[Numpy-discussion] UC Berkeley hiring developers to work on NumPy

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 10:04 AM, Sebastian Berg
<sebastian at sipsolutions.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2017-05-22 at 17:35 +0100, Matthew Brett wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 4:52 PM, Marten van Kerkwijk
>> <m.h.vankerkwijk at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi Matthew,
>> >
>> > > it seems to me that we could get 80% of the way to a reassuring
>> > > blueprint with a relatively small amount of effort.
>> >
>> > My sentence "adapt the typical academic rule for conflicts of
>> > interests to PRs, that non-trivial ones cannot be merged by someone
>> > who has a conflict of interest with the author, i.e., it cannot be
>> > a
>> > superviser, someone from the same institute, etc." was meant as a
>> > suggestion for part of this blueprint!
>> >
>> > I'll readily admit, though, that since I'm not overly worried, I
>> > haven't even looked at the policies that are in place, nor do I
>> > intend
>> > to contribute much beyond this e-mail. Indeed, it may be that the
>> > old
>> > adage "every initiative is punishable" holds here...
>>
>> I understand what you're saying, but I think a more helpful way of
>> thinking of it, is putting the groundwork in place for the most
>> fruitful possible collaboration.
>>
>> > would you, or one
>> > of the others who feels it is important to have a blueprint, be
>> > willing to provide a concrete text for discussion?
>>
>> It doesn't make sense for me to do that, I'm #13 for commits in the
>> last year.  I'm just one of the many people who completely depend on
>> numpy.  Also, taking a little time to think these things through
>> seems
>> like a small investment with the potential for significant gain, in
>> terms of improving communication and mitigating risk.
>>
>> So, I think my suggestion is that it would be a good idea for
>> Nathaniel and the current steering committee to talk through how this
>> is going to play out, how the work will be selected and directed, and
>> so on.
>>
>
> Frankly, I would suggest to wait for now and ask whoever is going to
> get the job to work out how they think it should be handled. And then
> we complain if we expect more/better ;).

This is roughly where I am as well. Certainly this is an important
issue, but we've already done a lot of groundwork in the abstract –
the dev meeting, formalizing the governance document, and so forth
(and recall that "let's get to a point where we can apply for grants"
was explicitly one of the goals in those discussions). I think at this
point the most productive thing to do is wait until we have a more
concrete picture of who/what/when will be happening, so we can make a
concrete plan.

> For now I only would say that I will expect more community type of work
> then we now often manage to do. And things such as meticulously
> sticking to writing NEPs.
> So the only thing I can see that might be good is putting "community
> work" or something like it specifically as part of the job description,

Definitely.

> and thats up to Nathaniel probably.
>
> Some things like not merging large changes by two people sittings in
> the same office should be obvious (and even if it happens, we can
> revert). But its nothing much new there I think.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org