Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away
3 days ago
- #Mental Health
- #Burnout
- #Open Source
- Open source software (OSS) maintainers face severe burnout due to unpaid work, overwhelming demands, and toxic community behavior.
- Burnout has three components: motivational loss, emotional breakdown, and cognitive detachment, leading to high quit rates among developers.
- Key factors driving burnout include lack of payment, crushing workloads, unrewarding maintenance tasks, toxic interactions, hyper-responsibility, and constant pressure to prove oneself.
- Recommendations to combat burnout include reliable payment for OSS developers, better community behavior, mentorship programs, and advocacy for maintainers' rights.
- Companies benefiting from OSS should financially support maintainers, and users should treat them with respect and understanding.