Tech Works: How to Identify and Address Burnout on Your Team
We all know that software engineers are very susceptible to burnout. Why aren’t we as an industry talking about this more?
Sure, a lot of tech events feature a talk on developer burnout. But given the increased pressures on developers — who are either under threat of layoff or bearing the burden of increased workloads because of headcount reductions — it’s shocking that their mental health is so under-addressed.
Burnout is bad for everyone: organizations, teams and especially individuals, for whom the consequences can be dire. For instance, people experiencing burnout are also at five times higher risk of suicidal ideation.
How can we detect the first signs of burnout in ourselves and in our engineering teams? We would not only increase developer productivity — because happy devs are more productive ones — but we could literally be saving lives. Read on to learn how to help.
The Invisible Pain of Developer Burnout
While overall burnout rates are up, especially for millennials, developer burnout estimates run as high as 83%.
“Engineers have great paying jobs, and they get to work from home, and they get to use all of this great technology,” Michelle Bakels, program director at G2i, said on the podcast Developer Health Show, in a conversation with Anthony Shew, developer experience lead for Turbo at Vercel.
“We think of it as this really comfortable job,” she said “And in comparison to some jobs, it really is, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not hard itself,” and very mentally taxing. “In my experience, sometimes, the coding is the easiest part of the job.”
Non-code challenges, she said, include:
- Figuring out if you’re building the right product.
- In the right way.
- Trying to understand your target customers.
- Team dynamics.
- Cross-organizational communication and collaboration.
Underlying all this is the tech industry’s “hustle culture mentality,” Bakels continued, where there’s this expectation you want to work 60 to 80 hours a week. This is in stark contrast to the research that says five to six working hours fosters organizational creativity. “We don’t see that behavior from people who excel in other industries.”
The New Stack’s late-December VoxPop poll asked readers how long per day they can code “at their best.” The most common answer, cited by half of the respondents: three to five hours a day.
Shew is a self-taught software developer, having learned via freeCodeCamp, while he played AAA baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals. He and Bakels talked a lot on the Developer Health Show about where the two high-stress roles diverge and align.
While what engineers do may seem mysterious, athletes’ exertion is highly visible, and rest and recovery are a well-known requirements of their work. It’s also easier to spot an athlete’s risk of a repetitive stress-based injury.
“With developers, that mental taxation, it’s not something you can physically see very easily. And it becomes very difficult to even justify to yourself or to others,” Shew said, to be able to recognize and acknowledge that you need to take time to replenish.
It’s much harder to spot signs of developer burnout. Especially in a mostly remote work world. These signs are just as difficult to recognize in yourself, especially if you haven’t experienced them before.
“When it comes to engineers, we just don’t make that connection,” Bakels continued. “If you want to be the best engineer that you can be, invest in yourself, give yourself time to rest. Give yourself time to recover. Eat well. Don’t make every day the hardest day ever.”
Yes, the tech industry is famous for its perks, but, besides now-dusty ping pong and foosball tables in ghost offices, the fringe benefits mostly faded with the pandemic or weren’t ever what they seemed.
Big Tech was among the fastest adopters of unlimited paid time off, but then employees at orgs with unlimited PTO policies actually take fewer days on average. It stands to reason that on-the-job pressure — with ever-increasing cognitive loads — could see tech workers taking less time than ever.
“With both burnout and a sports injury, if you hit that moment, you are lucky if it only lasts a short amount of time,” Shew said. “But in both scenarios, they can be career ending.”
What Does Developer Burnout Look Like?
Engineering leaders must be able to recognize signs of burnout in their developers, as well as be strategic in preventing it.
Generally, the psychological disorder of occupational burnout and stress sees an increase in:
- Absenteeism.
- Procrastination.
- Making mistakes.
- Lowered creativity.
- Physical and emotional exhaustion.
Specific symptoms of unhappiness in software developers include:
- Low productivity.
- Low code quality.
- Lower motivation.
- Work withdrawal.
- Low focus.
- Inadequate performance.
- Decreased process adherence.
- Intention to leave their job.
This was first realized in a 2017 Association for Computing Machinery paper, which set out to examine how to limit unhappiness — or the negative experiences that trigger it — in developers, which was in turn found to limit causes of burnout.
The paper presented the results of its mixed method, large-scale survey with recommendations for leadership because, while three out of 10 causes of developer unhappiness were personal to the individuals, the majority were sociotechnical external causes:
- Time pressure.
- Bad code quality and coding practice.
- Underperforming colleague.
- Mundane or repetitive tasks.
- Unexplained broken code.
- Bad decision-making.
- Imposed limitations on development, like technical and procedural bottlenecks.
This list of symptoms descends in frequency. The paper hypothesized that the majority of causes of unhappiness would be human-related, but, in fact, technical and then process-related factors were much more popular. As we’ve previously written about, strategies around trends like platform engineering, automation and generative AI can be appropriately applied to reduce a lot of these stressors for developers.
