[markphip]

This is a good description of what life is like working on almost any significant open source project. The only thing not included was the comments from overly entitled users that saps whatever morale and energy you have left. Probably best he did not include that though as that is what all discussion would be about.

I am not sure what to do about the burnout problem. The way he described it is very on point though. Since everyone working on the project is overloaded there is a great feeling of things only get done if you do them.

Most of my open source work was in the pre-GitHub days when we used mailing lists, not pull requests, to build community. I do think there was something better about that for the project itself as it encouraged a lot more discussion and community building. PR's and Issues become silos and are not great for general discussion. I think they also encourage drive-by contributions which honestly are intoxicating initially but once you see people are not coming back become defeating.

[markphip]

Following up on my previous comment, I managed to never become fully burned out, but it required changes to myself, not the project. I had to become less emotionally invested in the project, realize I could not solve everything and step back a bit and do some other things. I guess it would be great if the project were reinforcing these ideas to its contributors to prevent burnout, but that also does not seem realistic. And "the project" is made up of others going through the same problems.

The large OSS project I contributed to thankfully had other contributors that were good role models for these behaviors and it helped seeing them disengage to do other things for a while.

[jynelson]

this is a wonderful comment, thank you for writing it <3

i am trying to model these behaviors; this post was primarily intended for other people working in the project. i feel pretty strongly that this is a cultural issue moreso than an individual one. i have seen too many of my friends burn out to say it was all their fault individually.

[sph]

> This is a good description of what life is like working on almost any significant open source project.

Open contributions project.

An open source project does not necessarily have to accept random contributions, issues or hatemail from the general public. [1] They just need to make the source available with a permissive licence, period.

I believe that Linux with its idiosyncrasies in its communication model (mailing list vs the ease of Github, strong dictator running the show) works as a great filter from entitled users, and that's an underrated feature in open source. See also sqlite.

---

1: Yet hell will freeze over before Github lets maintainers turn off the PR tab which would lessen this problem a bit.

[seagreen]

> Open contributions project.

That's a useful distinction and a good term.

So in total projects can be classified as:

    - Source available or not
    - Open source or not (a subset of source available)
    - Open contributions or not (also a subset of source available)
    - BDFL or community driven

That's a lot of variation and may explain why so many conversations about open source sound like people are talking past each other-- they're talking about different kinds of projects!

PS: Regarding:

> 1: Yet hell will freeze over before Github lets maintainers turn off the PR tab which would lessen this problem a bit.

I wish there was a standardized way of declaring this, I always feel so awkward writing the "no PRs" disclaimer on my toy projects.

[marcosdumay]

> That's a lot of variation and may explain why so many conversations about open source sound like people are talking past each other

Most of the discussion is people suffering through GitHub-style social networks. I don't see a lot of people talking through each other, as much as I see people assuming this is the way, and others pointing out it's just one option.

At some point we have to acknowledge that GitHub is a toxic social network. The toxicity is way more hidden than Facebook and others like it, but it's there too. Every universalist social network is toxic.

[delfinom]

GitHub is absolutely toxic which is why we develop on GitLab instead. The reduction in the slowly creeping "social features" and non-existence of drive-by activism is great.

[sph]

Gitlab's approach to the problem is making every UI redesign even worse than the one before, so people have to click through 3 menus just to file an issue.

The latest redesign is egregious to say the least.

[berkes]

I strongly believe GitHub has the same dynamics as most "big tech social media". Where anything that drives "engagement" gets prioritized. From algorithms that make alt-right/neo-nazi's more visible because the controversy drives "eyeballs" to features that are removed or never implemented because they would lower engagement.

I'm confident that GitHub has a good prediction on what will happen if they roll out features that lower the burden of maintaining a FLOSS repo. And am rather certain that several of these features also lower the engagement. And therefore will not be implemented. In other words: the needs and goals of GitHub/MSFT and those of Open Source maintainers don't align perfectly. Yet the power balance is way off, so open Source maintainers will experience pain to a level that they almost walk away in great numbers.

[ninkendo]

It would be a baffling decision for GitHub to make any product decisions based on engagement. They don’t even serve ads, what benefit do they have to an engaged user?

[berkes]

Engagement isn't just driving ads. It's driving engagement: The "toothbrush"-factor we called that in app-development: do you have an app that people pick up like their toothbrush: without much thought, several times a day?

