According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Burnout is a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that one has failed to manage.
We may think that burnout, due to work or even otherwise, is something that only happens to others. Studies show that the burnout prevalence rates are 69 percent in the workforce which includes teachers and medical interns.

Burnout

Health

Time Management

It gets frustrating to become involved in our work, but to have a work environment that is not conducive to our deeper involvement.
If a workplace rookie (or even a manager) finds the working environment to be authoritative, opaque, chaotic or uncaring towards the employee, there is bound to be burnout, something that is increasingly common in software development profiles.

Workplace Hell

There are many companies that create a ‘road to burnout’ and there are some signs that point towards that:
<ol>
<li>Criticising your colleagues, clients, managers for their decisions or actions.</li>
<li>Having an impression of decreased work quality.</li>
<li>Only doing the work that is asked.</li>
</ol>

The Burnout Road

<ol>
<li>There is no sense of accomplishment, and work has lost its purpose.</li>
<li>Lack of energy and decreasing will to go to work on a daily basis.</li>
<li>Having dizziness, exhaustion, stomach cramp, headaches, sleeplessness and shortness of breath.</li>
<li> Negative emotions and feelings towards work, bosses and colleagues.</li>
</ol>

Clear Indicators Of Burnout

<ol>
<li>Overwork or overcommitment is a clear cause of burnout, at least in the case of software development, as it is an isolated working profile.</li>
<li>Lack of trust from the manager, combined with a lack of authority or autonomy towards your work.</li>
<li>Micromanagement from your immediate manager, when all decisions taken by you are questioned in a systematic way.</li>
</ol>

Causes Of Burnout

Our interactions with our co-workers affect us in various ways. There can be unresolved conflicts, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, and smear campaigns that we may have to endure.
The managers should check this in the one-on-one sessions and ensure that the employee does not face such kinds of harassment.

The Interactions With Coworkers

Knowledge workers, especially in software development suffer from an inherent absence of fairness, where the usual ‘tangible’ indicators of work like staying late at work doing overtime are rewarded by the managers.

Unfair Perceptions

<ul>
<li>A company with a generative culture ensures the psychological safety of an employee. The focus is good results, with shared risks, and all failures being accepted as a default. In such a company, one is not afraid to commit mistakes, experiment or express oneself. </li>
<li>A power-oriented company is where we find a lot of power politics, distortion, fear and threats in their actions, even though the words used by them describe it differently.</li>
</ul>

Psychological Safety

We as individuals have certain values, and if the company we work does not respect them, it feels like abuse. Our values have to be aligned with the company&#39;s values for us to feel motivated to work.
Example: If you are an animal lover but the company you work for is destroying the environment and the millions of animals that live in it, it would be hard to work for the company.

Company Values

<ul>
<li>Do not isolate yourself: speak your concerns to your manager.</li>
<li>It’s a bug: As a software developer, see that the problem you have is a bug that needs to be eradicated.</li>
<li>Know your path: Meditate to find clarity and understand your mental state. </li>
<li>Your endurance levels: You need to be able to gauge how much chronic stress and pressure you can take, and understand that money and glory at the price of our mental health is not a sound strategy in the long run.</li>
</ul>

Preventing Burnout

You can get clarity on your needs and requirements by asking yourself the following:
<ol>
<li>What is it that you want to accomplish in life?</li>
<li>What is the amount of money you require to be happy, without compromising on your mental health?</li>
<li>What is your definition of happiness?</li>
<li>Is being successful your happiness, or is sacrificing your happiness acceptable?</li>
<li>Do you live your life intentionally and deliberately or it just happens to you?</li>
</ol>

Get Clear About Your Needs

Do something different and playful, like drawing or writing. Having a hobby provides us with a creative outlet and gives us a sense of accomplishment. It is good to just enjoy the process and not to make it another goal with deadlines and pressure.
If things are serious, you can see a specialist, or discuss with your loved ones.

Hobbies To Prevent Burnout

From 1974 to 2008, 6000 different resources have been written on burnout. Even though, developers still struggle with it. How can we prevent it?

