You wouldn't want a new hire tackling some hairy mess of a bug. But this is common practice in open source projects - there's a massive backlog of minor bugs an

You wouldn't want a new hire tackling some hairy mess of a bug. But this is common practice in open source projects - there's a massive backlog of minor bugs and nice-to-have feature requests, stuff that's pretty easy to finish if you had the time and the will. Having someone take care of some of this stuff first to familiarize himself with the project and get used to the processes before jumping straight into a big task seems like a good idea to me.