Paid internships?

[Nathan Hartman <ha...@gmail.com>]

Regarding getting some paid resources working on Svn, have we ever
considered GSoC or Outreachy paid internships? Those require mentors, I
know, but perhaps between the volunteers we have, we could make it work?

Nathan

Re: Paid internships?

[Daniel Shahaf <d....@daniel.shahaf.name>]

Stefan Sperling wrote on Fri, 24 Jan 2020 15:25 +0100:
> What we need is not someone fresh out of college to get paid to work here.
> We need a set of people to be paid who already have the experience this
> project requires. Or we need to find ways to allow those people to keep
> spending the little time they have in the most effective way possible.

We can't just look for ways to allow the existing developers to spend
more time on svn; we should also try to gather new long-term
contributors from time to time, like the proverbial hammer that had had
three new blades and two new handles.

Cheers,

Daniel

Re: Paid internships?

[Stefan Sperling <st...@elego.de>]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 02:16:48PM +0100, Branko Čibej wrote:
> On 24.01.2020 13:31, Nathan Hartman wrote:
> > Regarding getting some paid resources working on Svn, have we ever
> > considered GSoC or Outreachy paid internships? Those require mentors,
> > I know, but perhaps between the volunteers we have, we could make it work?
> 
> 
> We've had GSoC interns on this project in the past -- I was a mentor for
> a few years. Then interest for Subversion amongst GSoC candidates waned
> to the point where there were none for a couple years, and we stopped
> signing up for that. Part of the reason was that Subversion simply was
> not as popular as before, another part was lack of time for mentoring.
> 
> This second consideration (lack of time) would also be a problem for our
> participation in Outreachy. I have not looked closely at that program,
> however, so that's just my feeling, not a considered opinion.
> 
> -- Brane

I have also mentored several times some years ago, for both GSoc and
Outreachy (back when it was still called "Outreach Program for Women").
I was able to serve as a mentor because the work I was doing at my dayjob
allowed me to spend a lot of time reviewing the resulting contributions,
and ensure that these contributors got feedback on their ideas, etc.

Unfortunately, we never got long-term contributors out of such programs.
The biggest benefit occurred when an existing SVN developer signed up for
GSoc and simply continued work that was already underway.

Based on these experiences my opinion of GSoc in particular is that its
advertised purpose of getting new contributors involved in open source
projects is pure marketing. The process on Google's side does absolutely
nothing to help achieve that goal. It doesn't provide any incentive for
students to stay involved beyond the last payout. The application and
evaluation process is entirely geared towards providing performance figures
to Google HR. The purpose is to recruit future employees for Google, with
mentors providing free labour for Google HR by evaluating candidates in the
pool of talent attracted by money that Google is paying out to students.
Which is not something I am willing to support ever again.

Outreachy has a noble goal but I don't think we have the resources to
make it work well. Just dealing with candidate evaluation alone takes
a huge amount of time. Outreachy applicants need more active projects
than ours to have a good experience.

What we need is not someone fresh out of college to get paid to work here.
We need a set of people to be paid who already have the experience this
project requires. Or we need to find ways to allow those people to keep
spending the little time they have in the most effective way possible.

Re: Paid internships?

[Branko Čibej <br...@apache.org>]

On 24.01.2020 13:31, Nathan Hartman wrote:
> Regarding getting some paid resources working on Svn, have we ever
> considered GSoC or Outreachy paid internships? Those require mentors,
> I know, but perhaps between the volunteers we have, we could make it work?


We've had GSoC interns on this project in the past -- I was a mentor for
a few years. Then interest for Subversion amongst GSoC candidates waned
to the point where there were none for a couple years, and we stopped
signing up for that. Part of the reason was that Subversion simply was
not as popular as before, another part was lack of time for mentoring.

This second consideration (lack of time) would also be a problem for our
participation in Outreachy. I have not looked closely at that program,
however, so that's just my feeling, not a considered opinion.

-- Brane