On Being a Free Software Maintainer

A service is unlikely to work because anger requires immediate release when triggered otherwise it's repressed. Repressed anger builds up and makes the next outburst worse. I believe that the "lives of quiet desperation" described refer to anger that's continually repressed with no outlet.

There's a seeming epidemic of burnout in tech that I think is driven by this dynamic. I've seen people start jobs and almost immediately start exhibiting symptoms of burnout. The inhumanity of tech builds up and every little thing builds up.

I don't get burned out. I think this is because I'm skilled at managing my emotions. But as I get older my tolerance for repressing anger to release it in a controlled explosion later when nobody is watching grows less and less. And my jobs get more and more visible. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to stay in this career.

Some of these emails are negative or even rude. But that negativity does not really bother me. I evaluate level of "Negativity" in the email to understand the nature of the request better (Is the request realistic? Is the request fair? Could our team realistically prevent that negativity in the first place?)

Requests like: “How dare you not (use your free time to) fix this ultra high priority bug that is affecting me?” -- I do not even consider negative. In fact, that is a positive comment to me, because it may indicate an opportunity (to make our job board better or to even add another revenue stream).

The complainer in such case already did some of the work for our job board: identified potential problem, described how to reproduce it, defined the use case explaining why fixing that problem is important.

If that is not helpful feedback, then what kind of feedback is more useful?

If one lacks the skills to or time & interest in helping, the two most productive courses of action are either to move along or throw money at the problem. Now maybe your issue is the developer/maintainer themselves. i.e. the project has value but you don't want to deal with the author(s)/maintainer(s). That's fine: fork the project. If enough people feel like you do, the original project will likely die due to these open source 'market' forces. That's a risk any author takes making the project open source to begin with.

I have absolutely no problem with a developer saying 'this is my project' or 'I'm not interested in your problem' as a default answer. It is their project/time and my problem after all. Assuming I don't have the time/skills and really want their help, I can offer to throw money at them and many will develop an interest in solving my problem. If that doesn't work, I can offer to throw money at someone who will.

Note that none of these issues are unique to open source: try to get Apple/Microsoft/Google to fix a longstanding bug or add a feature that you really want or need. Odds are, you don't have the order of magnitude of money to get them to care. And you usually don't have the source either, so you're out of luck.