Engagement means people have you in their workflow, on their radar. I would love it if Github is something that I don't have to think of, that is invisible and out of my mind. I'd love it if it's something I never have to visit, open, see or interact with; as as little as possible. I'd love it if it were preconfigured to take work from me rather than impose yet another inbox, timeline, bookmarks, "likes" and so on.

And if you consider "advertisements" very liberal, that's exactly what Github is: a place for companies to attract eyeballs and engagement on their software.

[ninkendo]

I think I know what engagement is, but I’m wondering why you think Microsoft benefits from me being engaged with GitHub?

[andrewaylett]

Because the known system effect means that the more arbitrary developers engage with them, the more likely it is that at least some of them will drive corporate adoption and, by extension, sales.

Tailscale put it well: https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan

> increased word-of-mouth from free plans sells the more valuable corporate plans

[alwaysbeconsing]

It means they keep position as dominant Git forge, mindshare: people are most familiar with them, then think of them first for Enterprise contracts, are interested in other paid product/feature (Copilot e.g.).

Side benefit to overwhelming mindshare many people expect/require the other forge to have the Github feature: being different counts as negative. This reinforces.

[barkingcat]

by hijacking the git moniker. most college students think of github before they think of git itself.

that brand power is worth billions.

[sph]

If anyone is getting promoted based on Github engagement metrics, you better believe that's what PMs are gonna optimise for.

[twp]

For an example of GitHub enraging its users and ignoring all feedback see the feedback on the new feed:

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/13130

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65343

The feedback is overwhelmingly negative, and has severely disrupted many people's workflow, but GitHub doesn't even acknowledge the problem.

[delfinom]

It's enshittification. The same way LinkedIn is being turned into ...generic social media, GitHub is slowly being eaten away into serving some executive's delusions.

[throwaway17_17]

I would assume, in the context of Microsoft encouraging engagement (specifically the PR feature of GitHub), the more engagement they have the more code is put into their system, thereby allowing them more data to train Copilot and other ML models.

[cozzyd]

conspiracy theory:

GH is Microsoft's ploy to kill open source once and for all by facilitating burnout.

(obviously false, but entertaining to think about)

[voakbasda]

What makes it “obvious”? They tried to kill Linux and Open Source. I will never forgive them, and I sure as hell would never trust them not to try again.

[workingjubilee]

This is a frankly ridiculous assertion given LKML's notoriously toxic history. Part of the problem is that overly-entitled maintainers can be as equally dangerous to actual progress in the project by stonewalling useful code on invented reasons that have never been applied to previous PRs and that the maintainer does not apply to their own commits.

[jackcviers3]

Github marketplace has a close pull request action[1].

You also need to close issues after a set amount of inactivity[2].

If there is a bug without a CVE, or a feature someone wants fixed that users don't want to submit a fix for themselves AFTER it has been discussed with the maintainer in an issue with a replication or strawman proposal and the owner has created a draft pr and asked you to work on it, it probably needs to come with a Patreon donation[3]. This can help alleviate maintainer burnout by allowing the maintainer to hire someone to make the contribution.

A software shop wouldn't operate without some kind of iterative plan. Large open source projects with single maintainers shouldn't either. Scheduling 1 or 2 hours a week for issue triage, hosted in an online meeting, and limiting WIP in terms of open PRs to be discussed during this triage meeting should allow for both community interaction and strong governance for the project and prevent burnout for the maintainer.

All of this can be placed into the Readme or Contributor guide and a CLA that contributors have to sign.

Otherwise, people can fork and maintain the project themselves.

If you want to prevent flame wars, or demotivating comments, something like a comment sentiment analysis app[4] might even be a good idea to add to your project. There are plenty of models available that you can delegate to for this in the wild, and it's worth automating moderation to prevent burnout.

Finally, really toxic users can and should be banned[5]. It's not worth it to deal with anonymous negative contributors all the time.

1. https://github.com/marketplace/actions/close-pull-request

2. https://github.com/marketplace/actions/issue-triage

3. https://github.blog/changelog/2023-10-03-sponsor-projects-th...

4. https://github.com/marketplace/comment-sentiment-analyzer

5. https://docs.github.com/en/communities/maintaining-your-safe...

[delfinom]

The point is Close Pull Request shouldnt be an action. It's should only be a bool in some database column for project settings that turns off the entire functionality.

