Yes, but you can also do things for other people to make their day better. Saying that happiness comes from within doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try help others feel happy.
The best leaders never take credit themselves. It doesn’t matter if it’s a paid job or as a volunteer on an OSS project, if you lead, you give all the credit to those who work under your direction.
Then you're just shifting the same unhappiness the person who wrote this blog feels to the leaders. That sort of flies when the leaders get a ton of money or other benefits but this is an OSS maintainer. Going for extremes tends to lead to worse outcomes than aiming for a good middle ground.
How would giving credit to the author of the article (the person that did most of the legwork) cause the project maintainer to feel unhappy ? I simply don’t get that.
The project maintainer surely would have not felt bad giving credit to someone ? Exhibiting this kind of leadership usually makes me feel great !
On the contrary, as we see from the article, the lack of credit really did create unhappiness from thin air…
I agree that in this case the maintainer should have at least put then as a co-author. At the same time the maintainer should get credit for their own on the improved patch. Middle ground versus extremes of leader get's all explicit credit or leader gets no explicit credit.
>It doesn't create unhappiness when you're a leader because that's part of the deal.
Having spoken to a lot of low level leaders I'd disagree. It does create unhappiness because in the end they are no less human. That unhappiness may be worth it for the other benefits and the happiness they gain from them but saying they don't experience unhappiness is dismissing their very human emotions. But often the unhappiness dominates, they burn out and then get replaced by some narcissist/sociopath. That person is fully happy and rises up the ranks.
This sounds like they didn't understand what they were signing up for. If I lead a project, I get to take credit for the project not for specific IC work.
Of course if you happen to do IC work as well it makes sense to take credit for that, but I think that mixing leadership and IC work tends to result in burnout.
