
Rust Ghost, Signing Off - luu
https://quietmisdreavus.net/self/2020/02/17/rust-ghost-signing-off/
======
turbinerneiter
I have a theory without data.

Is there a difference in burnout-rate between the new school of Open Sourcers
and the old school of Free Software people?

I feel like the stories of people quitting, either due to the insane workload
or because of the abusive "community", are mostly people who publicly hack on
stuff that is on GitHub.

The old folks who quietly drop their code in an SVN repo only the distributors
know how to find seem fine.

Obviously, I have no data on that, but to me it seems the whole "social
coding" thing on GitHub ... sucks for the people who do the actual work.

~~~
sansnomme
There is also the expectation these days that when your project grows big
enough, the unicorns are supposed to step in with funding. Considering MSFT is
evaluating and using Rust now, paying a couple maintainers would hardly
unreasonable for them, the community dropped the ball here. Mozilla and the
Rust community need to step up their fund-raising game, losing product
managers left and right is simply terrible for the ecosystem. Just a fortnight
ago we lost the lead developer of one of the fastest web frameworks in
existence over ideological conflicts. For good or for bad, libraries don't
code themselves, every effort needs to be celebrated and applauded.

~~~
steveklabnik
There is no Rust foundation.

------
anonsivalley652
Some random energy ideas:

\- Walk the Camino de Santiago on the cheap

\- Get in crazy good shape

\- Train for a half marathon for a start

\- Drive a supercar on the Autobahn

\- Take up electric paragliding (PPG)

\- Get an apprenticeship to learn the art of making Himitsubako / Karakuri
(Japanese puzzle/trick boxes)

\- Volunteer

\- Donate blood

\- Try to talk to that quiet, old homeless guy who's always around

\- Vote (as applicable)

\- Take good stand-up comedy classes and find the most brutal venues

\- Say and mean "hello" to more people

\- Go go-carting

\- Learn botany or geology - shout-out to _Crime Pays But Botany Doesn 't_

\- Learn Mandarin and move to Shenzhen (yes, the current issue will be over
soon)

\- Get a VW bus, sell almost everything and wander around Pennsylvania,
Ontario and Maine

\- Use a sensory-deprivation chamber or semi-meditate somewhere quiet doing
and thinking nothing until your brain starts generating ideas and they just
pour out

\- Get some friends or random cool folks and experiment with quality
psychedelics

\- Become a farmer.. you'll always be busy and get to practice skills
including: welding, machining, maintenance, electrical wiring, industrial
hydraulic maintenance, MacGuyvering, construction, botany, geology, civil
engineering, chemistry, risk management, accounting, negotiating, marketing,
sales, human resources, management, private aviation, meteorology,
engineering, plumbing and heavy equipment operation. I probably missed some
like having to feed and care for a fence-making rig.
[https://youtu.be/HG4gplitWSs](https://youtu.be/HG4gplitWSs)

~~~
turbinerneiter
> \- Drive a supercar on the Autobahn

Please don't. Take it to the Nürburgring, but don't abuse the Autobahn as a
race track. People die.

~~~
_Microft
German here: this, so much.

------
moomin
Grief, I've done a small amount of open source work and got thoroughly burnt
out on it. I can't imagine the level of commitment involved in doing the
amount of work she's done. It's okay to take a break. And it's okay to stop.

------
Communitivity
Thank you very much for your hard work and great contributions. I hope you
overcome the burnout and find joy in coding again.

------
topspin
Alex Crichton last week and now this.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306002)

Hmm.

~~~
The_rationalist
Not to mention the actix web founder.

------
mfer
This is ultimately about time, energy, priorities, and all of that.

One of the things many open source maintainers (and especially leads) run into
is time constraints.

More mentoring and empowering of others while not trying to do everything
ourselves is important for our health.

------
cotelletta
The more you do the more they will rely on you. But this is on contributors
too.

They start out hanging out in their clubhouse, working on their hobby, and
people join in. Then a few years pass and you realize your chat is now a
support channel for people who do not care and don't wish to care. Tough luck.
Maybe it was never about building software after all, and more about learning,
socializing, being valued, and pride.

That said, this part:

>the offer of the fellowship stipend for being a trans person in tech

It sounds like this person has made ample contributions, but they get a
fellowship because they're queer. And they're happy with that? Okay.
Personally I'd feel insulted.

------
steveklabnik
Misdreavus has done a ton for Rust. Sad to see her go, but at the same time,
it’s a well deserved rest for sure :)

------
StavrosK
Lately we've been hearing many stories like this one, and I got motivated to
write up a few guidelines on how people should conduct themselves when talking
to others in the FOSS ecosystem. I was going to put it up on
[https://www.osscoc.com/](https://www.osscoc.com/), but I got writer's block
shortly after.

If people could detail their issues here, so I could write something up, that
would help. The plan is to have a text that basically says "remember, everyone
here is a volunteer, be nice to each other, nobody is obliged to work for you,
etc" so it can easily be linked from discussions to remind people to be civil.

~~~
kingosticks
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your initiative, or that it
wouldn't generally help, but I don't see where people's conduct or
communication had a part to play in this particular story. Did I miss
something?

~~~
StavrosK
No, that's why I commented, the author wasn't very particular about the
burnout, so I wanted to know if it had something to do with the previous
stories we heard.

~~~
kingosticks
Ahh I follow you now. It read like "here" was here on this HN comment page.

------
saidajigumi
_> Unfortunately, it turned out that i wasn’t just dissatisfied with my job -
i was burned out from living and working in two lives._

This struggle is very real to me. There's always the tension between the day
job, Just Plain Life (tm), and various passion projects. Sometimes I have the
energy to just push on all fronts, but I've learned that's a limited resource.
Pacing that in a sustainable way took a long time to learn, and sometimes
means that I just need to aggressively back-burner things before burnout hits.

Best wishes to the author for a good period of rest!

------
foo101
How can we build a society that supports volunteer work in open source? Should
governments step in and provide open source grants for important projects just
like it does for research work? So much of the world now depends on open
source software. This problem needs to be solved soon.

~~~
dunkelheit
Lack of financial support is not the whole story (there is a lot of blog posts
declaring burnout written by very well-paid developers) but I agree that it is
an important part.

The problem is that open-source software is a quintessential public good
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_\(economics\))
). Markets fail to properly incentivize creation of public goods and the free-
rider problem arises. One approach to tackle this problem that is currently
promoted by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin is called quadratic funding
([https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html](https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html)).
Basically the idea is that anyone can contribute a donation to some project
and it will be matched using funds from a common pool in such amount as to
ensure that the value you get from the project completion is commensurate to
the donation amount. Probably not a silver bullet but the idea looks
interesting and I like that they are experimenting on small but real-world
problems (such as funding open-source projects for the Ethereum ecosystem)
instead of just theorizing.

