Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout

Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-22T11:25:13Z

On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 01:13:11PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 11:05:32AM +0200, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
> > On 8/22/23 09:41, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > > On Mon, 21 Aug 2023, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > >
> > > > > It is not clear to me how to get honest answers without fear of
> > > > > loosing an ability to work with that subsystems later.
> > > >
> > > > One straightforward (on paper) option is to guarantee anonymity. When I
> > > > was in university, students were given the opportunity to provide
> > > > feedback on teachers, and the feedback was aggregated into a report that
> > > > didn't contain any personal information that could be used to identify
> > > > the students.
> > >
> > > I understand where you are coming from with this (my university did the
> > > same :) ), but in my view this has a huge potential for not really
> > > reflecting reality. Rationale being: the people who e.g. got their code
> > > rejected will naturally tend to provide negative feedback, even if
> > > rejecting the code was objectively the right thing to do.
> > >
> > > And vice versa.
> > >
> > I do see the advantage, but the main disadvantage here is that it's eroding
> > trust between people. Anonymous review tends to be used for
> > negative feedback, and I am aware that negative feedback to maintainers
> > can have a direct impact on your ability to work in that subsystem
> > (and believe me, I have been in that position. Several times.)
> > But in the end if you want to continue to work in that subsystem
> > you have to come to some sort of arrangement here.
> > I do believe that our maintainers are capable of differentiating
> > between personal and technical issues, so it should be possible
> > to work together despite personal ... (issues? differences?).
> >
> > But none of the above will work if the feedback is anonymously.
> > Maintainer will have a reason for reacting that way, and won't
> > be able to explain themselves properly if they don't know whom
> > to address.
>
> I don't think that it is possible to provide feedback purely
> anonymously, as subsystems has pretty stable number of contributors
> and the feedback that they will provide will allow identify them
> relatively easy by savvy maintainer.

Usually, feedback is anonymized by gathering information from multiple
sources, and compiling it in a way that underlines the main points
instead of focussing on particular personal stories. The process can
also filter out non-constructive feedback. For instance, if multiple
replies to the survey mention a very large time to get patches reviewed,
that's something that can be part of an anonymized report. This however
requires a large enough pool of developers to submit feedback, so it may
not work well in some cases.

--
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart