On 12/29/2015 11:49 AM, Bobby Holley wrote:
On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 11:41 AM, Steve Fink <sf...@mozilla.com <mailto:sf...@mozilla.com>> wrote:On 12/22/2015 10:06 AM, L. David Baron wrote: But I don't think having mozilla-inbound/mozilla-central be closed more than it already is is going to help anything. It will just make people frustrated that they can't land what they've been working on. Amen. Trying to artificially force this stuff is going in the wrong direction. After all, you'd be reducing productivity from the top-down in order to improve productivity. It might work, it might not, it might help for a while but have long-term negative consequences. Personally, I feel like getting farther away from our volunteer-driven roots is dangerous. Sure, we have lots of paid staff now, but you really don't want any more selection pressure to push the overall contributor base towards people who are involved for the money and away from people who are motivated by the mission.I don't follow the concerns in this last part. Can you clarify which proposal you're concerned will take us farther from our volunteer-driven roots? The part about ordering paid staff to do unpleasant-but-necessary things, or something else?
Yes, the part about ordering paid staff to do unpleasant things, or at least some proposed mechanisms to do so.
We're getting paid, and so obviously it's within the organization's *right* to order us to do stuff that furthers the organization's goals at the expense of the individual's. (Which is the suggestion, in the case of mandatory tree closures for oranges that a particular developer has no hope of addressing personally.) But that's a big hammer, and should be used sparingly. The alternative is to motivate staff by aligning their goals with the organization's. While perhaps more difficult to get immediate traction from, it applies equally well to unpaid volunteers.
Note that my suggestion isn't really any better; it's just a stick in place of a carrot. I only suggested it because it feels to me like it is more likely to produce net positive results. But PTO is obviously irrelevant to unpaid contributors. Tree closures *are* globally relevant, but are more likely to drive away unpaid volunteers than to incent them to help out with unfamiliar intermittent oranges. The two weeks of enforced quality-related work at the end of each cycle are better, in that they only penalize paid staff, but that still feels to me like a top-down imposition to work in a particular way, one that changes the flavor of the organization into one that people are less likely to want to volunteer for.
Don't get me wrong, I can also argue that it would be suboptimal to only have a pile of developers all working on what they feel like, when they feel like it, and in the way they feel like it. But the right place is a balance between authoritarian and free-for-all, and right now I feel a couple of pushes towards excessively authoritarian that bother me.
_______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
