[em-bee]

almost all FOSS work is async. any company that has teams across multiple timezones does async work.

for me, unless we are doing pair programming, i expect communication to be async, even if we are in the same office. you don't get to interrupt on demand, but you better wait until i am mot focused on something else, and respond to your message

[Gigachad]

I have found FOSS to really illustrate the problems of async work. It’s extremely difficult to break in as a new contributor. There is no help like in a corporate job, you can post on GitHub and hope someone gets back to you at some point, but no one is going to get on a call with you and walk through a problem or the context.

Which shows in the contributor stats where 1-3 people do all the real work and everyone else submits trivial patches.

[em-bee]

that is a very good point, but just like there are companies with good and bad onboarding, there are FOSS projects with good and bad onboarding.

it's worth mentioning here that GSOC may have motivated a lot of projects to improve their onboarding and make it easier for new contributors to join.

these are solvable problems. and bad onboarding is not limited to async work, nor is async work a hindrance to good onboarding.