[kde-community] Does KDE attempt to attract experienced contributors?

[Stephen Kelly]

Hello,

I'm interested in how and whether KDE attempts to attract experienced
engineers, creators like writers and designers, curators like sysadmins and
leaders/community managers etc into the KDE community.

It seems to me that many/most KDE contributors enter as inexperienced, and
learn the tools and processes as they go, at least in the engineering
section.

I'm included in that group - when I started to get involved in KDE in
2007 I had no prior experience with SVN, Qt, CMake, or even C++ to a 
large extent, though I had some experience of online communities. That path 
led me to gain lots of experience and expertise in git, Qt, CMake and C++, 
which has formed the basis for my career.

These days, KDE has many programs to attract young people, largely students,
such as GSOC, GCI, SOK and other outreach. That seems to work well and KDE
has great experiences and contributors with those programs.

Does KDE make any particular effort to attract experienced contributors? Is
KDE attractive to someone who already has experience in their field?

Do we know what experienced people need or want? I have the feeling that at
least for programming, experienced people:

* Have already gained experience working in teams
* Already know C++ and Qt
* Already know the tools they can use to write and debug programs
* Already know how to make use of issue tracking and CI systems
* Can create quality designs and implementations
* Already value git and write good commits
* Already value code reviews with experienced colleagues
* Already value unit tests and write them
* Already have experience in at least one particular
  domain (be it coding for graphics/audio/video creation,
  communication/PIM, math/computation, admin, etc)

What do experienced people look for?

What makes an experienced person spend their time on FOSS?

Perhaps we can make some claims of answers to these questions and related
ones, and then gather them to try to analyze the truth of them.

Thanks,

Steve.