In addition, the paper argued that engineering leadership should be responsible in educating developers about these stress triggers: “Knowing what might cause unhappiness in the short and long term could encourage developers to be more considerate towards their peers. For example, it might be worth thinking twice about leaving others to clean up badly written code.”
The researchers also cited a previous paper that found a direct correlation between developers’ improved mood and code quality.
“After running a survey with internal teams, my collaborators and I found in Globant — a large, global tech company — that software engineers’ perception of burnout in the team is reduced when they are satisfied on their job,” Bianca Trickenreich, one of the researchers, told The New Stack.
In 2023, she and her team published on IEEE their model for understanding and reducing developer burnout. This paper explores the relationship between organizational culture and burnout.
The paper proved that a generative culture — one built on high trust, blamelessness and information flow — drives a sense of belonging, a climate for learning and a sense of inclusiveness.
These three factors, in turn, were discovered critical to work satisfaction. The SPACE framework had previously proved that a decline in job satisfaction is a major signal of developer burnout.
“We also found this satisfaction is increased when people work on a team that follows a generative culture, have opportunities to learn, and feel belonging and included in the team.”
Since Trickenreich’s paper was published, generative culture has been added as a core DORA metric by Google’s DevOps Research Assessment team.
How Leaders Influence Generative Culture
So how can engineering leadership balance influencing culture, while also meeting top-down demands?
“The investor/shareholder systems around us are usually oriented towards wringing as much productivity out of people as possible — a recipe for burnout. So then, good leaders are trying to balance those pressures with their desire to take care of their people,” Lauren Peate, founder and CEO of Multitudes, an analytics company focused on engineering teams, told The New Stack.
“As in: We can speed up build times, but then companies won’t give the extra time back to their devs, they’ll just give everyone more work to do.”
Add to that, with tighter budgets and fewer job openings, tech’s embracing of culture and inclusion in 2021 and 2022 turned out to be generally performative. It’s not just Twitter/X cutting employee resource groups, and Basecamp banning ‘societal politics’; Big Tech seems to have taken a big step off the company culture bandwagon.
“It’s also been frustrating to see how much topics like well-being and good culture have been pushed to the side in the current market – another example of how they’re often treated as nice-to-haves,” Peate said
As an engineering leader, you may be dealing with far less budget or C-level desire to invest in culture. But it is proven that improving developer experience increases productivity, which in turn improves profitability.
“Just like with many sports teams, you need to get out of the athlete’s way,” Ian Yamey, CTO at Retireable financial advice app, said on the podcast Leader Chats, also echoing the sports analogy.
Yamey has found three roles an engineering leader can play to help developers deliver well without burning out:
- Coach: Sets the vision, which, Yamey said, mitigates burnout by defining culture, like via documentation and processes that communicate decisions.
- Manager: Controls the time, which mitigates burnout by managing the workload, like via sprints.
- Trainer: Monitors well-being, which mitigates burnout by consistently checking in, including via one-to-ones.
How Do You Measure Burnout?
Of course, being engineers themselves, leadership will want to measure burnout, which Laura Tacho, now CTO at DX, a dev productivity platform, says is challenging because it’s so multi-faceted.
“It’s not necessarily about the amount of time someone is working,” she said in a Twitter thread she shared with The New Stack. Burnout happens, she said, when people are:
- Overworked.
- Chronically under stress.
- Disconnected from results.
- Lacking control over how they spend their time.
Burnout is a lagging indicator, which means it takes time and is hard to measure. Tacho suggests you look for leading indicators of burnout, which include: Lack of focus time.
- Frequent shifts in priorities.
- Working outside of office hours.
- Projects without tangible outcomes.
- Overhead and friction within the organization.
For any of these measurements, you should use a mix of automated tooling like Jira and developer surveys and conversations. Each Big Tech company seems to have its own way of doing this but they all seem to survey at least quarterly.
When burnout is lower, she says, you’re likely to find:
- Lower attrition.
- More meeting engagement.
- A higher employee net promoter score (eNPS).
- Increased motivation.
Based on this list, you can measure the following:
- Attrition.
- Quality of meetings.
- Frequency of meetings when attendees aren’t engaged.
- Average airtime per teammate in meetings.
- eNPS scores that indicate satisfaction.
- Number or quality of initiatives brought to you by the team.
“But most importantly, discuss it with your team,” Tacho said. “The fact that you care goes a long way.”
Learn more about recognizing and addressing burnout from a 2021 episode of the New Stack Makers podcast.
If you need help, the following resources are available:
Canada:988 Suicide Crisis Helpline
India: Lifeline Foundation
Spain: Line 024
France: Centre de Prevention du Suicide
United Kingdom: Samaritans
United States:
- 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988, or chat via the website (Military veterans, press 1 after dialing 988)
- Crisis Text Line: Text TALK to 741741 to text with a trained crisis counselor
Global directory:
