Burnout in Software Development Demystified

This blog post was originally posted on my blog, The Valuable Dev.

I know what you might think: "Not me. I'm not the kind of guy to burnout! I know how to manage my stress. I know how to manage challenges. I'm in the control of my life!".

Burnout is only for the others... till it hit you. I experienced a severe form of burnout at the beginning of my career, as I was mentioning in this article about stress. I was exhausted, angry, and I had strong physical symptoms, like dizziness and headaches.

I had to stop working for months to come back to a normal state of mind. From there, I learned more and more about burnout by reflecting on my own experience, as well as seeing colleagues or managers with the same problems.

Obviously, I'm not an isolated case. From 1974 to 2008, no less than 6000 different resources (including books, articles...) were written on the subject. Some studies reported a burnout prevalence rates up to 69% in a given population (30% in teachers, 31% in medical students for example).

I would like to share with you what my researches on the subject taught me as well as my experience:

• What's burnout, exactly?
• What are the possible burnout syndromes you might experience?
• What are the common causes of burnout? Spoiler ahead: it's not only overwork.
• How to prevent burnout?

I see burnout as a road which gets desolated as you go forward. This road lead to the Cave of the Burnout Vampire, which can suck your motivation and your mental energy for months.

Indeed, burnout is more a spectrum than a definitive state. If you are at the very beginning of the Burnout Road, you have a mild burnout condition. If you are in the Cave of the Burnout Vampire, you have a severe one.

On this delightful and bucolic description, let's look at the Burnout Road from above.

What is Burnout?

Once Upon a Time...

It's important to understand how people came to speak about burnout before trying to define it. In general, if you want to really understand why something is what it is today, looking at its history is always interesting. It's true for technologies too.

The concept of burnout was first described by the psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in 1974. Interested by the topic, he conducted studies on his own colleagues (medical practitioners) to find more about it.

Professor Christian Maslach and her colleagues then took over his studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She's still considered the most preeminent scholar in the field. She extended burnout studies to other profession than medical and social related ones. More precisely, she studied professions requiring creativity, problem solving or mentoring. The kind of work a developer would do.

The studies show that burnout is a preeminent problem which exists in the entire world!

Even if the media spoke a lot about burnout these last 40 years, it's a fiercely debated topic among psychologist and medical practitioners. Many countries still don't recognize burnout as a valid diagnosis, for example.

In May 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) accepted burnout as an "occupational phenomenon" (and not a medical condition) on the advice of many health experts around the world.

What is Burnout, Exactly?

According to the World Health Organization:

Burn out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

First thing first, the burnout condition is always linked to your job. The definition speaks about chronic stress too: it's more than a bad day, it's something which happens repeatedly.

Everybody responds to chronic stress more or less differently. Freudenberger found that the dedicated and the committed employees have more chance to burnout. They have "significant amount of emotional work and empathy, personal involvement, and intrinsic motivation".

It makes sense: if you're involved in your work but the work environment refuse your involvement, you'll become more and more frustrated and disillusioned. For example, if you work in a working environment which is too chaotic or authoritative, you will feel the pain.

There is two important things which can create burnout: your own personality and the environment you work in. However, the working environment weight more in the burnout balance than the personality, as suggested by this study(see Causes and Outcomes).

It can explain why burnout is going through the roof the last decades for some type of jobs, like software development, touching all kind of personality and hierarchical levels, from developers to C-level executives (CEO, COO, CTO...).

The Possible Burnout Symptoms

The symptoms described here will raise in intensity the longer you will walk along the Burnout Road. Learning to detect them early is a very valuable skill before your burnout takes a more severe form.

Involvement Become Cynicism

If you felt involved in your company and this involvement let place to cynicism, something is wrong. How do you know that you're in the poisonous Land of Cynicism?

• You begin to criticize many aspects of your work: your colleagues, your clients, your managers and their decisions or actions.
• You have the impress that your work quality decrease, and your colleagues think the same.
• You begin to only do the least amount of work you're asked to do.

In general, you begin to have a poor opinion on the company (or the clients) you work for.

No Sense of Accomplishment

If you go to work and you have the feeling it doesn't have any purpose, you have lost your sense of accomplishment.

