Re: [board-discuss] Merged proposal for in-house developers at TDF

Hi Paolo,

Paolo Vecchi wrote on 02/06/2022 22:59:

> thanks for your extensive explanation which I really appreciate as I 
> appreciate your contributions both during your working hours and as a 
> volunteer.
>
> We surely are all working with passion to reach the same goal and we 
> have specialisations that allow us to view things from different but 
> complementary perspectives.
>
> I know it is difficult to follow long threads where I provided further 

You need help? :)

> clarifications about my proposal but what you are saying has already 
> been taken in consideration.

IMO only partly. It is useful explanation to set realistic expectations.

> Young and passionate developers with the will to learn and adapt will 
> not replace the tenders, they will start with focusing on areas that 
> haven't been covered by others as much as we wished.

It is indeed an important outcome of the discussion that there are ways 
to complement, and not to compete with the commercial ecosystem.

> Finding senior C++ or experienced LibreOffice developers willing to 
> mentor is very difficult and/or very expensive as they already have a 
> good and very well paid position so even if they have a huge passion for 
> LibreOffice and our community is unlikely we'll be able to match what 
> some large corporations can offer.
>
> As from my proposal: "The developers will not need to have a narrow 
> specialisation in the proposed areas but a good understanding of them, 
> willingness to learn and to adapt will be necessary characteristics of 
> the candidates.
>
> Their general role will be to fix bugs and features in full, fixing bugs 
> that are blockers for community contributors and to help evaluating 
> which complex tasks should be tackled by external specialists."
>
> Thanks to the mentors that we already have in our team, if they have the 
> passion and the right attitude, they will grow to become excellent 
> developers and if they wish even join the ranks of mentors in the long 

I love your optimism (well, not always), but as you can read in Lászlo's 
mail: there's huge uncertainty.

> run. Not all developers want to become mentors or do presentation in 
> public, some just prefer to focus on the development side and we should 
> enable our team to express their best skills the way they are most 
> comfortable with.

That is true. However more mentoring power is needed to. So if we can 
combine the two, it's better I would say.

> There are surely risks in doing that but I believe there are even bigger 
> risks in not doing it. The biggest risk that we have in doing it is that 
> we invest in forming developers that then might go back on the market 

You are thinking about a contract that forbids people to switch? ;)

> and anyway contribute. That's one of our goals anyway. If we get it 
> right we'll have developers that start working on things that other 
> volunteers may want to take on again as they see that things are moving 
> in the right direction.

Let me not take that too negative, but I assume developers are driven by 
the wish to make cool stuff. And there are enough opportunities for that 
in the source/product.

> What is clear is that the process I started with my proposal allowed to 
> bring to light areas that did not receive enough attention and now 
> commercial contributors, volunteers and in-house developers will start 
> working together to fix those areas.

IMO there is clearly room for that. See my mail from 23:17 CET

> I'm sure there will be a lot of fun to be had for everyone ;-)

Could well be - let's hope it works out fine.

Cheers,
Cor


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