Burnout among programmers is common

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Interesting:

Burnout isn’t unique to the Linux community, of course. However, at times, the problem can seem almost epidemic in the community, and people seem reluctant to talk about it publicly.

Both Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon and Ubuntu volunteer and journalist Amber Graner find that, when they deliver talks based on Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North’s The Burnout Cycle, afterwards people approach them privately to talk about their own experiences with burnout.

Similarly, kernel hacker and Ada Initiative co-founder Valerie Aurora talks about sitting with a dozen women and technology activists and discovering that all of them were burned out, recovering from burnout, or else had been burned out in the past.

Also interesting to here this, which I assume lead to the invention of git:

No one seems immune, not even Linus Torvalds. Although he begins by saying, “I’ve never really had a burnout event,” he goes on to recollect a situation that sounds very much like the early stages of burnout:

“We had really big fights back in 2002 or so (“Linus doesn’t scale”) where I was dropping patches left and right, and things really weren’t working. It was very painful for everybody, and very much for me, too. Nobody really likes criticism, and there was a lot of flaming going around — and because it wasn’t a strictly technical problem, you couldn’t point to a patch and say, ‘hey, look, that patch improves timings by 15%’ or anything like that: there was no technical solution. The solution ended up being better tools, and a work flow that allowed much more distributed management.”

Also:

Still another source of burnout for women in particular is their under-representation in the community. Depending on the project, women typically make up one to five percent of the community. Not only do women have to endure sexist remarks, pornographic presentations, and outright hostility, but they often feel the need to prove themselves — often, to established women as much as the male majority.

“It’s similar to being in the military,” says Graner, a veteran from the first Gulf War. “You need to do ten percent more than everyone else to be seen as good as they are.”

For women actively trying to alter the culture, the stress is even greater. “There are simply too few women in open source to do all the work,” Aurora says. “A one percent community that’s already struggling is just a recipe for burnout. You’re already in a precarious situation where you’re getting a lot of messages saying that you don’t belong, and you’re adding on top of that hours of volunteerism for activism. You feel bad for not doing the programming, and for having doubts at all.”

Nor is the situation improved by the fact that, until recently, one woman has tended to be the figurehead for women’s activism at any one time. “You become the lightning rod for criticism and death threats,” Aurora says. “This is a huge cost. Every time someone becomes a leader for women in open source, their career suffers.”

To further complicate matters for men and women alike, burnout is a condition that everybody has trouble seeing or admitting to. “They can see the signs in everyone else, but can’t see the reality in their own reflection looking back at them,” Graner says. “And sometimes they believe that to use the term ‘burnout’ is negative — like they can’t tell anyone they’ve burned out.”