list
of stages a patch must path through like "format the patch correctly".

Then people can offer to shepherd patches through certain stages, or
they can say "I'm good at this, I need help with that, can someone else
do the other". I know I had a patch fail because I wasn't in a position
to really make a bunch of changes the reviewer wanted - I don't like
"begging" for help and I was really rather out of my depth already
without being asked to do more stuff ...

If you have a list of people who are happy with certain tasks - and yes
they are really mentors - then people who want to get started can tackle
a simple project and ask for help getting it through the relevant stages.

And you really need a bunch of people who are prepared to mentor and
respond reasonably quickly to pretty stupid questions. Although I'm
quite happy for the guidelines to state that mentees must be prepared to
learn as quickly as possible and that mentors *should* walk away if they
feel the mentee isn't really trying to do as much as they can on their own.

Cheers,
Wol