Short-sighted / long-sighted OSS

When I hear that the average tenure in tech is just two years, I wonder how anyone gets anything done. When I hear such job hopping justified by the fact that changing companies is the only way to get a raise, I just shake my head at the short-sightedness of such companies.”
David Heinemeier Hansson
here on Signal v Noise.

Have you noticed how your most valuable colleagues also tend to have had lengthy tenures in their workplace*? No matter how experienced you are at OSS, it takes a six month (plus) apprenticeship before you start adding real value in a new OSS role. The apprenticeship is usually twelve months or longer for those who are new to the industry. Unfortunately, it takes that long to develop the tribal knowledge of the tools, the processes, the people, the variants and the way things get done (including knowing how to circumvent rules).

To be honest, like DHH above, I shake my head when employers treat their OSS talent as expendable and don’t actively seek to quell high turnover in their ranks. An average tenure of two years equates to massive inefficiency. That’s my perspective on internal resources, the resources that run an OSS. The problem with internal roles though is that they can be so all-encompassing that resources become myopic, focused only on the internal challenges / possibilities.

The question then becomes how you can open up a wider field of view. The perfect example in our current environment is in the increasing use of CI/CD / DevOps / Agile methods to manage OSS delivery. I hear of a new tool almost every day (think Ansible, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Docker, Cucumber, etc, etc). It bewilders me how people keep up to know which are the best options, yet this is only one dimension of the change that is occurring in the OSS landscape. In these situations, high turnover actually helps with the cross-fertilisation of ideas / tools / practices. Similarly, external consultants can also assist with insights garnered from multiple environments.

There is a place for both on OSS projects, but I strongly subscribe to DHH’s views above. It’s the age-old question – how to attract and retain great talent, but do we give this question enough consideration??

* BTW. I’m certainly not implying that by corollary all long-tenured resources are the most valuable.

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