[vmfunction]

> Most of my open source work was in the pre-GitHub days when we used mailing lists, not pull requests, to build community. I do think there was something better about that for the project itself as it encouraged a lot more discussion and community building. PR's and Issues become silos and are not great for general discussion. I think they also encourage drive-by contributions which honestly are intoxicating initially but once you see people are not coming back become defeating.

Glad some said it. When things are too organised or categorised it just becomes another business/todo list.

[janoc]

The problem *is not the organization/categorization*. Any larger project is completely unsustainable if it is a disorganized chaos, with issues falling through the cracks because they can't be kept track of as the scope and team grows. These tools are a great help there.

The problem is this tooling is used for the wrong job.

If the only "discussion" about an issue is the bug report/pull request, that's wrong. That should be only the first/last step. Unfortunately, for many projects there is no other communication channel anymore.

So then people use what exists and is available - PRs and issues on Github. Which are both very poorly adapted to any sort of discussion. But if all you have is a hammer ...

It used to be that the first things a new project got set up was a mailing list, then maybe an IRC channel, perhaps a shared code repository (likely CVS or Subversion) and only then an issue/bug tracker (usually Bugzilla, Track) when the project grew large enough to need it. In that order.

This culture of project community discussion has been largely lost with the younger generation of contributors that don't use e-mail and many don't even have an e-mail account (or don't use it except for signing up for services). Mailing lists have been seen as "old school" and poor UX, so have been largely replaced first by silos in the form of web forums and then later by Discord, Reddit, etc.

All that makes it great and easy for anyone to come in and post something there (the signal to noise ratio is usually not great) - and absolutely terrible to find anything, to actually coordinate work of a distributed team or to track multiple busy projects. E-mail comes to you and can be automated - forums, Reddit, Discord, etc. you have to actively seek out, follow and manage. Poor project maintainer having to deal with that ...

There are good reasons why projects like Linux kernel still use mailing lists for coordination or even sending patches (!), despite the huge size of the project - it simply makes the life of the maintainers (i.e. the people doing most of the actual work!) easier.

[markphip]

Well said, this is what I was getting at as well. I think the barrier to contribution was too high in the old days, and that is where GitHub brought improvements, but it came with the loss of community. Everything becomes about PR's and Issues and Discussion was just lost. In the Apache community, the expectation used to be that everything had to happen on the mailing list. Even if someone created an issue, there was an expectation it had to come out of a mailing list thread.

I am not saying this was perfect or even better. Just that the side effects were different. Probably a lot of people did not bother contributing because the barrier was too high, but overall I think it created healthier community dynamics and it was not uncommon to see people begin as users asking questions, and evolve into users answering questions and eventually contributing to the development.

[MrBuddyCasino]

This generalises to any idealism. You would not think veterinarians to be at elevated risk of suicide, but they are [0], and I think the reasons are similar: a moral dilemma caused by the mismatch between expectation and grim reality which ultimately leads to burnout and desperation.

The other extreme is a "bullshit job", work that you don't enjoy and which serves no meaningful purpose.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231010-the-acute-suic...

[thomascgalvin]

I 100% understand why veterinarians are in a crisis.

We had to let our pupper go a few weeks ago. The vet had to basically sit there and watch us while we processed the fact that we were about to pay her to kill our best friend.

For us, it was the worst day we had experienced in years. For her, it was Tuesday. She had other people waiting in the room next door, and had to go from solemn to bright and cheery over the span of ten footsteps, and she has to do that every day.

Her job is often to put a very real price tag on the life of a beloved companion. "I'm sorry, but keeping him alive will be $10,000... or we can humanely put him down for much, much less."

It's grim business. Necessary, but grim.

[phpisthebest]

>>veterinarians

veterinarians are the most realists people in the medical field. While you put cost as the main factor my experience it is not simply a math problem, it is often a quality of life issue. Spending the $10,000 to extended a pets life for a another year is rarely about making the pet better, it is emotional support for the human companion of the pet while the pet will end up suffering for the year and die anyway.

So yes it is often cheaper to humanely put a pet down, it is often also the most ethical thing do to even if money was not a factor.

I call them realists because the face the inevitability of death head on in a way that we do not do in Human Medicine where we believe maximization of chronological age is the singular goal to be achieved at all costs with no regard to cost, pain, suffering or quality of life.

[jynelson]

i saw a fascinating blog post about this the other day https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-di...

