I'm not excluding them. If they do just knock out a random 'good first bug', then that's actually great and welcome. But there seems to be a pattern of people who heard that contributing to open source is good for their CV, this ends up being their only motivation, and they expect hand-holding from project maintainers or for their patches to be accepted without scrutiny (or, if they are receptive to feedback, their patches are just really low quality and require a lot of review iterations).
It's those last points that can be a problem, because it can cause their contribution to become net-negative.
> . But there seems to be a pattern of people who heard that contributing to open source is good for their CV, this ends up being their only motivation
Honestly I don't care what motivates people to contribute to open source. Some people are previlaged enough to contribute for fun in their free time. Some do it for improving their resume (Not everyone is previlaged to work in a FAANG or reputed tech company or went to an Ivy League). Some do it for improving the software they use. None of the reason is honestly better than the other. At the end of the day what matter is the code gets commited to the repo. Nobody mentions the reason why they made the contribution in commit message. Don't worry about maintainers getting overwhelmed by contributors. Its a good problem tp have. Most of them are smart enough to come up with a system if that problem actually arises. Honestly the main reason most open source projects die is not because of too many contributions. Its because of lack of contributors and a single maintainer having to do all the heavy lifting by themselves.
I think you are over estimating the number of contributors an average open source project gets. Almost none of the projects go to an extend to deliberately avoid new contributors. Its really hard to get people to contribute code to most open source projects. A good maintainer is incentivized to make it easier for new contributors to contribute. Not the other way around.
I kinda understand the point. However at what point one can call himself a "good prolific programmer" which has no time for "hand-holding", can judge if contribution is sincere attempt by some thirteen year old who wants to learn or just being done for CV.
One can argue that every kid with their "low quality patch" is net-negative as their teacher/project maintainer would be better spending time writing actual "good" code.
At what point one just starts sounding like elitist thinking that open source should just be left for exclusive prolific programmers?
> ... can judge if contribution is sincere attempt by some thirteen year old who wants to learn or just being done for CV.
To me it’s no different. Whether they’re thirteen or thirty, I’m not obligated to donate time to help them grow. In fact I’d say “student drivers” deserve less of my time — I’m not a free tutor unless I explicitly agreed to such.
That said, I deal with one-off contributors with respect and handhold out of kindness when necessary (assuming they’re not rude). But I don’t feel like explicitly setting the expectation that I will handhold, especially on trivial patches that’ll take me less time on my own.
I agree with you and think you're well-intentioned. One thing I'd point out is that if you're a project maintainer, who would you rather mentor:
- the inexperienced person who uses the software themselves, has an issue with it, and wants to fix it, or
- the inexperienced person who wants to boost their CV and picked a bug off a "starter task" list.
Assuming they are otherwise equal, I'd certainly prefer the first one, because chances are much higher that they'll stick around. Motivations matter.
Now if a patch just appears out of nowhere, obviously I don't apply a litmus test where I try to divine what the person's motivation is.
However, this logic has turned me off initiatives like GSoC. GSoC is great when there's a student who's already working on a project anyway, and it enables them to up their contributions during summer as an alternative to working a more boring job. However, my impression of GSoC with randoms who specifically scan GSoC for a project to work on has been disappointing.
It's those last points that can be a problem, because it can cause their contribution to become net-negative.