How to spot burnout in your engineers

The signals show up long before their performance takes a hit.

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I help engineers become great engineering managers - whether you want to become one or are already leading a team.

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Resignations seem to arrive very often in the same way.

The person leaving is usually still doing well, has strong feedback from peers, and they might even be working on one of the hardest things the team is doing.

Nothing really suggests there’s a problem.

Then they tell (or slack) you: “Can we have a quick chat today?”

And you know already that doesn’t sound good and what follow is that they’re exhausted, or that they’re leaving.

And this isn’t that unusual.

One study of 1,085 US employees found that 18.8% were highly engaged and highly burned out at the same time. And that group was the most likely to want to leave.

Their output won’t tell you

This is the first mistake I think managers make.

We wait for performance to drop.

I stumbled on this term performance protection from psychologist Robert Hockey from 1997.

It basically means, under enough pressure, people protect the main task by putting more effort into it.

For an engineer, the main task might be shipping the feature they’re working on, and they can keep doing that for quite a while without showing signs of burnout.

The SPACE framework authors noticed something similar with remote work. Some productivity measures, including commits and speed to merge PRs, actually increased while some developers were approaching burnout.

Even DORA says their metrics can’t tell you whether low deployment frequency comes from technical debt, bureaucracy or burnout.

So, even when some output related metrics change, you still don’t really know what they mean. By the time the obvious performance drop comes, you are probably already quite late.

It’s not just being tired

We talk about burnout like someone has a battery.

Working too much drains it, whereas holidays recharges it.

One study followed 3,209 Swedish workers over six years. Initially, things like high workload, low control and low reward were all linked to burnout.

But two years later, only low reward was the condition that remained linked.

I wouldn’t read too much into one study, but it points at something I think managers often miss.

People can work really hard when they feel trusted, appreciated and like their work actually matters.

The same amount of work feels very different when none of those things are true.

Sometimes the problem isn’t how much you’re asking someone to do.

It’s what they feel they’re getting back.

You might find out immediately

I used to think people hid burnout because they were scared to tell their manager.

Apparently, not necessarily.

A Dutch study of 332 workers found 73.2% had told their manager about a mental health issue. From those who didn’t, the most common reason was simply wanting to handle it themselves.

And I think this is particularly easy to miss with engineers.

They’re used to figuring things out themselves.

Time off helps but doesn’t fix this.

A 2023 meta-analysis of 13 vacation studies found well-being improves after taking time off.

But the improvement was basically gone after the first week of being back at work.

Another study I found tracking burnout reported people back around baseline within four weeks.

Obviously holidays are not useless.

Leiter and Maslach have a great analogy:

“when the canary keels over, we acknowledge that the environment is hazardous — we don’t tell the canary that it should take a long weekend.”

I think we as managers need to keep that in mind.

Look beyond their output

Leaddev surveyed 617 engineering leaders last year.

Only 21% described themselves as healthy. 22% said they were critically burned out.

And there’s a line from Dominika Rogala’s presentation at LDX3 that has stayed with me:

“Burnout isn’t an individual failure. It’s a system problem.”

So don’t wait for your engineers to suddenly start missing deadlines. That might happen eventually. But the earlier signs might have nothing to do with their output.

A good opening to this conversation to ask in your next one-on-one:

What have you stopped doing over the last three months that you used to enjoy?

And give them some time to actually think about it.

See you in the next one,
~ Stephane