rc3.org Strong opinions weakly held

Well, presumably a company has hired you because you passed some interviews and they think you aren’t a dumbass. In the opensource world, you’re just some dude on the Internet. At my current company, I think it took a little while for me to get commit access on the code base I work on, though I can’t recall if that was because our sysadmins were slow, or because they wanted to review my stuff first. In my previous place of employment, there was a whole team in charge of ‘change control’, and you couldn’t check in code that hadn’t been signed (literally, on paper) by another developer and your manager. So I don’t think the opensource/commercial world is so different. There are all sorts of work places and projects out there.

Posted by ramanan on 12 November 2009 @ 10am

I don’t think it’s unheard of for commit access to be mysteriously “delayed” for new hires… not that I’d ever do that, of course…

Posted by genehack on 12 November 2009 @ 10am

I don’t think there are any impracticalities if the shop has a review mechanism in place. Part of the logistical issue is identifying a maintainer for a given component (official, not de-facto). Many companies tend to think of developers as interchangeable, regardless of actual practice.

Without a culture that reviews code, this proposal won’t work. I suspect a lot of corporate development don’t have that reviewing culture vs. OSS projects with any development community.

Posted by Nathan L. Walls on 12 November 2009 @ 8pm

With subversion I give new corporate developers read only access for the first week or so. The ramp up period of a new hire is more reading code and learning the work environment than producing anything. This in some ways approximates the OSS model, as any potential developer can read the code but not commit to the project. The difference is that the switch from r to rw is predetermined and guaranteed in the corporate world, very much not the case in the OSS community.

Posted by Jason on 13 November 2009 @ 11am