burnout

i.e. "Joy's handbook to navigating burnout" / "the burnout escalation chain"

I think of myself as burnout prone—someone who struggles with motivation—and I’m on and off depressive.

burnout, like depression, its close cousin, has anti-memetic properties, so I think the best time to talk and think about this stuff is when you’re coming out of it. for me, there’s this narrow window when I can see the patterns.

if this isn’t something you’re familiar with, I have an easy analogy! this window is like the day you’ve just recovered from a cold or flu, and *health* just feels different because illness is in recent enough memory that your body still remembers what it feels like.

so whatever funk I was in, I guess I’m coming out of it. here’s the handbook.

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Step 1. diagnosis

are you burnt out? who knows! the internet and navel gazing have been equally unhelpful when I’ve asked myself this question, so I’ve stopped asking and just say “yes, probably; whatever, go do something about it.”

anything that feels adjacent to “I’m not the kind of teammate/engineer/etc. I wish I were today” is enough for me. you don’t have to be crispy. the lightly toasted end of burnt out is still burnt out. being productive when the motivation isn’t actually there is still burning out and it’s better to get ahead of it.

Step 2. interventions by level

Lv0 - work on yourself

this is free. always do this. these can be hard because although interventions impact only you, you’ll need other people to succeed at most of these!

• a pep talk - told to me by the manager who introduced this whole escalation chain to me in the first place, “sometimes I know I need a pep talk, and I can’t give myself a pep talk, so I get someone to give me one.”¹

• self-care - seemingly obvious, but hard to do! hygiene/life habits are notoriously sticky/biased towards entropy. stuff like resting/sleeping better/going to the gym/running/doing team sports/therapy/getting medical care/being in nature. particular items are weighted differently by individual, so prioritization is oddly important. choose one, make a difference until you’re satisfied on it, then choose another until you’re satisfied overall. ²

• life-engagement - this could be a sub-bullet for “self-care” but I think it deserves its own space. Live Your Actual Life. friends, family, hobbies, etc. are Your Actual Life.³

Level 0 - self-interventions are pretty clear: you’re human, behave accordingly.

Lv1 - change the work

this level is basically free. the price can be zero up to losing context on your current project, but any perceived efficiency losses of interventions at this level are rounding errors. that said, it can still be hard to intervene at this level because changing your work likely requires involving your team.

• snack - snacking gets a bad rap, but dude, sometimes you’re in the grind and you need to eat a damn snack to remember what you love about your job. find a snack. recognize it’s a snack. and then EAT IT.⁴

• do the same project, differently - maybe the snacking revealed it, maybe you’ve always known, but it’s this specific project that’s a bad match for you. there’s a loooooot of options here. another brain can help you see some of these if you don’t.

  • re-imagine it - re-prioritize/re-scope/re-design the project to something you actually like - dude, this often makes it a *better* project. completionism or perfectionism can be the default (we missed some chances to say no to ourselves!), which can sap motivation. break it down, cut some stuff.⁵

  • grab a buddy to pair on it - pairing is often just fun. and magic happens. like some of that re-imagining ^

• do different projects - all else being equal, there’s probably something else you could be spending time on more effectively. go ask for what you need!!! the negotiation with your team/manager probably won’t be as bad as you think. best case, you immediately eject from a bad situation to a better one. worst case, you’ll make a exit plan.

  • looking at it from the other angle, re-allocate work on the team - (this is typically a tech lead responsibility, but you can help ‘em out. more brains, more better) maybe there’s someone else who is actually more motivated than you on something. boring grunt work for you could be a learning opportunity for someone else. a painful struggle for you might be a cakewalk for someone else. this is why we work on teams.

• change your responsibilities - swapping between being the lead and being support on a project can be really nice! a milder version of the engineer/manager pendulum, it’s just nice to have your responsibilities shift from execution/decision making/teaching/learning.

Level 1 - work-interventions are my favorite: you’re not alone, and you’re not stuck doing what you’re doing.

Lv2 - change teams/change the team

this is the first disruptive level, since you’ll lose some of the advantages you might otherwise get in the alternate universe if you kept at it and grew more tenured within an area of ownership. that said, there’s also unexpected magic that can happen when you change teams!⁶ I strongly believe that organizations should make this easy to do, since our interests are all aligned here.

• go on a rotation - easy money. this is just a logistical challenge. if your company offers flexible PTO, it should be *easier* not harder to get a rotation for about double to triple that amount of time.

• get a transfer - yep, this is harder, so if you think this might be attractive, start negotiating early. your manager/director might have budget/strategic constraints to work through (swapping is often easier than a straight up transfer). this will often raise healthy questions like “why are we nervous about you leaving this team/why is so much stuff dependent on you?” and incentivize changes that are healthy whether you stay or go.

• advocate for a re-org - I’ve seen people say “XYZ is a separate responsibility, let’s make a separate team.” or the like, and this can work well. this isn’t where my brain goes, but gimme like 5 more years in this industry and maybe I can say something useful on when and how to shard out/seed/re-org teams.

Level 2 - team-interventions are generally underutilized: if you feel you need a bigger change, look to your management chain to explore your options.

