Voices of Burnout
The Human Cost of the Always-On Culture
“I started in tech late 2015 in a helpdesk with no high school diploma or college degree, I've hustled a lot over the last few years and currently work as an SRE for a major cyber security company.
The longer I spend time in the industry, the more I see people in shambles. One of my colleagues recently had to take several months off for mental health leave. In another job, one of the guys in the security auditing team literally worked himself to death - stress induced heart attack, likely caused by the fact that he forced himself to work essentially 24/7.”
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“I feel like I'm looking around and watching my peers drop like flies. At times it seems more like a warzone that you have to fight your way through than a career path.
I've never fully burned out myself, though I've been close and I recognize the signs. Obviously mental health is incredibly important, especially in this industry.”
“I've been grinding nonstop since college. My passion for tech/CS has dwindled because of the high stress and soul-lessness of my job and this field. I don't understand why some people in this industry are such workaholics, especially when it's unnecessary. It almost feels like some form of pride. It drags you down with them, because if you decide to go home early -- you appear lazy.
The bullshit "on-call" culture and companies insisting that their devs should be responsible for their service 24/7 when they can just hire people to do the job, it's an entire job role itself... Also it feels like guilt-tripping the developers, especially the younger ones...”
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“There have been tiny sweet moments in my work life, but the majority of it has been a shit storm.
I've been a "strong performer" in my company for years, and now I don't care anymore... I want my life and freedom back. Both my mental health and physical health was destroyed these years, luckily I had the finances for cover them. However in the back of my mind, I know I wouldn't have had know issues if it wasn't for working such a stressful job. The bullshit office politics, the backstabbing, and the masks people wear, it's disappointing...”
“I'm in my first senior position and am finally understanding why some people leave the tech industry. Every company wants to push push push and grow grow grow and it's really taking a toll on me right now. Is it possible to stay at the same level for the entirety of your career? Because my sanity is a much better long-term investment than a title on my LinkedIn profile. I either want to stay at a senior level or drop back to a Junior role. Almost every job description says "you won't get bored" and all I hear is "you will work non-stop." After this last year, I'd gladly take a boring job with less pay now that I've gotten my student loans down to a manageable level.”
“My last title was principal software developer for a publicly traded company. I've worked 15 years now, 6 years of which were freelance. Mostly because of personal reasons I've just been completely unable to take a vacation or do anything until lately where I took months off of work after being laid off.
The reason I mention the publicly traded company is that I've become completely disillusioned by the ramifications brought by typical corporate interest in manipulating their own stock prices, even if it means laying everyone off so they can get a stock price bump or hit earnings predictions. On top of that, I'm seeing a lot of attacks from people now on software developers in general. Actions taken by people such as Elon Musk and public comments by other CEOs are making my attitude towards work even more negative. They seem to be emboldened by expecting insane hours for less pay and are actively pushing laymen and regular people to have this attitude that software developers are overpaid people who don't deserve any of the perks associated with working in tech.”
“Last fall, after a few years of working for a department of the federal government, I found myself dealing with what I now understand to be the typical symptoms of burnout -- no motivation, aversion to work, cynicism, and depression. To me, the problem felt like it was the work. I had a manager who paid no attention to me, repetitive and dull work maintaining legacy database applications, and zero support from colleagues. I did the things I thought I was supposed to do: found a therapist to talk it over with, took six weeks short-term disability on a doctors' recommendation, started exercising, journaling, meditating. By the end of the six weeks off I was beginning to feel like myself again.
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When I went back to work, it wasn't long -- maybe a couple of weeks -- before the old feelings of hopelessness started to surface again. By February of this year, only a few months after my medical leave ended, it had grown once more to be too much for me to handle on my own -- I was crying every day before and after work (and sometimes at my desk) from the mental exhaustion of doing even simple little feature requests or bug fixes, the kind of thing that I used to be able to do quite happily for hours at a time earlier in my career. When I looked at my colleagues' code during review, all I could see was the flaws, and I grew bitter and distant from my team. After a last-ditch request for transferring departments was denied by my manager, I decided to pack it up and just quit.
I was rapidly headhunted with what seemed like a golden ticket -- fully remote, working on a product in the field I studied in university (NLP), 20% more pay, working with a team of people that seemed during the interviews to be passionate and interesting. I told them I would need two months off before starting the gig to recover from my last job, and they readily agreed. At the end of those two months, once again, I felt so much better: I was exercising, eating well, seeing friends and family, and generally open to what life had to offer. Now I've been in the new job for only a month, and my mental health has never been worse. All I can see is mountains of technical debt, a culture of mostly freshly-graduated devs who seem happy to work 12 hour days six days a week, and managers who are beholden to sales and unable (or unwilling) to push back for saner deadlines or better working conditions for their teams. At the end of each day I am too exhausted mentally and emotionally to do anything other than order take out and sit in front of the television until I fall asleep. I can barely recognize myself as the person I was a month ago.“
“I’m 28yo been working for around five years, worked in mobile dev and moved to devops and cloud the last three years, I work at a big tech corp now and haven’t felt burnt out as much as I have this year.
The pay is good, perks are good and yet I feel like I’ve lost all kinds of motivation. I used to pull all nighters and overtime I didn’t get paid for in other companies I’ve worked in and I didn’t feel as frustrated as I do now, can’t focus, feel overwhelmed and stressed all the time, i don’t find joy in doing what I do which was the case for me at my last job, where I had great mentors and colleagues.“