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 <a dir="ltr" href="https://thevaluable.dev/programmer-stress-causes/">this article about stress </a>. 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. <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314262938_Burnout_Research_Emergence_and_Scientific_Investigation_of_a_Contested_Diagnosis/link/58bed1e292851c1475e7a2d2/download" rel="noopener">Some studies </a>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:

<ul><li>What’s burnout, exactly? </li><li>What are the possible burnout syndromes you might experience? </li><li>What are the common causes of burnout? Spoiler ahead: it’s not only overwork. </li><li>How to prevent burnout? </li> </ul>

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.

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 different 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 <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.who.int/mental_health/evidence/burn-out/en/" rel="noopener">World Health Organization (WHO) </a>accepted burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” (and not a medical condition) on the advice of many health experts around the world.

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 <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4911781/" rel="noopener">suggested by this study </a>(see <code dir="ltr">Causes and Outcomes </code>).

It can explain why <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.gallup.com/workplace/237059/employee-burnout-part-main-causes.aspx" rel="noopener">burnout is going through the roof </a>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 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.

If you felt involved in your company and this involvement let place to cynicism, something is wrong. Be attentive to these signs:

<ul><li>You begin to criticize often your colleagues, your clients, or your managers, for their decisions and actions. </li><li>You have the impress that your work quality decrease, and your colleagues think the same. </li><li>You begin to only do the least amount of work you’re asked to do. </li> </ul>

These are clear indicators that you’re in the Poisonous Land of Cynicism.

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

We need motivating goals in our life 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 pointing to Burnout Hell.

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:

<ol><li>You won’t feel going to work from time to time. </li><li>You won’t feel going to work every day </li><li>In a more serious burnout state, you might have dizziness, headaches or stomach cramps only by thinking to go to work. </li> </ol>

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.

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.

Freudenberger characterized burnout with physical symptoms such as:

<ul><li>Physical exhaustion and muscle pain. </li><li>Fatigue. </li><li>Frequent headaches. </li><li>Gastrointestinal disorders. </li><li>Sleeplessness. </li><li>Dizziness. </li><li>Shortness of breath. </li> </ul>

These are the symptoms for chronic stress too.

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 to reach it:

<ol><li>Take multiple causes, or one cause with high intensity. </li><li>Add enough time. </li><li>You feel very bad, don’t you? </li><li>More time! </li><li>You have now the most severe form of burnout. </li> </ol>

When you begin to walk the Burnout Road, 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 will be worst 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.

There are many misconceptions or incomplete information about burnout:

<ol><li>Burnout is only overwork. </li><li>If somebody experiences a burnout, working less is the solution. </li> </ol>

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. But if you have other burnout symptoms going on, they will continue to evolve and poison your life.

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. The idea of a developer only working when he’s behind his computer, for example, is wrong. Bugs and features populate our brain even when we’re doing something else. As a consequence, it’s not always easy to see if a developer overwork.

A lack of control or a lack of autonomy are often due to a lack of trust.

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

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

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

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. Some managers think, since they are “above” you in the hierarchy, that 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. It means as well that you won’t learn a lot either. We need to experiment and make mistakes for that.

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:

<ul><li>Unsolved conflicts which haunt your thoughts. </li><li>Bullying. </li><li>Power abuse. </li><li>Harassment. </li><li>Absence of (positive) feedback. </li><li>Ultra competitive colleagues. </li> </ul>

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.

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 value more quietly.

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:

<ul><li>Staying at work late doesn’t mean producing business value or even quality code; quite the contrary, in my experience. Overworking is not synonym of quality. </li><li>Knowledge workers are working by thinking and having ideas. This doesn’t necessarily happen behind a computer in an open office. </li><li>It creates feelings of jealousy and unfairness. </li> </ul>

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.

Psychological safety needs to be <a dir="ltr" href="https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/foster-psychological-safety/" rel="noopener">ensured in a company </a>. It means that you are not afraid to express yourself, experimenting, and admitting you’re wrong.

Everybody should thrive to create a <a dir="ltr" href="https://continuousdelivery.com/implementing/culture/" rel="noopener">generative </a>company culture, where:

<ul><li>The focus is on good results. </li><li>The risks are shared. </li><li>Failures are accepted and thought upon. </li><li>Experimentation and iterations are understood and respected. </li> </ul>

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:

<ul><li>Politics. </li><li>Distorted information. </li><li>Fear. </li><li>Threats. </li> </ul>

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.

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.

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.

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