[MrBuddyCasino]

My condolences, loosing a pet is hard. May he frolic in pile of leaves and cherish his favourite bone.

[yencabulator]

This is why you need to bring your joy & love of the dog to your vet when things are going well, when you're there for routine things. It really improves their day.

We finally found the right medications for my 10-year old loyal potato (she's had low thyroid function, immune system trouble caused by the low thyroid function, a rattlesnake bite on the nose, arthritis, and so on) -- she's now acting half her age and happily jumping on rocks to pose for treats, and it's so nice to share her story with the vet.

Everyone at the vet visibly brightens up when they interact with a happy well behaved dog.

[throwaway2037]

Is cloning your dog in Korea out of the question? I have read some articles about people who did it. Yes, it is very expensive.

[WJW]

The original dog would still die, no? Having a puppy with technically the same genes but none of the behaviors or memories of the original seems like a very poor substitute.

[throwaway2037]

> the same genes but none of the behaviors

???

[mjw1007]

I think, from observation, that the Rust project has worse burnout problems than most other similarly-sized open source projects.

I'm not sure whether it's more to do with the way the project is organised, the state of the codebase, or the sort of person that's attracted to working on Rust in the first place.

[Buttons840]

Maybe it's because Rust is new and well designed. People who have adopted it probably care about this and want to maintain it and that's hard. Maybe it's my perfectionism, my desire to build and live in an ivory tower, but I feel this as a Rust user, a fear that they might break some perceived perfection that I care about. I've commented before that "at least C++ developers are free from the burden of using a perfect language", which was me projecting this feeling.

[FpUser]

Rust is far from "perfect" in my opinion as any other language. It tackles couple of particular and important problems but since it can not completely solve it for general case it bends people to think in a certain "perfect" way. Not sure it is ok when one has to jump hoops on what should be perfectly valid and logical code just because compiler can't figure out that it is actually safe.

Also as a generic tool I think it ought to support multiple paradigms and it does not. Just because they (language designers) believe that doing thing their way is superior to what others might find more appropriate does not make them right.

Personally - I would use Rust if clients insists which so far has never been the case, otherwise I would take a subset of C++ any time over.

[jynelson]

i have some thoughts on it here: https://tech.lgbt/@jyn/111771280764615511. i'm planning to make this the subject of my next blog post.

[pdimitar]

> the sort of person that's attracted to working on Rust in the first place

What's that even supposed to hint at?

[mjw1007]

I was thinking something along the lines of people who tend to set unusually high standards for themselves.

Rust has something of a self-image of always being best-of-breed in everything it attempts, so I could believe that it might be particularly attractive to those sorts.

Other possibilities might be that Rust developers skew younger than average (I don't know whether that's true), or that its six-week release cycle attracts people who think that a year is a long time.

[pdimitar]

> people who tend to set unusually high standards for themselves

I would agree, at least I am like that when using Rust (though I don't contribute).

And it's true that this is a shortcut to burnout.

> or that its six-week release cycle attracts people who think that a year is a long time

I don't speak for the Rust project but to me this always sounded like a measure to avoid stagnation. Having six week slices helps remind people that this is not only a labor of love; many people out there are counting on you to get your stuff right.

Obviously Rust isn't governed like a commercial project (and thank the gods for that) and obviously many things still take years to complete but for me at least the six weeks release cycle would serve as a periodical poking a la "Hey, is your stuff progressing even a little?".

Don't know though, could be just my interpretation.

[darthrupert]

From the outside, the Rust project seems to be governed like a government project. Is that markedly better?

Linux shows us at least one way to run a successful long term project. What is their governance model?

[pdimitar]

Wish I had an answer.

[jynelson]

rust definitely skews younger than average. i don't have statistics on hand, but almost all people i know working on the project are younger than 35, and a surprising number are 17-25

[preommr]

Furries - lots and lots of furries.[0] /endjoke

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/vyelva/why_are_there_...

[oaiey]

Not only open source. Also anyone taking ownership in companies end up like that. The difference is: The person gets paid and is ideally not emotional involved.

[tristor]

Unfortunately, people who take ownership and accountability are often the same people that take pride in their work, which means they aren’t emotionally detached. As long as you're emotionally attached to your work, burnout is a real risk whether you get paid or not.

