I've been the organization administrator for a library that participates in Google Summer of Code for many years now. Of the questions that we typically see and the requests we typically get, some are high-quality and constructive---and are people legitimately asking for help.
But the article here kind of glosses over the reality of the hard part: the low quality questions. The "please help me get started"; the "how do I get accepted"; the "please review my PR".
It's all well and good to say, hey, take a step back! Be nice! Don't respond when you're angry! But this is not the reality for an overwhelmed open source organization---and let's face it, most popular projects are completely overwhelmed. The reality is that to wake up every day to countless new issues and pull requests and other demands on your time is absolutely soul-sucking, and after years and years of this it grinds you down and leaves you with resentment and disappointment, and that's just absolutely not great for anyone.
I don't necessarily have any rebuttal to what the author is saying, and I think the intentions are great, but I think it's also important to point out what reality is for people who are trying to build community and help: everyone slowly burns out doing it. It's like social work.
(food for thought: Github has made this problems orders of magnitude worse for organizations, because lowering the barrier to entry means now anyone who doesn't know where to start can open an issue and clog up a bug tracker in just a few seconds, and anyone who thinks they can write code can open a low-quality PR in just a few minutes, and this is more to do for the maintainers...)
But the article here kind of glosses over the reality of the hard part: the low quality questions. The "please help me get started"; the "how do I get accepted"; the "please review my PR".
It's all well and good to say, hey, take a step back! Be nice! Don't respond when you're angry! But this is not the reality for an overwhelmed open source organization---and let's face it, most popular projects are completely overwhelmed. The reality is that to wake up every day to countless new issues and pull requests and other demands on your time is absolutely soul-sucking, and after years and years of this it grinds you down and leaves you with resentment and disappointment, and that's just absolutely not great for anyone.
I don't necessarily have any rebuttal to what the author is saying, and I think the intentions are great, but I think it's also important to point out what reality is for people who are trying to build community and help: everyone slowly burns out doing it. It's like social work.
(food for thought: Github has made this problems orders of magnitude worse for organizations, because lowering the barrier to entry means now anyone who doesn't know where to start can open an issue and clog up a bug tracker in just a few seconds, and anyone who thinks they can write code can open a low-quality PR in just a few minutes, and this is more to do for the maintainers...)