Burn Baby Burn
I, as many in software/engineering, have experienced burnout. While I cannot speak to other industries and the rate of burnout, I do know it is rampant in software. I can see it in the eyes of coworkers that they too have fallen victim.
Burnout makes you want to snap at those around you, feel hopeless/anxious, and simply just dread every aspect of work. Have you noticed it’s slightly harder waking up to go to work or you’re only getting out of bed at the very last minute? Do you start to feel completely indifferent to what you’re working on? Have you lost that spark and no longer feel like you have the mental capacity to work the hours you once were? These are some of the early warning signs and it’s important to recognize them early before you become a net-negative productive employee.
When burnout reaches later stages, everything becomes difficult. Your brain simply shuts down and you can no longer do common tasks much less critical thinking work. Similar to depression, your reaction times and ability to string together thoughts rapidly deteriorates. It’s Saturday morning and you’re already dreading showing up to work on Monday. You use all your PTO and still, that unproductive feeling persists when you finally return to your work tasks. Every work event is spun in a negative light. You might even start to feel physically anxious or sick when you finally try to sit down and look at a task. Overall, it feels like your mind is betraying you as your brain becomes mush.
I believe burnout is officially recognized in the DSM-5 which is a positive affirmation of the issue at least existing now instead of being bucketed in with depression or other mental illnesses. While there are textbook definitions, by the time it reaches late stages, it’s fairly obvious. It’s difficult to identify in the early stages because it sneaks up on you. I remember when I first started working, I could work a 14 hour day no problem and wake up the next day at 7 AM to do it all over again. I could run problems over in my head all day and looked forward to coming up with a solution. While I think burnout shares a lot of similarities to depression, the root causes can be completely different. Until I tried to take action (aka cut back on work) I thought I would eventually will my way out of it.
In corporate U.S. where there’s a dog-eat-dog mentality, it’s hard to realize when you’ve pushed yourself too much. We view Olympic athletes on T.V. as heroes, the Navy SEAL as superhuman, and the Wal-Street guy putting in 80 hours as the climactic corporate warrior. There’s a mentality that all you need is hard work to succeed and be happy. With this idea in mind, it’s extremely easy to fall into the trap that working 12 hours a day will bolster you too to success you’ve only dreamed about. If you’re physically not up for it? You’re lazy, incompetent, and dare I say it? Average. We all want to be the heroes in our own journey, but this ethic only gets you so far.
I used to think I could do it all. I finished up a Masters in 1.5 years with a high GPA while working 40-60 hours. If some deadline slipped at work more than likely because the task was unrealistically time-boxed, I avowed to have it complete ASAP. Over a couple years, it took its toll. I held a mantra of personal accountability to the extreme end but it was not benefitting me, it was making me a less reliable employee as the work piled on. It’s easy to sink your teeth into everything when you’ve always veered on the side of being an academic overachiever compared to some of the general population, but it’s difficult to create your own balance.
What finally helped me? I was not even aware of burnout at the time. I knew as I became less productive that something in my brain was physically just not right. I Googled symptoms and it finally all clicked. Even after knowing I had an extreme case of burnout, I found it difficult to admit it to myself. Was I that weak that I couldn’t handle a couple weeks/months of hard work? It was disappointing admitting to myself that I had a physical limit of how much work I could handle. Sure, I could keep going but the more I kept going, the less functional I became at work. The first step in my road to recovery was simply acknowledgement.
To snap out of it feels like a long journey to recovery. Taking a month off of work will work magic in the short-term but sometimes it may take longer to undo years of stretched brain. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution and the severity can drastically impact how much time you need to unwind.
While I know many other fields experience burnout, I think it’s so common in engineering because there’s not much work you can do without stretching the neurons to pump out critical thinking type work. I rarely get the chance to work on proper documentation or simply drop formulas into an excel document. No, no, no. It’s figuring out how I’m going to integrate a software test suite with the current code base or architect how the code should look for a new feature. If I’m not doing tasks such as this, I’m wasting critical value added to the product in a feature factory environment.
I wanted to share my recollection of burnout to know that there’s such a thing as work-life harmony. I wish I had set hard stops on the amount of time I worked in a day regardless of the project’s status. I wish I had set time aside each day to workout to relieve the boiler point stress. I wish I had spent more time dedicated to learning stuff that had nothing to do with engineering or my job. It’s easy to say yes and hard to say no. If I dropped dead tomorrow, does the company actually care or will they be focusing on finding my replacement ASAP?
All of this was a revelation at the time. Nowadays, it’s still easy to fall into the burnout cycle but I remind myself that to be working at my best I need to hack together how I’m going to get a manageable amount of work done. I take a laissez-faire attitude that I’d rather be fired for not completing work than skip a weekday workout or watching a new movie I’ve been wanting to see. In my mind, it requires this amount of ruthless prioritization to focus on my mental wellbeing and in turn, I’ve been able to reach closer to peak productivity.
I read that our brains can only handle 25-30 hours of critical thinking in a week before productivity starts to diminish and I truly believe this. I know there are many engineers being pushed past their limits and want to see this change. A spotlight has been shined on mental health in the workplace in the last couple years, but I still feel there’s a long ways to go with how it impacts both your work and personal life. There’s no magic pill that will help you recover from burnout, so you need to prioritize your own health at any cost. I feel there’s more that can be done from an employer’s perspective to accommodate burnout but it’s also important to keep in mind nobody is going to watch out for your wellbeing like yourself, so remember to always treat yourself well and hold yourself to the same compassion you would show to others.
