Burnout in Tech

Hey!

In my experience, I have observed multiple cases of burnout in the tech industry and have experienced it myself. Here I want to share my thoughts on why it happens and how to overcome burnout.

Burnout?

What is burnout? And how to identify if you have burnout?

According to Christina Maslach, burnout is a syndrome represented by three groups of symptoms:

• Emotional Exhaustion. That's the main and fairly self-explanatory group. You feel emotionally overwhelmed, drained and exhausted.
• Depersonalization. This means becoming distant, impersonal or even a bit hostile in how you interact with others. You may feel you are running on autopilot or just don't care anymore.
• Reduction of Personal Accomplishment. So, you feel you are not competent and not productive.

And, of course, besides symptoms, you have the root cause of burnout. To fully recover from burnout, you need to identify the root cause and make some changes (usually to your life) to eliminate it.

The problem with this plan is that we have the first symptom – Emotional Exhaustion – which significantly complicates everything.

First of all, it makes you unable to do anything. When you are exhausted, it's nearly impossible to find energy to perform even usual duties and activities. Finding energy for identifying root causes is also not possible.

At the same time, without this work done to identify why exactly it happens to you, and how to change your life to get rid of this syndrome, you can't significantly move forward.

Second, exhaustion may make you think that you are just a little bit tired. You just worked a bit longer this week, and you'll recover by having a lazy weekend.

That may work, but usually, there is something bigger behind burnout, and keeping yourself afloat this way might not be very effective.

Finally, you may not even recognise this exhaustion until the moment it's so extreme that you can't deal with it. If you didn't experience burnout before, and you are not familiar with related feelings, it can be hidden from you for quite some time, and then it just crushes you, making you unable to do anything with it.

To break this cycle – and this is what I tried myself – you can do two things:

1. Lower exhaustion levels by analysing how your everyday activities affect you and adjusting these activities accordingly.
2. Use the energy gained from the previous step to identify the root causes of burnout and execute more significant changes in your life for long-term results.

Let's dive deeper into these areas.

Fighting Exhaustion

The first step is always to make you able. If you are exhausted, you can't do anything, but you need to do something to overcome this condition.

The approach I've used is to journal my life, measure how exhausted I am, and analyse the results. That is a CBT-inspired technique that I find extremely useful and which has helped me a lot.

The idea is very simple – every 30-60 minutes (or on each work interruption – this matches pomodoro techniques quiet well), write down current time, what exactly you were doing right now, and how you rate your exhaustion level from 0 to 10 (or on any other scale you prefer).

Over time, you'll have a set of data points you can use to visualise your day, like a personal energy chart.

Then, you look for activities that most significantly influence exhaustion. You can find them by checking the difference in scores of two consecutive data points. The bigger this difference is, the more significantly this kind of activity influences you.

This exercise helps to identify which activities increase and which decrease exhaustion. With this information, you can try to limit activities that increase exhaustion and use activities that decrease exhaustion to recover.

Using this technique, you can slowly move forward, decreasing your overall exhaustion level. And after that, you can start working on the root causes.

Root Causes

Now, when you have some free energy, you have a room to ask deeper questions. Why did this even happen? How can we avoid this in future? What is the real root cause?

Answers to these questions are frequently very personal, and the journal introduced above can help to identify at least some involved areas. Analysing how your daily life before and after the syndrome is different might also be helpful.

In my case, I realised that the majority of my duties back then did not match my strengths. I was able to perform these duties, but the ROI of this was very low, which was initially not obvious to me.

Speaking about, from my point of view, common areas, I'd just mention a few examples:

1. Meaningless work. The work should be meaningful, it should have a purpose, and it should be clear to you what this purpose is. There were a lot of examples in our history of how forced labour in combination with meaninglessness was used as a torture or even extermination measure.
2. Absence of strategy. If you don't build a strategy for your career or your life, you may find yourself in unexpected situations, like being burned out, or doing something you don't like or want to do. Understanding what you want to achieve, what your values and strengths are, and building a proper strategy with this in mind will reduce the risks of burnout due to increased meaningful self-control.
3. Crisis of Senior Software Engineers. While Junior Engineers are absorbing knowledge and dealing with assigned tasks, Middle Engineers are dealing with assigned projects, and Senior Engineers are dealing with assigned technical and business goals, roles above these usually don't have tasks, projects or goals assigned to them. They need to set goals themselves, and this might be challenging. Additionally, there is a common path from Senior Engineers to Engineering Managers. Both these possible paths lead to significant changes in approaches to work and daily routine. Without proper attention, this may lead to frustration and burnout.

Conclusion

There may be many different reasons for burnout, but, from what I have found, all measures to overcome it are related to having more control over one's life.

Journaling to analyse the impact of your activities on your life, analysing your own strengths and values, building an informed strategy for your life, and then acting accordingly, may seem to remove some freedom from you. Still, in reality, it gives you more control over what is happening to you, including your psychological state.

2025-07-03