We need motivating goals in our life, for us to feel useful. If you spend most of your day wondering why you're doing what you're doing without finding answers, you have here a good sign which point to Burnout Hell.

Your Energy Is Gone

In the past, you had a good amount of energy throughout the day. Now, it seems to be gone. When you wake up the morning to go to work, you feel already exhausted. You didn't throw a big party or smoked anything illegal, but the mental fog you're in is real.

There are multiple levels of exhaustion:

1. You won't feel going to work from time to time.
2. You won't feel going to work every day
3. In a more serious burnout state, you might have dizziness, headaches or stomach cramps only by thinking to go to work.

Exhaustion is a strong sign that your burnout is real. Some studies suggest that exhaustion is mandatory to take the Burnout Road. However, it's not enough by itself: you'll need as well other symptoms to be sure you'll reach the Burnout Vampire.

Negative Emotions

Related to the other symptoms, negative emotions about your work and your colleagues are always a vicious circle. More negative emotions you'll have, more you'll blame your company to be the root cause of them, more negative emotions you'll have.

Of course, negative emotions will affect your mood and, at some point, it might make you angry with everybody, including the ones you love.

Physical Symptoms

Freudenberger characterized burnout with physical symptoms such as:

• Physical exhaustion and muscle pain
• Fatigue
• Frequent headaches
• Gastrointestinal disorders
• Sleeplessness
• Dizziness
• Shortness of breath

These are the symptoms for chronic stress too.

The Causes of Burnout

What can cause all of these symptoms which can, if not taken seriously, bring you into the Dark Cave Of The Burnout Vampire?

Some studies show that you need at least three of the causes described below to experience the most severe form of burnout. Here's a very effective recipe for burnout:

1. Take multiple causes, or one cause with high intensity.
2. Add enough time.
3. You feel very bad, don't you?
4. More time!
5. You have now the most severe form of burnout.

When you begin to walk the Road of Burnout, it might seem normal to feel that way. You don't really want to go to work every day, but whatever, you need to pay the bills. This is even more true if you're a beginner who has tendency to put every faults on yourself.

Remember: more you'll walk along the Burnout Road, more you'll have difficulty to come back to your normal mental state.

Overworking / Over-commitment

There are many misconceptions or incomplete information about burnout:

1. Burnout is only overwork.
2. If somebody experiences a burnout, working less is the solution.

It's true that exhaustion is an important cause of burnout, but it's not the only one. Working less won't solve a burnout, at least not entirely.

If you work a lot because you love what you're doing, for example, you might feel exhausted after a while, but not burnout. However, if you have other burnout symptoms going on, they will continue to evolve and poison your life.

Furthermore, you can have a normal workload and experience burnout anyway.

Let's not forget that programming is isolating. If you work non-stop, you will spend your days alone. You won't have social interactions, or very dull ones since your brain will constantly be busy trying to solve problems, instead of having relaxing conversations.

People have tendencies to only trust what they see. A developer is only working when he's behind his computer, for example. It's simply wrong. Bugs and features populate our brain even when we're doing something else. Therefore, it's not always easy and visible to know if a developer overwork.

Lack of Control and Autonomy

A lack of control or a lack of autonomy are often due to a lack of trust and / or some power abuse.

Lack of Trust

It's easy to see if your managers don't trust you:

• They are always looking at every single commit you're doing to be sure you're working.
• You don't have the authorization to do many things. Deploying on pre-production or production, for example.
• The management think that employees don't work when they are out of the office. Home office is therefore impossible.

This list is far from exhaustive. If you have other examples, feel free to let a comment below.

Micromanagement

You'll recognize micromanagement when somebody will try to take all the decisions for you and question the ones you've already taken, systematically.

This can be due to a lack of trust and / or power abuse. Some managers think, since they are "above" you in the hierarchy, they can do everything they want and make everything their own. They want a total control on you and what you're doing. "We have to do that because I said so" will be their mantra.

It can be more subtle than that: they might listen to you but never take any action. They might not let you experimenting with your ideas, too.

What are the consequences, you might ask? A lack of control and autonomy is a comfy nest for chronic stress.

A lack of control on your work means as well that you won't learn a lot either. We need to experiment and make mistakes for that.

