Growing and scaling project leadership

Being a maintainer and a project leader is most often very rewarding, giving the person a chance to showcase their talents and skills while being able to make an impact on others globally. But at the same time, it can be quite stressful, as we saw in Chapter 8, Dealing with Conflict. I did a cursory search and came up with several stories about the stress a maintainer takes on:

• Being ridiculed for your open source project (https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/)
• Maintainers hitting their breaking point and quitting or even sabotaging their own projects (https://www.businessinsider.com/open-source-developers-burnout-low-pay-internet-2022-3)
• Stress on how to say no to a feature request (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366248)

There is a similar pattern I’ve seen in early-stage start-ups, where you see founders taking on a number of roles from sales to marketing to product development, and roles such as...