Ironically, the solution from my perspective is the opposite of most advice. It’s not for everyone to become drudging zombies apathetic about their work and just kicking the can, it’s that more people take pride, ownership, and accountability in all aspects of their lives.

Having gone through burnout and a lot of therapy, my conclusion was that my burnout (and I think others too) was caused by being a caring decent person in an uncaring world. There are far too many people who surround all of us who are apathetic and/or incompetent, yet are entrenched, and being “forced” to carry their burden has an amplified effect on the misery we feel when doing that work. When you work with a team that only has accountable, competent, engaged people it becomes energizing rather than draining.

Realistically even if I am entirely correct above, this isn’t a solution. This is just a confirmation that in my experience the old adage “hell is other people” is true and the primary driver of burnout.

[pdimitar]

> my conclusion was that my burnout (and I think others too) was caused by being a caring decent person in an uncaring world

Yikes! That hits way too close to home. You didn't have to attack me like that.

In seriousness, this is a very astute and correct observation. Noticed it in myself and several others as well. It really pays off to correct your level of caring with what you see from your superiors and colleagues (and peers, in non-commercial activities).

[Buttons840]

I also see some truth in that insight.

A problem I have is I don't know how to work if I don't care. At my last job I tried to not care and succeeded, but then got fired for poor performance.

Are there sufficiently productive people who don't care? Or does everyone care, but some hold themselves to impossibly high standards?

I don't know how to separate "lower standards" and "stop caring". They are the same to me, because lowering my standards requires not caring about the things that comprise my high standard.

[pdimitar]

Oh, that one is easy IMO.

Create a backlog of tasks that you would want to do in a week. Then do it in a month.

Not caring doesn't mean slacking off. It means to reduce your output.

[Dalewyn]

>Or does everyone care, but some hold themselves to impossibly high standards?

That's your answer right there.

Do you know the age old saying "That is above my paygrade."? It means you shouldn't care more than what you are paid to do, which in turn will hopefully prevent you from burning out.

>I don't know how to separate "lower standards" and "stop caring".

You need to remember that your personal satisfaction ("I did good work!") is independent from your peers' satisfaction ("He did good work!"), and that correlation is not causation.

Life is short, draw a clear line between your personal and professional lives and budget your limited capacity for passion appropriately.

[Buttons840]

That explains how to set time boundaries, that's easy, set a timer, use the clock, etc. It's a mechanical process to adhere to time limits.

I'm thinking about things like finding millions of real user passwords in the test database. I complain and push and eventually we delete all the passwords from the database which breaks everyone's test build and in the end I don't make any friends. Did I care to much? I harmed my career because I cared.

Early in the project we agreed to organize our code into modules a certain way, but that fell apart and the code was not organized. I never knew where my code should go, the existing code was not organized, it bothered me a lot. How do I stop caring about that?

Shortly before I was fired a unit test I had written was passing even though it shouldn't have. The code was something like "assert(x == 1); assert(x == 2);" and the test was passing, it was impossible. It was some custom TypeScript stack and I got on the phone with the guy who created the tech stack and he agreed something was off, but none of us had time to look into what's up. I was fired before we ever got to the bottom of it.

These are the most recent examples, but I've had similar issues at other jobs. Imperfections, big or small often bother me more than other, and, again, I don't know how to lower my standards without also stopping caring, but without caring I have a hard time working.

[jynelson]

i think this is partially true, but i hesitate to call people zombies. the vast majority of people in the rust project are competent and engaged. the problem is they have different priorities and collaboration is hard when everything is bottom up. i have some more thoughts on this here: https://tech.lgbt/@jyn/111771440884089084

[tristor]

> i think this is partially true, but i hesitate to call people zombies.

To clarify, I was more responding from the perspective of the workplace rather than the Rust project. That said, I have been an open source contributor off and on since 2003 and my observation has been the situation isn’t much different.

In a project, rather than apathetic coworkers, you deal with users of the project that have complaints and expectations but without the ability or motivation to contribute themselves. I imagine Rust has slightly less of this than the consumer-focused projects I have worked on, but people are people at the end of the day. Contributing to any large project is largely thankless because there will always be one more complaint/demand issue, or one more PR from someone that didn’t read the contribution guidelines.

It can turn what you’re passionate about into a slog, and while the form may differ, it’s not meaningfully different from having apathetic or incompetent coworkers dragging you down.

To be honest, dealing with open source slog is slightly worse, because it takes much longer for the hope to die. Somebody that submits a bad PR seems to care somewhat, it’s not total apathy. Somebody that submits a whiny issue at least demonstrates that they used the project and cared enough to write. But both demand your attention without demonstrating competent contribution in and of themselves. It’s somehow worse than the coworkers that are on an in-office vacation.

[jynelson]

i agree! i hadn't realized you were talking about people who weren't already team members. they're usually well-meaning, but it's true that some drain a lot of contributor time on things that aren't important.

rust has a conflict avoidance problem. i think rust could be much more effective at saying no, and saying it more quickly. i want to talk about that in my next blog post.

[markphip]

It is a fair point, but I think your last sentence hits on the problem. People that contribute regularly to OSS projects are nearly always emotionally invested. It brings a lot of pleasure initially which I think also contributes to the eventual burnout.

These are hard problems.

[Waterluvian]

> I am not sure what to do about the burnout problem.

Pacing and self-regulation. It’s a marathon not a sprint. Set an hours-per-week budget. Beyond that things just don’t get done. That’s okay.

If the community needs faster pace, they can consider supplying hours or dollars to fund more developers to work full-time.

[markphip]

I should have clarified, I meant I am not sure what an OSS Project can do about it. I think this ultimately has to be managed by the OSS contributor.

[Waterluvian]

Ah yes. I wonder if an OSS project should set forth a time budget in some way? Hard to “enforce” though. And goes counter to wanting contributors to feel free to contribute on their terms.

[bombcar]

The best I’ve seen is have additional contributors (often who just like the project but aren’t coders themselves) who run interference for the dev team. They can triage feature requests, filter out the spam and repeat issues, etc.

Also, and this can be the hard part, is sometimes you have to have someone who (even politely!) can be a bit of a dick when necessary. People scan be quite entitled and want to boss everyone around and tell them the project is run wrong - if you don’t actively run at least some of them off the devs will curl up and disappear.

Also having a defined procedure for “hiatus” helps quite a bit - make it easy for a dev to say “I’m off” and it can be indeterminate - this allows them to easily come back later. Encourage devs to use it liberally.

[pdimitar]

> People scan be quite entitled and want to boss everyone around and tell them the project is run wrong - if you don’t actively run at least some of them off the devs will curl up and disappear.

As an Eastern European I always found fascinating how many Westerners are struggling hard with this. To me and many of my peers (and apparently to Linus Torvalds and a good chunk of the entire Nordic culture, probably?) it's the easiest thing in the world to say something like:

"Listen up dickhead, I do this in my free time. If you don't like the direction of the project or the urgency with which your issues are [not] being addressed, you are free to not use it, and it also costs you nothing to not comment at all. I got better things to do than to reply to entitled cunts, now piss off."

It's very amusing what a huge drama many Westerners make out of just... being direct. Honest. Straight to the point.

"But he won't ever contribute and he might infect others with the opinion that the project leaderships is toxic!"

OK. That's a price I am willing to pay. My mental health > the second-hand opinion of people who were only 0.1% likely to contribute anyway. The math is very easy yet so many Westerners struggle so much with these [to me and many] mega obvious solutions, like "be a bit of a dick when necessary".

This is really very similar to the discussions I had with a lot of women long time ago. It goes like this: they tell me:

"I have to go tell X and Y about event A because otherwise Z will tell them lies and they'll think something wrong about me."

To which I reply with a cold expression: "Then you don't need X and Y in your life, if they can be so easily influenced by lies and won't even ask you about what truly happened."

Their expressions were priceless. The cognitive dissonance can hit us all VERY hard.

Back to the topic at hand, yes, I firmly believe all open-contribution projects need a Linus type of person. It's also a fact that many devs are introverted and can be chased away by entitled and insolent loud people. So somebody must put a shield in front of the devs.

[lbalazscs]

I guess you missed the part where Linus Torvalds has apologized for years of being a jerk.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...

[jodrellblank]

> "Westerners are struggling hard with this [...] it's the easiest thing in the world"

But why pride yourself on taking the easy way out?

It isn't being honest and direct and straight to the point, it's a power move being deliberately rude/offensive/cruel hiding behind "just being honest and direct". Which only works as long as you have the power behind the powerslam putdown (in a personal project you do) and can deal with the consequences of cutting people off (which you say you are willing to). For everyone who doesn't have that power, and needs to work with others, it's not an option. Compare a physically large man saying "I find it funny that people don't just stare others down and threaten them like I do" and thinking that will work for everyone in every situation.

If that's your project selection criteria - "don't be thin skinned, man up, grow a pair!" - it's not-meritocratic; like a selection based on wealth or social class or accent or nationality isn't. If you want X and Y's skills (public project) or contacts or signoff (professional work) then you will have to face their susceptibility to Z's manipulations and deal with it. If you need help to do more work than you can do alone, you will have to work with other people's issues. "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go a long way, go together".

> To which I reply with a cold expression:

> Their expressions were priceless.

That story shape is a perfect fit for "everybody clapped" meme, you feel superior to the stupid women who didn't even think of this power move, and wait for your applause. Were their priceless expressions "you solved my problem, my hero!" or were they "you have no clue that my life is different to yours and with no attempt to empathise or understand, you expect the first thing you thought of will solve my problems and want me to be impressed?" Women generally have less power in society, in companies, far less physical intimidation, less respect, fewer options, and need to depend more on social networks and support and building consensus to get along in life or get things done. Cutting off the network and getting a reputation as difficult to be friends/work with risks a lot more for women than it does for you.

That "I'm colder, more vicious, than you so I win. Empathy and emotions are weakness." is so ... last season.

> "It's also a fact that many devs are introverted and can be chased away by entitled and insolent loud people. So somebody must put a shield in front of the devs."

It isn't a shield, it's a counter-offensive. Many devs don't want their workplace turned into a battlezone by people trying to shout the loudest. Again, fine for your personal project, but having a shouty vicious bouncer is turning away the porentially useful contributions of unknown people who don't want to fight their way into that kind of workplace. Consider @dang here at HN doesn't take the easy way out of shouting people down, swearing at them, putting them in their place; instead he patiently links the HN rules and politely explains what he's doing and why (your account is doing A, against the rules here, will be banned in this time, please do this or that specific thing), over and over and over.

Trying to build a community of disparate people is much harder than being a dictator who can tell disagreeable people to piss off. Is it any wonder people who are trying to do that, are struggling with it?

[gray_-_wolf]

> I think they also encourage drive-by contributions

I realize I am in minority, but for me, if project uses a mailing list I am more likely to do a drive-by contribution (compared to no contribution at all). Just doing git send-email is much easier compared to figuring out how to create whatever pull request is called in whatever forge the specific project is using.

[humanrebar]

I'm the opposite. There's no clear notion of status, remaining concerns, priority, etc. in an email thread.

[gray_-_wolf]

> There's no clear notion of status, remaining concerns, priority, etc. in an email thread.

Which, for drive-by contributions, does not really matter. It is a problem for long term contributions and project managements in general, true, but there often is some tracking system present (patchwork, debbugs, ...).

[hinkley]

None of this is unique to open source. Something that would be readily apparent to people who do volunteer work on things besides software. Which is essentially moonlighting on doing your day job.

All volunteer organizations have to fight burnout. Any time you start feeling like things won’t get “done” unless you do them, you’re on that road.

[TheCleric]

Amen. Especially on open source projects where just enough people use it to have an active user base, but not enough where you have a good stable of contributors.

I’ve burned myself out on a handful of projects like this and also why I haven’t started any new ones lately. It’s very tiring (doubly so if maintaining open source isn’t part of your paid job, so you’re doing it on your free time).

[Dalewyn]

>I am not sure what to do about the burnout problem.

Get paid for it, and don't do anything more than you are paid to do.

I've done volunteer work, per se. My biggest takeaway has been that humanity overall is not worth giving away my free time to.

When I volunteer my time now, I do so only for individuals who I know will sincerely appreciate it.

[Loxicon]

If I understand you properly, in the mailing list days, did EVERYONE get the email when someone sent in patches?

[coldpie]

Yes. Usually there's either two lists, one for discussion and one for patch submission and review; or users use filters to divide them out (if $h_Subject contains "PATCH" -> send mail to "patches" dir). For large projects, you can use deeper filters to entirely drop mails in areas of the project that you don't care about.

[mpol]

Yes. The way to make it work is to use fiters in your mailclient. All mail to dev@ goes to its own folder, all mail to discussion@ to its own folder, all mail to support@ to its own folder. You only look there when you feel like it. Your inbox is not having all this noise.