Lv3 - change companies

probably as disruptive as most of us get. there’s plenty of collective wisdom on when it’s time to quit and how to think about the next stage in your career (this, which I referenced often, is my favorite), and it’s all hard to make any generalized sense of…

this level also anti-memetic! if your company serves a lot of KoolAid, it can be impossible to entertain the notion of leaving, so it might be an idea that rises and falls within your own head. hard to make progress. for good reasons, you also might not want anyone at your current company to know, so the usual resources you can tap into aren’t as accessible (though, I will say that if there are people you trust, they can be incredibly helpful. similar to Lv2, explore your options, here.)

anyways, given all the noise that makes this level hard to navigate, here’s my two cents on the tactical elements:

• a lot of people quit earlier than they need to because this is the first level you can actually do entirely independently, so it’s easy to skip through all the earlier levels straight to leaving (I’ve done it)

• on the flip side, plenty of people stay for longer than they should, when it’s been clear for a while that no intervention at any of the earlier levels is going to make this a good match (I haven’t actually done this. I know when it’s time to go)

• pretty much everyone I know starts interviewing later than they should because job searching sucks as an activity and it’s hard to entertain the possibility enough to get over the activation energy of doing it (I’ve obviously done this)

Level 3 company-interventions seem self explanatory, but my take is that timing and execution is everything, so fight the anti-meme and momentum!!!

Lv4 - leave the industry

there’s always opening the coffee shop! ☕️ I used to reach for this more, back when I was a younger, more self-loathing techie, spiraling in uncontrolled burnout cycles. nowadays, I still hear about it occasionally from friends, but it sounds a little different than it used to. I think in our 30s we’ve largely settled into the roles we’ve now held professionally for most of a decade.

who knows what the future will bring, though, so I try to stay open minded.

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that’s all the levels! an important thing to note is that for Lv 1 - 4, interventions at higher levels totally shake up everything below (you can’t change teams without changing work, etc.), so escalate with intention.

burnout or not, a lot of this just good rules for life, so I try to keep the levels and some of their principles top of mind:

• you’re human, behave accordingly.

• you’re not alone, and you’re not stuck doing what you’re doing.

• if you feel you need a bigger change, look to your management chain to explore your options.

• when considering a major change, timing and execution is everything, so fight the anti-meme and momentum.

• stay open minded

whew, this was another big one. existence is hard.

1. I really internalized this escalation chain and got a lot out of it the last few years (thanks Alicia!!!). I have my regular pep talks on drip, including my boss (yep, awkward but rewarding).

it took me a while to notice how particular people make me feel (I’m still learning). some people just reliably make me feel energized when I finish the conversation. that’s magic to tap into.

2. for me, my most chronic, debilitating problem is not eating reliably. my hunger doesn’t behave as it should when I’m working, and I can go weeks to months scrounging in a sad kitchen, going a bit mad for a few hours every day, before I realize I’m doing it. I just needed a damn sandwich.

3. I feel better about work when I feel better about everything else, but it’s not easy! life sucks sometimes, and it can feel less rewarding than work. as someone who’s been guilty of letting work suck in my entire identity, social life, every free cycle in my brain… I actually find it super helpful to remind myself often that My Actual Life deserves my time and energy too. unlike work, my life will love me back.

another segue, I’ve never liked the phrase “work-life balance.”

even before management, I came from a “work hard, play hard” school, and I actually think there’s a lot of space for just fucking firing on all cylinders sometimes. invest in BOTH more if you might have the energy for it.

then rest.

sprint-and-rest cycles are much more energizing for me than trying to achieve some kind of balanced steady state. if the seas are gonna be rocky, might as well ride the waves.

even if this isn’t your personal preference, I think reality is always going to be more feast-and-famine (“only thing constant is change”, etc.) and trying to maintain balance is a poor goal, dooming people for disappointment.

folks in management know there’s a time to be a rock-star and a time to be a superstar, in both work and life.

4. an organization shouldn’t be snacking/rewarding snacking on the whole, but I strongly believe that an individual can’t subsist on entirely salads all day. (unless you’ve had a heart health scare in your mid-life, and have an extreme kind of single-minded focus on health… man, this analogy works disturbingly well)

I can speak for probably all engineering managers, we’d rather our engineers snack around, find some inspiration and renewed sense of purpose, than wander around like a damn zombie.

I definitely snack. this, right now, is literally a snack. it’s a treat. treats work.

5. if a project is feeling meh, it can help to break it down into smaller pieces and then evaluate your own motivations for each one. a buddy can help you do this, since it’s easier sometimes to make aggressive scoping decisions when you don’t personally feel the weight of responsibility.

6. I’ve been saying “magic” a lot… I guess I’m really reaching for magic because when I’m in a funk, anything that pulls me out feels… magical to me.

maybe for people like me, our big engineering brains really want to believe that life is physics, and we’re all looking at the same data, so we should be smart enough to just solve problems if we think hard enough. (this has been reinforced enough times in our life that this idea is really sticky, even when it’s totally inappropriate)

but humans don’t follow rules like that. ideas don’t follow rules like that. the systems we’re a part of—human, organizational—are complex enough that a new person looking at the same problem reliably produces different results. getting help works.

I think the term magic feels particularly apt when I think about transferring/rotating between teams because there’s a collision of so many different things. team cultures, personalities, areas of ownership, perspectives… it’s unpredictable, awesome, totally emergent… just magic.

magic that’s natural and wild and good. the most we can do is make it more likely to happen, and be enthused when it does.