It’s time to have a real conversation about engineering burnout ??
In the fast-paced world of tech, we often celebrate our 'heroes' - those incredible engineers who dive into the deep end to troubleshoot production issues in the midst of piles of legacy code, infrastructure changes, and rightfully impatient customers.?
The reward for saving the day is always more opportunities to save the day
The reward for saving the day is always more opportunities to save the day.?These engineers want to do what’s right for the company and they become the “go to†person when the product or service breaks.? The barrage of slack messages, alerts, and phone calls grow.? The executive team knows who “the fixer†is. ? ???
It's an adrenaline rush to see them in action, but here's the hard truth: this firefighter culture, if unchecked, can lead to burnout and attrition. It's a lesson I've experienced first hand as an engineer and product leader.? ??
Think about it. Your go-to problem solver, constantly in the trenches, is paying an invisible price for their heroics. It eventually gets old.? This is likely not what they signed up for when they accepted their role.? You promise them things will get better when:
?? - your junior engineers ramp up
????? - you complete your cloud migration
?? - you migrate to the new architecture …. that you promise will be more stable, scalable, and resilient
Quarters go by and none of these things happen. ? ? The goal posts keeps moving.??
Having your best engineers in constant firefighting mode isn't just unsustainable; it's unfair. What's the cost?
? Tremendous stress and cognitive load
? It can actually slow career progress - not accelerate it
? Stifled creativity and innovation
Robert Ross wrote about this in Alert Fatigue and Your Health:? “These ongoing alerts eventually contribute to worsening outages due to overload, desensitization, employee burnout, and open the possibilities for significant errors.â€
Jordan Cutler thoughtfully touches on the career implications of this in his guide to software engineer promotions.? He cautions software engineers who are great at on-call to “start investing in a new area to become known for that rather than the on-call personâ€.
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But how can an engineer do this when the bulk of their time is spent working on issues. Frequent interruptions take hours out of their day, slow the innovation train, and lead to an unhappy team.? ??
As leaders, it's on us to disrupt this pattern
The departure of a top engineer can be a mystery; But often, the clues lie in what we demand of them. So they leave, someone else steps up. "The show must go on." ? The cycle repeats itself. ? ??
As leaders, it's on us to disrupt this pattern. Yes, long hours are often required in high-growth companies. But isn’t it better for everyone if engineers get to spend most of their time and energy shipping customer value?
But how can we improve this?
Let's start by democratizing problem-solving.?
??Codify tribal knowledge
??Spread the tough challenges
??Invest in training, mentorship, and platforms that support these goals
?? And hey, let's not forget to celebrate fire prevention, not just the last-minute saves. ??
To my fellow tech leaders: let's redefine heroism in our teams. It's about collective strength, not just individual might. Let's create environments where our teams can thrive and grow.?
Here's to building more resilient and happy engineering teams! ??
#engineeringmanagement #TechLeadership #Team #Culture #Innovation #productleadership #startup
Virgin Galactic Astronaut 006 | Co-Founder of the Black Leaders in Aerospace Scholarship & Training (BLAST) Program | Senior Engineering Manager
1 å¹´????????????????????????
Military Spouse /VCISO Advisory GRC, Cyber Risk Compliance Executive, Leadership content developer/ Instructor. IR Support & Team builder, Cyber & IT Mentor & Career transition support.
1 å¹´Love this my dear brother
CEO of FireHydrant
1 å¹´I got so burned out fighting outages and fires I quit to start a company for it!
Building stuff that works, and fixing stuff that doesn't. Providing technology resources to enable people and Agile teams to be successful and the business to drive revenue. Proven IT leader for rapidly growing startups.
1 å¹´As someone who loves firefighting, it's not the fires themselves. A number of factors come into play: - Feeling unappreciated. "Here's a token bonus for solving that problem that was blocking millions in sales deals for months, and oh yeah, no annual raise this year because you're at the top of salary band and we don't have budget for a promotion." - Overload/Unreasonable expectations. If you have 40 hours of dev work you need to get done in a week and regularly add 1-50 hours of firefighting, it's impossible to be successful. A successful firefighter can't have 40 hours of other work/meetings every week. - Distrust. This single most important factor in employee engagement is two-way trust between management and individual contributors. When management loses the trust of employees, the employees stop caring about the company or their work. - Lack of prevention. Solving a new problem is challenging and exciting. Cleaning up the mess after a problem that you saw coming, or problem that has happened repeatedly, is about as appealing as scrubbing floors with a toothbrush. I can't recall the departure of a top engineer over my career that was a mystery. Quite to the contrary, coworkers usually saw it coming for a long time.
Ambitious Software Engineer with a passion to build, learn, and develop!
1 å¹´This was a great article, an very true points made here. I'd like to add 1 point, in my almost 20 years of SWE. Burnout can also stem from a disconnected management team. It's Exciting to be the one to save the day and put out the fires... it's less exciting when that fire could have been prevented as the engineering warned management of weeks or months ago. A management team that doesnt listen to engineers or buries everything in bureaucracy can contribute heavily to burnout at an organization.