Guests: Kat Cosgrove | Billy Thompson
Companies: Minimus |Akamai
Show Name: KubeStruck
Topics: Kubernetes, Open Source, CNCF

Burnout in open source isn’t a warning sign. It’s the baseline.

In this clip, Kat Cosgrove, Kubernetes Release Team Subproject Lead and Head of Developer Advocacy at Minimus, says the quiet part out loud: she is burned out, her peers are burned out, and she doesn’t know a single long-term open source maintainer who isn’t. The only difference is that most people have learned how to hide it.

That reality is easy to miss from the outside. Projects keep shipping. Releases go out. Conferences are packed. Maintainers show up smiling, productive, and engaged. But behind the scenes, the emotional and cognitive load is relentless. Open source maintainers and developer advocates don’t get the luxury of having a bad day in public. They are expected to be available, upbeat, and community-first at all times.

Kat describes what that pressure looks like in practice. Conferences blur together. The constant “peopling” becomes overwhelming. The noise never stops. Even when burnout is severe, maintainers still feel obligated to perform — because the work depends on them, and the community expects consistency.

Her coping mechanisms are simple but deliberate. Stepping away from people, even briefly. Sitting alone with a book. Taking real time off. Disconnecting entirely from technology. Spending time in places without cell service. These aren’t luxuries. They’re survival tactics.

Billy Thompson, Senior Global DevOps & Platform Engineering, Office of the CTO at Akamai, echoes the same theme from a different angle. Burnout isn’t a single event — it’s cyclical. He talks about burning out and reigniting repeatedly, and the struggle to find balance when the things you enjoy overlap heavily with the work you’re paid to do. For him, creative outlets like music, photography, and analog hardware provide a necessary counterweight to constant technical focus.

What makes this conversation important is its honesty. Burnout isn’t caused by a lack of passion or commitment. It’s the natural result of long-term responsibility without enough shared load, boundaries, or institutional support. The industry depends on open source, but often treats the humans behind it as infinitely resilient.

Kat’s final message is sobering but grounded. Most maintainers are burned out. You just can’t tell — because they’ve learned how not to show it. That invisibility is part of the problem. Sustainability doesn’t start with better tooling or more processes. It starts with acknowledging the human cost of keeping critical infrastructure alive.