Ana Guerrero <a...@debian.org> writes: > - For some DDs in previous years, this seemed to be a way to have students > doing stuff from their TODO lists...
Just a quick note on this part: I don't think this is inherently a bad idea, although of course it should be something the student is also excited about. But I remember what I was like when I was in high school: I really wanted to program, but I was horrible at coming up with useful things to do. I needed a good problem stream that I could work on and then I enjoyed finding ways to solve the problems. Not everyone is like that, of course, but I do think there are people out there who just want to put skills to use and learn how to do new things but don't know how to select good and useful problems to work on. On the general topic of mentoring, though, I think one of the hardest parts of helping new people join the project is that people need to start with relatively easy tasks so that they can get their feet wet. That often means that one needs to step back and let new people do things that are easy for the mentor, which in turn means leaving easy work undone for long enough to give people a chance to do it. I think this can be a real struggle with mature teams. I know I'm not the only person in Debian with a strong interest in time management techniques (it's even already come up in candidate statements), and one thing that's virtually universal in time management literature is that one should do easy things immediately rather than letting them accumulate. Part of what I've always found challenging in mentoring is that I have to step back and *not* follow my normal work process to give someone else a chance to work through the easy things that will help them build familiarity with the overall structure. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/874nghoapt....@windlord.stanford.edu
