Re: skills of developers
On 7/14/05, Bartosz Fenski aka fEnIo <fenio@debian.org> wrote:
> In sum. Maybe it's time to create additional positions in Debian project?
> Maybe something like Packager (with knowledge about Bash and Debian
> Policy), Translator (with knowledge about some particular language and
> English), Helper (with knowledge about Debian in general), and finally
> DEVELOPER which develops software and is able to fix it if it's broken.
> Developers could be splitted to Python/Perl/C/C++/Java/Mono/and so on...
AIUI, DD-hood principally conveys voting rights, upload and login
privileges to certain machines, and r/w access to debian-private and w
access to d-d-a. None of this has much to do with real-world
"software developer" competence and it would be rather odd to try to
retrofit such an expectation onto the "Developer" status at this
point. It's not as if bogus position titles weren't ubiquitous in the
software industry anyway -- I have knuckled under to accepting titles
like "Staff Engineer" despite the fact that I am no engineer and do
not pretend to be even in job interviews, let alone any other setting.
But FWIW I would be disinclined to see Developer status split along
programming language lines in any way that isn't purely advisory. In
a crisis I'd rather have a wizard developer who has never seen Python
(Scheme, OCaml, whatever) before step in, figure out an RC bug, and
deal with it without having to jump some stupid "hello world" hoops
first. After you've worked in a dozen disparate languages, the
thirteenth is just more grist for the mill. And for that matter, with
a little help from Google, fixing a screwed-up translation file in
some human language you don't know isn't all that hard either. It
won't be idiomatic, but they'll get the idea.
Cheers,
- Michael
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