Does the initial environment impact the future of developers?

Software developers need to develop technical and social skills to be successful in large projects. We model the relative sociality of developer as a ratio between the size of her communication network and the number of tasks she participates in. We obtain both measures from the problem tracking systems. We use her workflow peer network to represent her social learning, and the issues she has worked on to represent her technical learning. Using three open source and three traditional projects we investigate how the project environment reflected by the sociality measure at the time a developer joins, affects her future participation. We find: a) the probability that a new developer will become one of long-term and productive developers is highest when the project sociality is low; b) times of high sociality are associated with a higher intensity of new contributors joining the project; c) there are significant differences between the social learning trajectories of the developers who join in low and in high sociality environments; d) the open source and commercial projects exhibit different nature in the relationship between developer's tenure and the project's environment at the time she joins. These findings point out the importance of the initial environment in determining the future of the developers and may lead to better training and learning strategies in software organizations.