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The Rust project has a burnout problem

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Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#161

Post by estebank »

layer8 wrote: post #124
drx wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, not to me. Variety is the spice of life. It’s their blog, they should use whatever style they feel like using. Besides, is lowercase poetry a fuck you to the reader as well?

This is not an art exhibition. Conventions have a purpose. Capitalization is not a random spelling quirk, there’s a reason why we have it. The upvote balance on my comment confirms that it’s something to consider. The “fuck you” was in reference to the author’s comment, not just to his blog post.

This is a post in a personal blog that they wrote because they wanted to write it. Someone else came across it and pointed people outside of it's desired audience that it existed.

If I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and offer it to my friend next to me, and someone across the street yells "How rude of you! I'm allergic to peanuts", I will just close the window and continue sharing sandwiches with my friend, not spend time arguing with the yelling guy across the street.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#162

Post by Dalewyn »

Buttons840 wrote: post #148
pdimitar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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, be…

>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.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#163

Post by mrec »

Brian Anderson (AKA brson, who as it happens used to head up the Rust project) wrote a good piece back in 2017 called "The Minimally-nice Open Source Software Maintainer" which has tips to reduce burnout/disillusionment in junior contributors. It's less geared toward preventing burnout at the top, but still well worth a read, and there's no reason much of it couldn't be applied in reverse.

https://brson.github.io/2017/04/05/minimally-nice-maintainer

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#164

Post by uticus »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #17
cjs_ac wrote: post #4

> the best way to help the project is to keep contributing for it for years. to do that, you have to avoid burning out, which means you have to treat yourself well. When I was a schoolteacher, the way I expressed this is that you have to do the job in such a way today that you're capable of doing it again tomorrow. This did not go down well and I am no longer a teacher.

Personally, I don't think it is natural to sit in the same role for more than a few years. And that's not just the primary tasks of the job -- the same people, the same administration, the same bureaucracy. I do feel that virtually no jobs will allow you to grow as a person and enjoy life. Here, by "job" I mean the traditional kind at a corporation or medium-sized organization. After seven years of working in such or…

I agree with a lot of this. The software industry has so few lasting projects, and almost no lasting projects that pay the bills. It just doesn't provide value to the paying consumers in a way that encourages long term building. Which, no surprise, the name is software after all, the benefit being computations can be easily changed without re-wiring circuits.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#165

Post by trealira »

twen_ty wrote: post #29

This is why I think that C++ will be around in the next 50 years but Rust? I can't tell.

I'm sure legacy C and C++ will be around for a long time, but their process for authoring new standards also seems somewhat unsustainable.

It seems like people making contributions to the C and C++ standards are also at risk of getting burnt out: https://thephd.dev/finally-embed-in-c23

> It was all worth it.

> …

> Or. That’s what I keep telling myself. Because it doesn’t feel like it was worth it. It feels like I wasted a lot of my life achieving something so ridiculously basic that it’s almost laughable. How utterly worthless I must consider myself, that hearing someone complain about putting data in C++ 5 years ago put me on the track to decide to try to put something in a programming language standard. That I had to fight this hard for table scraps off the Great C Standard’s table.

> What a life, huh?

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#166

Post by cozzyd »

voakbasda wrote: post #137
cozzyd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

Such conspiracies are hard to hide, so it seems quite unlikely to me (and GH was sort of like this before the MS acquisition, no?)

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#167

Post by estebank »

I'm surprised at how many people seem to focus so much on the effect of incoming PRs that require some mentoring to get them to a mergeable state or on "entitled users". I don't think those are significant contributors to burn out in the Rust project. Those you can ignore. More significant is "X is important, but I'm the only one that thinks so, so I have to carry X to completion single handedly". That causes a lot of the demoralization and heartache and guilt that contributes to burn out.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#168

Post by layer8 »

aftbit wrote: post #156
rkangel wrote: post #10

Do other people react as strongly as I did to the lack of capitalisation at the start of sentences? The post is generally "well" written with good grammar and punctuation so I find it strange - it feels like a style choice. But the style choice just instinctively makes part of my brain feel like it's written by a child.

Wow a lot of people have very strong feelings about this. Parent comment is fine but some of the replies are quite out there, calling this "arrogant" and "dumb". Let me provide my own opinion. IMO content over style. Nobody owes you adherence to a particular set of rules, nor do they owe you their thoughts at all. If the writer's style is a bridge too far for you, kindly just close the tab, don't complain about it. C…

> If the writer's style is a bridge too far for you, kindly just close the tab, don't complain about it.

I sure hope we are allowed to criticize writers’ styles.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#169

Post by surajrmal »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #17
cjs_ac wrote: post #4

> the best way to help the project is to keep contributing for it for years. to do that, you have to avoid burning out, which means you have to treat yourself well. When I was a schoolteacher, the way I expressed this is that you have to do the job in such a way today that you're capable of doing it again tomorrow. This did not go down well and I am no longer a teacher.

Personally, I don't think it is natural to sit in the same role for more than a few years. And that's not just the primary tasks of the job -- the same people, the same administration, the same bureaucracy. I do feel that virtually no jobs will allow you to grow as a person and enjoy life. Here, by "job" I mean the traditional kind at a corporation or medium-sized organization. After seven years of working in such or…

If you like the people you work with, why change things? I've been on the same team for 6 years and my org has had minimal churn in that time period. It's not quite like a second family (that would leave me too heartbroken if I ended up moving on), but I don't really think I'll have an easy time finding another group I work so well with, so I don't feel motivated to find another opportunity.

I used to move around a lot, but I've since put down roots. There is something you miss out by constantly upheaving your life. Nothing is permanent, but letting flowers blossom over long time periods can be rewarding.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#170

Post by trealira »

chillingeffect wrote: post #43
twen_ty wrote: post #29

This is why I think that C++ will be around in the next 50 years but Rust? I can't tell.

C is/was fueled by positive energy: "Let's be (relatively) portable and improve on Assembly." Rust seems to have vengeful victory at its heart: "Let's sock it to those reckless, ignorant C programmers."

It's more like "let's improve on C by catching errors C compilers don't check." Rust took a lot of inspiration from Cyclone, which was meant to be a safe version of C.

Writing C makes certain classes of sloppy assembly bugs unwritable, like accidentally using the wrong calling convention, forgetting to preserve a register, or forgetting to pop something off the stack. Similarly, Rust makes classes of sloppy C bugs unwritable, like using a dangling pointer.

Why do you view that as an attack on C programmers? It's no more an attack on them than C was an attack on assembly programmers.

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