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Job opening: kernel bug manager

Posted May 1, 2007 12:42 UTC (Tue) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
Parent article: Job opening: kernel bug manager

If the learning curve were less vertical, the pool of potentials might be bigger.
So maybe this job gap is a tattle-tale about some other structural changes the community might consider.
Or maybe not. Possibly the learning curve is more of a filter to winnow the weak.
Both?

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Posted May 1, 2007 14:46 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Do you mean a tell-tale? Or are those terms the same in your parlance?

(Not asking to be a jerk, I'm honestly both interested in and a bit murky on your meaning.)

Job opening: kernel bug manager

Posted May 1, 2007 15:44 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

see the discussion n the kernel list (a huge thread followng up the 2.6.21 release, subject 2.6.21)

many people feel that the job of noticing bugs, figuring out who to send them to, and pestering people (politely) until they get a response is something that a person with the right skills can do after only a few months of reading the kernel list to see who's involved with what.

this doesn't sound like the vertical learning curve that you are suggesting.

Job opening: kernel bug manager

Posted May 1, 2007 20:55 UTC (Tue) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]

Having done exactly that for GNOME (a community which, AFAICT, is more tolerant of newbies than LKML) it isn't easy. It requires a fairly deft political sense (if you irritate people, they flip the bozo bit, and it is really hard to get them to listen to you again) as well as good technical judgment (requires good engineering taste more than actual ability to read code, I found.) The combination of both of those is rare- if you have a deaf political ear, or poor engineering sense, years of reading mailing lists won't help you.

Job opening: kernel bug manager

Posted May 3, 2007 20:12 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

You're describing a nearly horizontal learning curve, not a vertical one. A learning curve is a graph of productivity on the vertical axis against time spent doing something on the horizontal access. If it's vertical, that means you instantly have infinite productivity. Something that you slowly learn over years in order to get to maximum productivity is a long, shallow curve.

I suspect the common error of thinking that "steep learning curve" means "hard to learn" comes from a mental image of climbing a hill. But the learning curve comes from industrial engineering, where nobody cares about something being "hard." They care only about quantities of input and output.