In reply to @delroth:delroth.net
semi-related, checking my intuition: I think "reliance on people with high-altruism utility functions" is not a linear knob - I expect that once you start reaching a certain amount of people with lower altruism, you get the people with higher altruism to leave go do something else. WDYT?

One time I was in a position to be paid to do OSS. Something I was doing before, but now I was paid, it was supposed to be the dream. It was paid like half my usual hourly rate, but it was OSS!

What ended up happening is that I felt the additional responsibility from being paid, while also feeling shitty about being paid badly. There were other issues like a too vague SoW. But now the thing I was doing with my heart before, had become a drag. It was really confusing.

My conclusion from this experiment is that if I do work, I want to be paid properly. Work is work. Don't "oh but it's OSS" me. Or I do it for free. I love giving things away, and that it's own heart reward.

This is just me of course because we all respond to incentives differently. But I had this naive conception that OSS+money would necessarily make things better, and it backfired dramatically in that case. I still think that +money can be useful, but maybe structured in different ways, like material support, or to show appreciation.

In reply to @edef1c:matrix.org
none of this is a particularly strong claim that i'm doing things valuable or essential enough to be paid for or whatever

You are definitely doing things very worthy and essential enough to get paid for. It's unfortunately not an option at the moment.

And honestly these messages scare me a little bit, as to me it seems like you might already be further on the burn out path than you might realise. I'm not sure if I should even write this here in a public room...

But please be careful about this. I'm 7 years into a severe burnout and you really don't want it.

In reply to @delroth:delroth.net
Infra work kind of has the unfortunate property that you can't really dissociate it from responsibilities :(

In reply to @delroth:delroth.net
I mean, you can have someone work on infra without taking on responsibilities, but usually that just means someone else is doing it

In reply to @patka_123:matrix.org
I understand that, but I'm also very aware what the consequences of that mentality are. You really don't want to go down on a multi year burnout where you are unable to get out of bed 80% of your day. It's good to have a very high sense of responsibility, but those will also fall in the water if you can't function anymore (as will much of the rest of your life in that period)