Your Colleagues

For many of us, we're working most of our lifetime. Hence, our coworkers affect our life significantly, too. Human interactions can bring the best as well as the worst. Some examples:

• Unsolved conflicts which haunts your thoughts.
• Bullying.
• Power abuse.
• Harassment.
• Absence of (positive) feedback.
• Ultra competitive colleagues.

If you really don't get along with your colleagues, even after honestly trying, you'll have difficulty to wake up every morning to work with them. If you have more severe problem like harassment or bullying, run away from your current job.

Absence of Fairness

Companies' management can be very good to create competition among employees, sometimes without even knowing it. They reward some "talents" because of visible achievements they've accomplished, forgetting other employees who might bring quietly value to the company as well.

An example: some managers out there will compliment employees because "they stay late at work" or because "they did a wonderful job on the frontend's save buttons". They forget that:

• Staying at work late doesn't mean producing business value or even quality code; quite the contrary, in my experience. Overworking never brought quality.
• Knowledge workers are working by thinking and having ideas. This doesn't necessarily happen behind a computer in an open office.
• It creates feelings of jealousy and unfairness.

If you're a manager, keep in mind that work is not always something visible. Rewards and feedback should be given personally, and employees shouldn't feel compared to others.

If you are managing people, reward honestly every single developer on your team and show them that you know what they're doing, that you care and that you're thankful about it.

Values and Entropy

Psychological Safety

Psychological safety needs to be ensured in a company. It means that you are not afraid to express yourself, experimenting, and admitting you're wrong.

Everybody should thrive to create a generative company culture, where:

• The focus is on good results.
• The risks are shared.
• Failures are accepted and thought upon.
• Experimentation and iterations are understood and respected.

On the other side of the spectrum, some company cultures are power oriented (do-what-I-say-because-I'm-the-boss style), with a lot of:

• Politics.
• Distorted information.
• Fear.
• Threats.

Remember: whatever culture a company aims for and generously speak about during the recruiting interviews, the reality can be very, very different. Judge on what a company's doing, not on what they are saying.

Values

Another thing carried by a company culture are the company's values themselves. What's the goal, the mission of the company? Why do they want to grow their business?

The difficulties come when your values mismatch the company's. Let's imagine you love polar bears because they're cute, but unfortunately you're working for a massive gas company which destroy the environment, including the poor bears. Would you feel motivated to work for them, every single day?

Everybody has values, even if you have the impression that Dave, your colleague developer, doesn't care about anything except new overpraised technologies and trends. This is a value by itself. If your company don't want to use the new cool stuff, even with good reasons, Dave might close himself in a world of sorrow and pain.

An advice: don't hire Dave.

Company Entropy

A company can as well be so chaotic that their values and objectives are not clearly defined. One day they will do this because it's trendy, the other day a concurrent will do the contrary, so they'll follow. An absence of long term vision can confuse everybody.

Often, you won't even know if your work is useful, since nobody will dare give you any honest outcomes of the teamwork.

This will damage your motivation and your commitment.

Preventing Or Solving Burnout

Nobody wants to burnout. Preventing it is better than trying to recover from it.

Let's say you're more and more tired, you recognized yourself while reading the burnout symptoms, you see some causes which match some aspect of the company's culture you work with. What can you do?

Acting on the Environment

Now that we know the main causes for a burnout, you can try to find the biggest ones in your company. You need to be able to explain them and to illustrate them with concrete examples. You're a problem solver after all, and the first step is to define the problem.

If you have some colleagues you trust, speak about your discoveries with them first. If they agree with you and share your feeling, it's likely you might not be the only one on the Burnout Road. Social support inside your company (as well as outside!) can help you tremendously. Don't isolate yourself.

Then, speak about your concerns with your managers. Be honest. Even if developers can feel ashamed about burning out, keeping the silence won't help anybody. Heck, speaking about it might even help the whole industry and encourage other developers to follow your path! You can see it as another problem which needs to be solved.

Speak about the problems you've spotted in the company's environment and explain that it can burn other employees, too. Even better: speak to your managers with the colleagues who agree with you.

If you have some possible solutions in mind, it's even better. You can speak about them and see what can be done.

After that, observe how your managers are reacting for a defined period, what they are doing to improve the situation.

If they don't seem to understand the gravity of your state, or if they don't seem to care, find another job.

