heckless

Pedant alert: "it's" -> "its" :)

I don't have a huge issue with the ACM or even so much with IEEE. But have you ever submitted to or reviewed for Springer or Elsevier? It's an emasculating and thankless experience, and Springer and Elsevier go get to make huge profits off of everyone's free work. (haha, we just did it for exposure, right???)

I don't mean to imply that peer review is this shitty thing that we "have" to do. I review papers regularly and generally enjoy the process. But I think it's important to point out that no, we are not being paid for it, and actually typically the incentives in our jobs mean that peer review is a "thing we have to stuff in there somewhere", and certainly not a primary task.

Although reviewership is a useful thing that gets put on CVs, I can't think of a position I've ever seen where "review X papers" a year is part of the job requirement.

A more salient point about why it is important to note that peer review is unpaid is that academics, as authors, submit their work---for free---to a journal, where reviewers review it for free, and then the journal turns around and sells the article for $35 apiece.

I've been the organization administrator for a library that participates in Google Summer of Code for many years now. Of the questions that we typically see and the requests we typically get, some are high-quality and constructive---and are people legitimately asking for help.

But the article here kind of glosses over the reality of the hard part: the low quality questions. The "please help me get started"; the "how do I get accepted"; the "please review my PR".

It's all well and good to say, hey, take a step back! Be nice! Don't respond when you're angry! But this is not the reality for an overwhelmed open source organization---and let's face it, most popular projects are completely overwhelmed. The reality is that to wake up every day to countless new issues and pull requests and other demands on your time is absolutely soul-sucking, and after years and years of this it grinds you down and leaves you with resentment and disappointment, and that's just absolutely not great for anyone.

I don't necessarily have any rebuttal to what the author is saying, and I think the intentions are great, but I think it's also important to point out what reality is for people who are trying to build community and help: everyone slowly burns out doing it. It's like social work.

(food for thought: Github has made this problems orders of magnitude worse for organizations, because lowering the barrier to entry means now anyone who doesn't know where to start can open an issue and clog up a bug tracker in just a few seconds, and anyone who thinks they can write code can open a low-quality PR in just a few minutes, and this is more to do for the maintainers...)

I agree about the futility of trying to answer this question---that is what the entire article is about after all. But I am a practicing statistician so I feel the need to "well actually" sometimes when I see stuff like this. I can't help it.

> And if we go by the assumptions that every possible state in this set of possible states is equally likely (a common assumption in classical probability theory)

I know I am being nitpicky, but despite the fact that yes, it's common to assume equal priors, this often has no basis---especially in regards to this question. With only one observation we know virtually nothing about the distribution of possible observations other than that the state that we observed is in a region with nonzero probability. We can't conclude anything else with any certainty at all.

I was happy to see that in the article the author discusses this point in particular.

> Demanding for a feature without making a case for it. Not using any polite or nice phrasing in a thread.

In virtually every case where I have seen impolite issues filed or even abusive issues filed, the biggest success has always been when the project maintainers simply ignore the abuse and respond respectfully, as if the request had been worded more politely. The abusive issue opener will often apologize for their tone or simply adopt a different, much more friendly tone.

This is an effective strategy. In the same way that people filing issues need to remember that maintainers are people and should be treated as people, maintainers can also remember that people filing issues are people.

There's no need to act adversarially in open source software development.

Thanks for writing this. It takes a hard head to be an open-source project maintainer and taking a step back and evaluating how to contribute to open source software while keeping it enjoyable is a good thing to do.

I see so much abuse on Github (stuff like "your README is utter garbage" and other frustration, all over, all the time) and it's really disappointing. I don't ever expect the issue-reporting community to change so instead maintainers have to learn how to deal with it, which is unfortunate and leads to the type of burnout detailed here and in numerous other posts I've seen on HN.

Don't give in and quit! Ignore the trolls.

It really irks me, when a sentence has an unnecessary comma in it, it probably should have been a semicolon instead. Bugs, the crap out of me and I can't keep reading anymore!

I recently finished my PhD and had a terrible relationship with my "advisor"---who left part of the way through to start a startup doing the exact same thing he had brought me on to do (except I was not invited). I don't have any continuing contact with him and I certainly don't list him as a reference on my CV (nor did he help me make any useful connections before he ditched his lab group). In a difficult situation like that, what kept me going as what amounted to a self-advised graduate student for almost five years was that I enjoyed the work I was doing. If that intrinsic motivation was not there, I would not have finished---or if I had, it would not have been very meaningful: why get a PhD studying something I wasn't fully enjoying and engaged by?

I have watched enough graduate students "stick with it" non-enthusiastically and it doesn't usually work out well. I hate to be black-and-white, and I don't think it's as black-and-white as I'm about to put it, but either you love the work and nothing can keep you from it (or something close to that), or you should leave the PhD program (and there's nothing wrong with that!). I think PhDs do not really made to reward folks who don't fully enjoy the work they are doing, because often the post-graduation prospects are "pay a big price to keep doing your research" or "do something else".

Granted, I don't know much of your situation, so take the advice for what it's worth, but I hope that what I've written here is helpful.