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The Rust project has a burnout problem

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Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#191

Post by estebank »

jynelson wrote: post #186
estebank wrote: post #167

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 o…

they both contribute a lot, although rereading my post i realized i dedicated more discussion to review burnout. i think it's a question of whether you feel more of an obligation to your users or to other people in the project, i've noticed you and i differ there. for me particularly, reviews were bad because there was a time component, if i waited too long people would get frustrated and give up.

I enjoy helping people get up to speed, but after a while it becomes overwhelming for sure. It's just that if I'm not around for some reason I know that others will review things, eventually. PR reviews will continue if I get hit by a bus, pet features likely won't. I am happy that other people have taken some of my stances around DX and run with it, so at least on that one facet of the project I feel like I succeeded in becoming dispensable.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#192

Post by jihiggins »

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.

i didn't even notice there was no capitalisation when i read the article

idk about the author, but when i was younger, some people's pedantry and pettiness over grammar / capitalisation / more casual chatting got me to switch sides and deliberately stop using it as much. now it's also an aesthetic preference

i think there's potentially a valid point about accessibility concerns, but blog posts, chatrooms, and internet comments are also very informal modes of discourse

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#193

Post by sowbug »

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.

You can group these kinds of "errors of personality" to help understand why they might or might not bug you.

First: actor intentionally disrespected someone. Speaking in a movie theater, especially after being shushed. Using the letter "u" to mean "you" in formal business communication.

Second: actor unintentionally disrespected someone. Clipping your fingernails in class. Badly misspelling someone's name in a critical business communication.

Third: actor unintentionally makes an inconsequential error. Native English speakers misusing "it's" or "your" and their respective homophones, or missing antecedents ("As an expert, it's important to do X and Y" rather than "As an expert, I think it's important to do X and Y").

Fourth: actor intentionally makes an inconsequential error. Wearing obviously mismatched socks. Consistently writing in all lowercase.

The key, for me, is evaluating intent and impact. Group #1 is asshole: they mean to hurt or annoy. Group #2 is incompetent: they make mistakes that matter. Group #3 is hapless: they make mistakes that don't matter. Group #4 is quirky or aloof: they're not hurting anyone, and they're OK if people draw negative inferences about them, so hey, it's a free country.

You might reach different conclusions about the groups, or subdivide the groups further.

(Anticipating critiques of my examples: yes, I really do think that misspelling the English pronoun "you" is disrespectful. Misspell your own name if you want to move from Group #1 to Group #4, but please don't misspell the word that you're using to represent me. And clipping your nails in class is such over-the-top behavior that I believe it's more about upbringing than intentional disrespect.)

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#194

Post by nyokodo »

surajrmal wrote: post #169
vouaobrasil wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> letting flowers blossom over long time periods can be rewarding

There can be rewarding ways to live your life that don't allow this, e.g. serving your country, doctors without borders etc, but the nomadic life is a sacrifice so in order to be happy long term most people need to eventually set down roots as you did. The digital nomad lifestyle was sold for years as the ultimate life hack, and perhaps for a minority it is, but for most of us it sours.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#195

Post by BobaFloutist »

nightowl_games wrote: post #73

I'm a game dev at a small studio. I have a discord full of gamers who all want me to do something or at least pay attention to them. Every time I release something new, someone hates it. It was hard for a bit, but I've been doing this for years. Honestly you just gotta tune out the noise and prioritize what you want. Open source project is a bit harder because you have to collaborate more than I have to collaborate w…

There's little I hate more than watching game devs engage with and respond to vitriolic fuming. Communities try so hard to tell people not to shit on devs, to be polite, to engage calmly and rationally, and then a certain subset of devs see a shitty, cranky post or comment getting attention and just can't help but weigh in to defend themselves.

I understand the temptation, but it's deeply frustrating to see.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#196

Post by sph »

ninkendo wrote: post #152
berkes wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#197

Post by Hirrolot »

jihiggins wrote: post #192
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.

i didn't even notice there was no capitalisation when i read the article idk about the author, but when i was younger, some people's pedantry and pettiness over grammar / capitalisation / more casual chatting got me to switch sides and deliberately stop using it as much. now it's also an aesthetic preference i think there's potentially a valid point about accessibility concerns, but blog posts, chatrooms, and interne…

Downvoted your comment because of spelling. Consider learning some English grammar.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#198

Post by Hirrolot »

pdimitar wrote: post #72
mjw1007 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the sort of person that's attracted to working on Rust in the first place What's that even supposed to hint at?

[flagged]

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#199

Post by [deleted] »

lbalazscs wrote: post #122
pdimitar wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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...

[deleted]

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#200

Post by V_Terranova_Jr »

pdimitar wrote: post #128
lbalazscs wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I did not, but I have my doubts as to whether he was made to do it or if he truly meant it. I tend to believe in the former because it's always accompanied by "stepping back for a while" and "get help on how to behave better". Seems like a standard procedure after somebody manages to overpower you (in whatever hierarchy they have there). Were cursing and expletives necessary? Absolutely no. They don't drive any point…

There's more to the Linus-style jerk phenomenon than just telling entitled people to piss off (I would be reluctant to call that being a jerk if that's all it was). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33058906 for an example thread and associated comments. If you're just ranting or passing off subjective POVs as truth and obvious and those disagreeing with you as doing so out of incompetence or malfeasance, that isn't being direct, honest, or straight to the point. It's being a dick.

I've seen brilliant colleagues for whom I have the utmost technical admiration completely fail to improve bad designs implemented by others, because the brilliant person was so dickish about how they communicated to others.

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