Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's quite uncool of you, even if it's supposed to be a joke
i thought it was funny lol
same
The Rust project has a burnout problem
81–90 of 258 posts
Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
> 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.
Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem
#83This 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.…
> 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 initial…
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.
Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the sort of person that's attracted to working on Rust in the first place What's that even supposed to hint at?
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 cyc…
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
Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem
#85[flagged]
Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
My brain tends to self-correct what it's reading these kinds of posts, and considering the author of the post has replied to the comments here in the same style, I see two options for the style. It's either done for speed, or the shift key is mapped to something else, making typing one-off capitals harder. That might equally be a stylistic choice, but I my gut says it's not.
my shift key is there i just have conscientiously objected to it
Oh, hey! Thanks for chiming in. It's rare to see rejection of grammar rules on longer forms of writing, so it looked interesting.
Any special reasons? Just because I like to know people through their choices and views. Didn't want to sound rude in the previous comment, so if I did, genuinely sorry (non-native speaker woes).
Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a teacher friend who I've been pushing to adopt this mindset. She had a burnout last year because she kept putting off taking care of her health problems because she didn't want to miss a single day. Safety first, people. Take care of yourselves.
[flagged]
The fact that you are in pain every day is obviously a tragedy, and I hope your situation improves. Mocking your peers for taking care of themselves is still not acceptable, and does nothing to improve the situation for anyone.
I accept that this is a spectrum, and that some level of discomfort in life is unavoidable—people stay up late and skip exercise from time to time. The unpleasant consequences of these actions doesn't justify not contributing to society, and there are no doubt freeloaders in any reasonably sized company.
However, no workplace, including yours, should expect their employees to sacrifice their health.
Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
My brain tends to self-correct what it's reading these kinds of posts, and considering the author of the post has replied to the comments here in the same style, I see two options for the style. It's either done for speed, or the shift key is mapped to something else, making typing one-off capitals harder. That might equally be a stylistic choice, but I my gut says it's not.
my shift key is there i just have conscientiously objected to it
It comes across as saying "fuck you" to your readers.
Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem
#89This 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.…
If I understand you properly, in the mailing list days, did EVERYONE get the email when someone sent in patches?
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.
Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the sort of person that's attracted to working on Rust in the first place What's that even supposed to hint at?
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 cyc…
> 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.