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.
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 (and peers, in non-commercial activities).
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, because lowering my standards requires not caring about the things that comprise my high standard.
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.
I'm thinking about things like finding millions of real user passwords in the test database. I complain and push and eventually we delete all the passwords from the database which breaks everyone's test build and in the end I don't make any friends. Did I care to much? I harmed my career because I cared.
Early in the project we agreed to organize our code into modules a certain way, but that fell apart and the code was not organized. I never knew where my code should go, the existing code was not organized, it bothered me a lot. How do I stop caring about that?
Shortly before I was fired a unit test I had written was passing even though it shouldn't have. The code was something like "assert(x == 1); assert(x == 2);" and the test was passing, it was impossible. It was some custom TypeScript stack and I got on the phone with the guy who created the tech stack and he agreed something was off, but none of us had time to look into what's up. I was fired before we ever got to the bottom of it.
These are the most recent examples, but I've had similar issues at other jobs. Imperfections, big or small often bother me more than other, and, again, I don't know how to lower my standards without also stopping caring, but without caring I have a hard time working.
Are you paid to care about "finding millions of real user passwords in the test database"? About caring how or whether your code is organized? About what should be happening in a unit test?
If you are paid to care about it, absolutely do so because that's your job. If you aren't, though, at most you should inform someone who is paid to care about it and then forget about it because it's not your concern.
Life is short and there is only so many waking hours in a day, so we need to budget them accordingly. If you can't bring yourself to be less passionate about your work even though you realize it's actually causing you and your coworkers problems, perhaps it's a sign you need to change professions entirely.