{"id":4,"date":"2009-02-22T19:01:35","date_gmt":"2009-02-22T19:01:35","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2021-03-03T03:08:25","modified_gmt":"2021-03-03T10:08:25","slug":"wanted-top-notch-developers-only-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/2009\/02\/22\/wanted-top-notch-developers-only-or-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Wanted: top-notch developers only, or not"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donnie recently posted this<\/a> which made some noise. Before we go any further I’d like to say that I liked it a lot and found it very interesting although I’m going to sound very critical about it. Exploring this kind of ideas will benefit us, whether we use them in the end or not. At least if we don’t we’ll know why we believe they’re not appropriate to our own little world.<\/p>\n

I’ll have to split my comments in a few different posts because I was told the previous one was too long. Sigh. Let’s all thank television and its commercial breaks for unlearning our kids to focus more than a few minutes at a time.<\/p>\n

Keeping in mind the Pareto principle (20% of the effort produces 80% of the results), I\u2019ve come up with some ideas. The core of these ideas is creating a development community composed only of top-notch contributors […].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here I’d like to warn the reader who’s not used to corporate bullshit (tell your mommy that in this context it’s not a bad word but a technical term). Donnie uses the Pareto principle in the good way: as a clue to what the problem could be or as a lead to an idea. However, general principles like this one were made up by bright minds and are abused by corporate robots everyday. It’s so easy to derive, from such theories with a certain amount of undeniable truth, a pretty looking analysis that doesn’t fly or a practical application that smells funny. It’s so comfortable to hide behind numbers and tell upstream (the boss) \u201cHey it’s not me, it’s the numbers\u201d. When you use such tools blindly and push them too far you may end up crashing into a wall. And the wall in Donnie’s case was top-notch.<\/p>\n

It’s true that we<\/s> some of us<\/s> I tend to procrastinate a lot and then do the real work in short bursts. It’s also true that my neighbors’ house popped up from the ground in a few days and that months after they’re still working on who-knows-what inside. And it’s also true that there’s a small group only of Gentoo developers who seems to be doing most of the work. Now, do we know how much procrastination participates to creativity? Don’t you know how long it takes to do the wiring, plumbing, painting etc… compared to just building the walls? And do we even have a vague idea of how much so called slackers contribute to the Gentoo ecosystem?<\/p>\n

I don’t have exact numbers but it seems to me that the 20% of top-notch developers are a fluctuating population constantly drawn from the 80% tank of slackers. And that if we got rid of the 80% we’d have trouble maintaining the number of top-notch developers. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Top-notch developers won’t do chores. Or not for long. Top-notch developers often can’t be bothered to answer users. Top-notch developers don’t always behave well so it’s a good idea to dilute them. Top-notch developers may not want to handle obscure package herds. Oh, and do top-notch developers write a lot of documentation? I could go on like this forever.<\/p>\n

By the way, I’m not meaning we should keep the bad apples. Some of you may know which side I’m usually on when devrel needs to vote on retiring annoying developers. For those who don’t, let’s just say I don’t have a high tolerance for counter-productive behaviors. But between bad apples and top-notch developers there’s a lot of room that I find very comfortable.<\/p>\n

Here’s another provoking thought. One could argue that if the 20% were that<\/i> top-notch, they would naturally fight their way up to 30%, 40%, etc… If this population is so fit for its environment and purpose then it surely has this very basic evolutionary skill. If not then they’re not top-notch in my book.<\/p>\n

So you think you’re a top-notch developer? Try and make me become one and we’ll know for sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donnie recently posted this which made some noise. Before we go any further I’d like to say that I liked it a lot and found it very interesting although I’m going to sound very critical about it. Exploring this kind of ideas will benefit us, whether we use them in the end or not. At … Continue reading Wanted: top-notch developers only, or not<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":237,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}