New volunteers sometimes expect the red-carpet treatment as someone volunteering their (pretty expensive presumably!) time and as someone accomplished in their field. Volunteers usually get the opposite treatment since it turns out the other volunteers tend to come from a similar perspective and someone doing the hard human work is often contributing a lot more to the project than an otherwise excellent engineer.

You can of course choose your volunteer activities to be interesting to you. Open source is one such very fun activity but lo-and-behold in projects I've been involved with the human aspect is often very important and requires a similar amount of hard work. This is often truer for bigger projects/organizations than small ones.