Burnout
The whole article is great. So I've copied almost all of it here. I have observed this 'burnout' with me and my friends, but wasn't able to put it into words. This is exactly what I had in my mind.
“It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” — Henry David Thoreau
If burnout was a natural byproduct of working too much (or too hard, or for too many hours), we’d see every founder/C-level suffering from it. And yet… they’re generally doing just fine; ICs and middle managers, on the other hand, are usually taking the biggest hit.
Preventing burnout from happening on our teams means that first we need to identify the real causes of it, otherwise we’re just sending people to long vacations hoping the problem fixes itself. (It won’t.)
Each case is different (of course), but from what I’ve seen with engineering teams over time, burnout usually isn’t about work’s volume—it’s about a lack of purpose or agency.
If an engineer can’t see how their hard work supports the company’s objectives, helps real users, or improves their own skill set, every hour feels heavier—pointless, even. And when people feel they have no input into what they do, that their tasks are simply “assigned” to them rather than chosen, any form of intrinsic motivation goes to the toilet.
Let me be clear: working too hard/for too long can obviously lead to burnout, but again, more often than not the entire story doesn’t end there. In many cases, burnout emerges when smart, passionate individuals find themselves working on tasks that feel meaningless or misaligned with their strengths and interests. They might be coding late into the night, but the real energy drain is when they ask themselves: Why am I doing this?
“Ok, I’m sold. What can I do about it?”
You can start by considering whether the people on your team:
Have control over the projects they work on;
Feel connected to the outcomes they produce;
Understand why their contributions matter;
Added on May 10, 2025