I mean I love all the contributors - I do, but a few nights a week is fun, all of them is bad, when it starts to eat your Saturday, that's a steamroller.
There's reward, yes, but mostly there's a lot of people who (queue up the Sixth Sense voice) that WANT THINGS. I mean, everybody totally means well, they do... but so many people wanting so many things.
You could spent all your time just helping people who didn't read the docs, helping misunderstandings, restating the obvious, code review, website editing, so many things. And you have no time to do them all flawlessly, so you do them all the best you can, and get hammered on the things you couldn't be perfect on. Then you get into Catch-22 scenarios as the project grows and must please conflicting audiences.
Open source is really really really hard.
I think ones with very focused audiences (say, like, insect biology?) may have it easier - the more general purpose you are, the greater the demands from diverse audiences.
Programming languages may have it the hardest, I don't know.
Given, most people will probably think I succeeded at all of those things, but it also broke me in ways that would make me reconsider doing it that way again. Maybe everybody has energy to do it some, but ... it's rough.
There's so much more to it than just writing code too.
I think the worst is when some people show a sense of entitlement and default to throwing a tantrum when a response doesn't go the way they want, even if it is the logical outcome of what has happened.
For example, one time I had closed an issue after asking for a clearly worded explanation to a claimed bug in implementation and/or a reproduction, and I got a broken reproduction with more unclear response. After closing the issue, I got some rapid fire responses in the issue from the person with all sorts of accusations.
After the person fixed the reproduction, it turned out the person was right, but unclear explanation and a supposed reproduction that did not show a bug caused a lot of wasted time because the person was too hasty, and the tantrum only added stress for all parties.
These are the types of interactions that make me want to not do open source work - people not taking the care to do the necessary investigation to avoid wasting time and generally respecting other people. It's as if those people don't realize that open source maintainers are there precisely to help if they can.
My ideal job would be as a GitHub janitor. Cleaning up and helping with projects that have become too unwieldy or need a little duct-tape to keep going.
I totally got the second job feeling.
I mean I love all the contributors - I do, but a few nights a week is fun, all of them is bad, when it starts to eat your Saturday, that's a steamroller.
There's reward, yes, but mostly there's a lot of people who (queue up the Sixth Sense voice) that WANT THINGS. I mean, everybody totally means well, they do... but so many people wanting so many things.
You could spent all your time just helping people who didn't read the docs, helping misunderstandings, restating the obvious, code review, website editing, so many things. And you have no time to do them all flawlessly, so you do them all the best you can, and get hammered on the things you couldn't be perfect on. Then you get into Catch-22 scenarios as the project grows and must please conflicting audiences.
Open source is really really really hard.
I think ones with very focused audiences (say, like, insect biology?) may have it easier - the more general purpose you are, the greater the demands from diverse audiences.
Programming languages may have it the hardest, I don't know.
Given, most people will probably think I succeeded at all of those things, but it also broke me in ways that would make me reconsider doing it that way again. Maybe everybody has energy to do it some, but ... it's rough.
There's so much more to it than just writing code too.