I am not sure what to do about the burnout problem. The way he described it is very on point though. Since everyone working on the project is overloaded there is a great feeling of things only get done if you do them.
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 initially but once you see people are not coming back become defeating.
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 and just kicking the can, it’s that more people take pride, ownership, and accountability in all aspects of their lives.
Having gone through burnout and a lot of therapy, my conclusion was that my burnout (and I think others too) was caused by being a caring decent person in an uncaring world. There are far too many people who surround all of us who are apathetic and/or incompetent, yet are entrenched, and being “forced” to carry their burden has an amplified effect on the misery we feel when doing that work. When you work with a team that only has accountable, competent, engaged people it becomes energizing rather than draining.
Realistically even if I am entirely correct above, this isn’t a solution. This is just a confirmation that in my experience the old adage “hell is other people” is true and the primary driver of burnout.
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.
rust has a conflict avoidance problem. i think rust could be much more effective at saying no, and saying it more quickly. i want to talk about that in my next blog post.