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**Nadia Eghbal:** So sort of wrapping up this segment - so people use the term burnout a lot to talk about when they leave or step down or whatever... Do you think that people need to call it burnout in order to leave? Is it okay just to leave because you're kind of done with something and you wanna focus on something ... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, burnout is used as this convenient excuse; it's like "My mental health is being affected by this project and now I feel like leaving. I'm going to leave now." I think while that is mostly true, in some cases it may not be true; it may just be used as a convenient excuse. |
Also, the reason I didn't quit or hand over the projects earlier is because I had the anxiety around "If I quit, then people will hate me, they'll not use the project and this will have all been a waste of time. It will all just crumble into dust", and that's not true at all. That didn't happen. People continually use ... |
I think what we need to have is more of a discussion in the open source community like "If you are no longer interested in the project, if your heart is no longer interested, just like a regular job, you're allowed to leave. You're not chained to your desk, you're not forced into the building every single day." You can... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's what made me start thinking about it, because it is like with a job, where... I imagine for people - if you're really passionate about your job and you might be afraid to leave because you're like "Well, who's gonna everything that I was doing?" or "The next person may not be as good" or whatev... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, absolutely. I agree. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Something that Adam was musing about that I also wanted to ask you about is do you think that we're hearing more about burnout now, just because open source as a practice or community has started to mature, and there's sort of this question now if it's not just about creating stuff in open source, but... |
**Ryan Bigg:** \[39:51\] I think that's definitely the case. I think what we're seeing is the first generation of open source contributors - or at least on GitHub projects... I mean, I'm only new to this game; open source has been around longer than I've been alive. I think we're seeing these first-generation open sour... |
So what we should be encouraging is the second generation or next generation of open source maintainers to come along. Encourage the first generation to say "By the way, I'm looking for help", exactly like what I should have done. "I need help with these projects. I'm trying to maintain them, but I'm struggling." It's ... |
So when they do that admission, then they should look around the community, like "Who's been contributing to this project? Who can I tap on the shoulder to be the next maintainer or the next group of maintainers for this project?" That's probably why we're hearing more about burnout, because that first generation is ge... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Coming up we talk with Ryan about getting paid for open source work and whether or not money actually helps. We talk about his thoughts on compensating open source developers, funding an individual contributor versus funding a project, a happy path to maintainership if there is one, and so much more... |
**Break:** \[41:25\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I wanted to touch on what it's like to get paid for open source and how money and open source mix. When you were at Spree, you were being paid to work on open source, and it sounds like even some of your open source work now is on work hours. Do you think that the presence of money helps keep you in o... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Certainly. It absolutely does. If for instance I was not paid to work on Spree, I probably wouldn't have done as much work as I did. It allowed me to live my life, have my roof over my head, have food on my table sort of thing, for two and a half years. Within that two and a half years I did a substantia... |
With regards to culture and paying me to do open source contributions, they benefit indirectly from that because we're using the Elastic package at work, and if that Elastic package didn't exist, then we would probably use another package or somebody else would have to contribute to another open source project to do th... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Are there tradeoffs to it? Are there things where being paid to work on open source makes things harder, or just compromises you in some way? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, your ethics are kind of compromised in the way that "We're paying you to do open source, so these are the things we think are important and these are the things you should work on." At Spree, because I was paid to do Spree work, you've got this large group of work that you can do, and there's a lar... |
If I was paid to work on a particular open source project -- let's say I worked at Facebook and worked on the Babel project for instance, even though I'm not a JavaScript developer; a large open source project like that, used by thousands of people, because I'm paid by Facebook, Facebook gets their say of what I contri... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, it's a different kind of project, right? Which I guess again goes to show that open source is not all the same across all projects. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, I think it's rarely that direct... It's usually pretty indirect, right? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, it is... It's not like "By the way, we're gonna fire you if you don't add these features in." It's never that direct. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I think maybe a better example is the Go project, where the majority of the committers are at Google, and Google's certainly not telling these people what to do, because they are the kind of developers that are not told what to do... But they are sort of constantly inundated with Google's probl... |