Let's be clear here: a company which has such problems can't be successful, and my experience proved it many, many times. There are exceptions, of course, but they need to have a very solid business model. Not everybody is McDonald, especially when we speak about startups.

Don't make the same mistakes I made: I explained the problems I had, spoke about them with some colleagues who agreed with me, and told the management that it could easily lead to burnout. However, the management didn't do anything. I stayed in the company anyway, trying to solve everything. This was a big mistake and it didn't end well.

If they don't listen to you now, they won't listen to you in the future. You can't enforce your help, especially if nobody asked for it. In that case, find another and better company to work with.

Know Yourself And Where You're Going

In most modern and stable societies, it seems we have never enough: never enough money, never enough time. It's a vicious circle: more time and money you'll have, more afraid you'll be to lose them, and more you'll try to have more.

This can definitely push you to work for companies for the wrong reasons (money and glory), without listening to your mental health.

You need to be aware how much pressure and chronic stress you can endure, to know how long you can sustain your walk on the Burnout Road. This is useful since, even if you quit your job, you might have to go through some notice period. Weeks or months can seem an eternity when you're burnout.

Listen to yourself, and don't play the superhero which can endure everything forever. Meditation is a good way for me to get some information about my mental state, for example. If my brain is full of cynical thoughts, if I think constantly about my company and the problems I have there, I need to be careful and act quickly.

Asking yourself these questions can give you strength when you need it the most:

• What do you want to accomplish in your life? Why? Since this is bigger than your work, try to keep your goals in mind.
• How much money do you need to be happy? Write a specific amount. We don't need as much as we think, most of the time. Your mental health is more important.
• Can you define what makes you happy?
• Is your definition of success related to the way you define happiness?
• Do you feel you've chosen your situation? If not, what can you do in the future to live your life more deliberately?

You won't be able to answer these questions from one day to another if you never really thought about them. That's fine. Ask yourself these questions from time to time. Don't put pressure on yourself. You'll find the answers, and they even might change overtime.

Knowing yourself well can help you find a job which is aligned with your values, too. It's the best way to prevent a burnout.

Hobbies Against Burnout

Doing something different from programming can help you a lot to distance yourself from your source of stress.

Something inspirational you enjoy and you can learn from is the best bet. It could be another creative activity, like drawing or writing, for example. It doesn't cost anything to try new things, you just need a bit of courage not to procrastinate.

A hobby is best when it brings you some sense of accomplishment. As developers, we all know this feeling when something we create finally works and does what it has to do.

You should try to come back to a more detached and playful state concerning your interests, programming included. Try to learn a new language for example and experiment with it. Begin a side project which really interest you. Don't expect too much, focus on the process, and enjoy!

A playful state is looking at things like a child. You want to play, to have fun with whatever you're doing, without expecting any result.

Professional Help

Depending on the intensity of your burnout (correlated, again, with the time spent on the Burnout Road), it can take months for you to get better. You'll know it when you'll be out of your job, trying to recover.

If you see that you're drowning down and down, even after you stopped working, it's time to see a specialist. Actually, you should seek one as soon as you feel the need to do so. Your health, mental or physical, is the most important thing you "have". Don't let your pride neglect it: we all need help, we should give some when we can and not be afraid to ask for it when we need it.

Take Seriously The Burnout Vampire

We are living in a society of service, where the "human resource" has an important place. In the software world, developers can create great automation which can save a lot of time for many people, only with a small amount of developers. Little input, potential massive output.

Also, for this statement to be true, a company needs motivated, responsible and involved employees. It means that the culture of the company needs to nurture these ideas. If it's not the case and burnout begins to creep in the environment, you need to take action as soon as you can.

To summarize, what did we learn in this article?

• Stress related to your work can push you from mild to severe form of burnout.
• Burnout can manifest itself via a mix of cynicism, a lack of accomplishments, a feeling of exhaustion, an obsession regarding your job, and negative emotions.
• The causes of a burnout are multiple too. Do you overwork? Do you feel a lack of control and autonomy in your job? Is the company culture nurture open communication and experiments?
• To prevent yourself going further on the Burnout Road, you should try to explain to your managers that the work environment needs to change. Trying to "fix" an employee's burnout won't save his colleagues and it won't improve the company culture.
• Rely on your family and your social interactions to escape the Burnout Road. Strong social bounds are the best medicine against chronic stress.