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On Tue, 05 May 2009 19:19:00 +0100
Roy Bamford <neddyseag...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> - From your post, it appears that standards were lowered during the 
> recruitment drive you reference.

Not quite.

At the time, there weren't really any particular standards during
recruitment. The system relied upon recruitment mostly being done or
supervised by a smaller group of people who did it a lot and were
fairly good judges of suitability. The system broke when someone who
didn't do much recruiting pulled in a bunch of new people for obscure
side projects that sounded cool without verifying that some of those
people, say, knew what 'grep' was.

The ebuild-related quiz questions come from my attempt at the time to
reduce the damage until a proper solution could be implemented, which
never happened because devrel decided to make other things a priority.
And even then, the quiz rapidly became unsuccessful because recruiters
would give people lots of attempts and lots of help to answer the
questions, and would let people retake the quiz as many times as they
liked -- the questions were designed to be instantly answerable, not
research questions.

At the very least, before attempting any mass recruitment, the quiz
needs to be lengthened, brought up to date and split into "answer these
on the spot on IRC without having seen the question before" and
"research allowed" questions, and recruiters have to be prepared to
fail most applicants.

- -- 
Ciaran McCreesh
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