I have ridden the burnout train before. It was a miserable experience.

Rewind to 2020. The startup I had joined in 2016 was acquired by a FAANG company in 2017. The new company gave us a healthy grace period to ramp up, but as time marched forward the corporate expectations on our org grew ever-larger. Information security demanded an audit. Finance dictated we shrink cloud spending by 10%. API response latency was up and we needed to bring it down by 50ms. I was running the SRE team, and it was becoming a lot.

The point I knew something was wrong was when I got paged during Thanksgiving 2019. We had traveled to the Sierra Nevada mountains with friends and the feast preparations had begun. My pager went off. I sprinted upstairs to grab my laptop, sliding in my socks on the carpet. My knee went down hard into the floor. 

I opened my laptop, saw that a service had run out of memory, restarted the instance, and went back to my holiday business. Total distraction time: 15 minutes. As I nursed my rug burned knee something was clear to the people in the room that was still dawning on me: I was hating every minute of my job.

The hate I felt wasn’t toward any person or any situation. It was a generalized frustration and irritability. I hated that I was underwater. I hated that I felt frustrated by my workload. I was quick to anger when things didn’t happen properly. I wanted to blame my manager, but I knew that I had willingly taken on my responsibilities. I hated that I shot myself in the foot by not communicating more effectively with my manager. That fact made me even more frustrated, but purely at myself this time.

The next week I (finally) talked with my supervisor and let him know that I was burnt out. He moved quickly to lighten my load and divide some of my responsibilities. This didn’t fix my burnout, but it did provide some breathing room. It was also a great career advancement opportunity for my peers. In hindsight, by holding on to so many responsibilities myself I was preventing others from demonstrating the skills to get them promoted. That is a blog post for another time…

My burnout recovered bit by bit. It took six months, but by the next summer I was feeling back to “normal”. Still, that July a former coworker let me know about a great new opportunity with their company. If I didn’t just go through burnout recovery I probably would have ignored him. Because I was still harboring some of that frustration and irritability I ended up saying “yes” to the recruiter when they reached out. The rest is history.

What can we learn from all of this? I think there are several lessons, but we can break them down into three for now:

1) Be vigilant for signs of burnout in yourself and your employees. Steer clear early.

The total cost for a bad case of burnout is high, for both the business and the individual. It is far better for everyone involved to steer clear of burnout as soon as the early signs are present. Don’t wait for them to say they are overloaded. Constantly ask them about their stress level, their workload, and week-to-week changes in their relationship with their work.

2) Burnout may hit your most-engaged people hardest.

In retrospect, the root cause of my burnout was a failure to say “no”. I wanted to help the org whenever we were in a tough spot. I had the skills and the knowledge to address problems that were constantly popping up. Why shouldn’t I help? I felt needed and I felt important. It felt good. However, the constant piling-on just served to erode the foundations of my motivation until it all collapsed on itself.  If you have someone that is constantly volunteering to take care of challenges make sure to check in with them more often.

3) Recovery from burnout can take ages. 

It is not a matter of just fixing the issues or dialing down the total amount of work. I can say with authority that it is an effortful journey back to an engaged state of mind. Time away from work, new challenges, resetting expectations, and setting boundaries are just a few things that can help.

None of this is pleasant. None of this is happy. I think the best step toward addressing burnout as an industry is to talk about it. If a manager decides to consciously ignore burnout as a factor and optimize for short-term deliveries from their team then, hey, more power to them. If you have a desire to optimize around the long-term success of your organization then navigating the burnout cycle is a critical pillar of sustainable engineering.

Photo: The Amtrak Pacific Surfliner stopping at the San Luis Obispo station. It’s a beautiful ride north from Santa Barbara.