**Ryan Bigg:** That's exactly right, yes. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[47:39\] I guess part of me wonders what makes open source not something that is fun as a volunteer hobby...? That's sort of going through my head right now, but then I think "Well, some people do enjoy contributing to open source in their spare time... And I guess I was just kind of thinking about, ... |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yes, it does. it does absolutely seem coherent. So when I was starting my contributions to Spree, it was a lot of times of doing Google group answering, and a couple of issues here and there, but nothing substantial. And then working on the project itself is enjoyable, so when I was contributing to other... |
But then open source is not free as in beer, it's free as in puppy, and you have to maintain it, and people come up with weird and wonderful feature requests, and bug reports that are literally a single line of like "It didn't work." I'm like, "What didn't work?" That grinds on you, that just gets to you over (I don't ... |
And you know, your interests change over time as well. That's another issue. You get started with an open source project and you love it and you work on it every day because it's something that you're passionate about. Then if the passion kind of fades with time, you're like "Well, that's no longer interesting to me, s... |
The money helped a lot with Spree. While I wasn't in love with the code as much as I was at the start, after two and a half years, the money kept me going. I was like, "I get paid to do this; I'm just gonna keep thinking about these problems and trying to solve them, even though the code is no longer enjoyable to work ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's almost like there has to be some reward at some point, whether it's building your reputation that's a suitable reward, or at some point then it just kind of becomes money. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, the reputation definitely came out of that, and I still get approached at conferences, like "Oh my god, it's Ryan Bigg. Oh, it's him!" "Oh, hello." "You wrote the book, you contributed to Spree", I'm like "That was years ago... I've done a lot more now." I don't know, it's very strange having this ... |
But in the niche of a niche of a niche of a niche where we exist, in this Rails world, people are like "Oh my god, it's Ryan Bigg!" It's so weird to see that change of people who are like "Oh, I don't care about you", and other people who are like "Oh my god, it's you!" |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's kind of the best of both world, right? Because then you can go to something else outside of open source and no one knows your name. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, that's right; lots of anonymity there. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It reminds me of like actual celebrities that are on a sitcom, and then they move past that sitcom and do like major independent films, and everybody's like calling them the name from their character 20 years ago... \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, totally. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You're like, "I've done more than Rails, come on!" |
**Ryan Bigg:** \[51:54\] Oh no, that's okay... Any contribution is fine; they can name anything I contributed to. I don't care if it's Rails 3 in Action or Multitenancy with Rails. Anything. It's just good to be known, and I try to get to know them as well. I just don't want to be like hero worship, but I wanna know wh... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Does any of it surprise you, that people from totally random walks of life that take interest in it? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, it does. Absolutely. I had all kinds of people - old, young; all sorts of things - approach me, and it's just... And when they come up to you and they're like "I read your book, and now..." So, that's right. I went to a Rails meetup in Sydney, and this lady called Metanya introduced herself to me a... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There's been a lot of self-reflection -- I'm just trying to think, like, is there anything else that you've learned in the last few years about managing your workload, and just sort of being better at managing your work and not burning out, and just kind of feeling happy in your daily life? What woul... |
**Ryan Bigg:** So I'm good at really thinking about how terrible I am at managing my workload, and my wife is also really good at thinking about how terrible I am at managing my workload; not only that she's good at telling me how terrible I am at managing my workload, and... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Your advice is to get married? \[laughter\] |
**Ryan Bigg:** My advice is not necessarily to get married, to have somebody like a close friend for instance - even that; you don't have to go the whole way of getting married, but somebody who can say "You're being a ridiculous idiot. Stop working so hard. How can I help you? How can we stop this burnout? You're grum... |
For a new developer - two years from now, I hope that he would know better practices of maintaining workload. If I was able to speak to Ryan from two years ago, I would say it's not that critical that you continue doing all this work. None of it matters that much that you have to kill yourself to do it, that you have t... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's a good advice for open source communities too, right? Even reinforcing that to each other, and not expecting that the other person is always gonna be there all the time. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I have a similar story to this, except I've been with my wife for like 12 years now. She would be like "You're being ridiculous now", but now I can actually recognize it before she needs to tell me. This is exactly what happens, actually - there's certain things that she's just never gonna do a... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[56:28\] That's a good degree of self-reflection there. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's taken a long time to get there, but yeah. |
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