Is Burnout Inevitable in the World of Tech?
22 Mar 2025 #careerIn 2023, I burned out.
I checked all the boxes for the first time. The burnout boxes. It wasn’t a good thing. And it took me almost an entire year to recover.
I know I’m not the only one, of course. It’s all over the tech industry.
In recent weeks, I’ve been exchanging emails with another senior software engineer who went through a burnout season. His take? The tech industry is unsustainable.
These days, I’ve been chatting with a group of colleagues and friends. Most of them claimed to experience some sort of boredom at their jobs. OK, boredom isn’t burnout, but it’s a warning sign.
We’re privileged to work in the tech industry.
But, it has its own challenges—YMMV, of course:
- We work long hours.
- Coding is mentally exhausting.
- AI threatens us to take our jobs.
- Layoffs are always around the corner.
- Agile and SCRUM take control away from us and trap us in “ceremonies.”
- We’re problem solvers at heart, but often we don’t get to solve problems.
- We’re expected to code after hours just to prove we’re “passionate.” Side projects and open source contributions.
- We have high standards for quality and development practices. But stakeholders’ expectations don’t align ours. They care about different things.
The toll? Our mental health. Burnout.
The solution? I don’t have one.
Yesterday I found on the front page of Hacker News a post about tech being a burnout machine and unionizing as the solution. Mmmm. Dunno.
My best idea? Detach our sense of meaning from our jobs, recognize there’s nothing wrong with coding just to pay the bills, set boundaries between work and non-work, and diversify our sources of joy.