Burnout: The Elephant in the Room

Originally published on my old blog as four posts between November 2013 and January 2014, written around my ignite talk on burnout at DevOpsDays London. Combined into one post and lightly edited; notes added in 2026 are marked.

The talk was called Burnout – the elephant in the room. What follows is less about its content and more about how it felt to give it, and what happened afterwards.

Straight after the talk

13 November 2013

I was really very nervous getting on stage in front of 250 people, especially to talk about something that had affected me personally: admitting that I had burnt out a year earlier, not knowing how they would react, not knowing whether my slides would be well received. I was scared.

It didn't help that I'd had technical "issues" with LibreOffice, losing slides and failing to save.

My mouth was dry when I set foot on stage and I couldn't remember my talk… but nobody was judging me.

I started to relax, and then something surprising happened: I started to enjoy it. I was not expecting that.

I felt a connection with the audience. People understood where I was coming from.

When my final slide appeared on the screen, the applause was immense. I wasn't expecting it, and I was visibly shaking when I stepped off the stage.

Many people congratulated me, and a wave of relief washed over me.

I went downstairs, got a drink, and was told that someone had suggested a breakout session on burnout. I knew I had to attend.

The response, both in person and online, has been almost entirely positive. Only one person has written anything negative (and given that the rest of their post was negative about everything at DevOpsDays, I'm ignoring it).

The majority opinion has been that we need to deal with this as an industry and get it out in the open, which I totally agree with.

Pushing Tin

14 November 2013

At DevOpsDays someone (I forget who, but thanks anyway) recommended Pushing Tin as a film that deals with burnout.

I won't spoil it, but one scene really resonated: a burnt-out man struggling to get himself from the car park into the building.

I wasn't that bad, but I have known that feeling. It isn't good.

Six weeks later

21 December 2013

It has been around a month and a half since I gave my talk, and it has been an odd time for me.

The initial reaction after the conference was awesome. People told me that what I did took guts, that my talk was good, and many of them had been through the same thing themselves. It certainly boosts the ego a little. :)

After a week or so the momentum died down. I was still talking to a couple of people about related topics, but it seemed that almost everyone who wanted to congratulate me, or talk about projects they were working on, had already done so.

Then, about a week ago, something strange started happening: people who had seen the talk, or the video afterwards, started to work up the courage to talk to me about their own current problems with burnout. This I hadn't foreseen.

While I have been through burnout, I am not an expert on the subject, but I will listen to people. I guess people see me as someone sympathetic to the problem who might have some insight and impartial advice.

It is a hard position to be in, especially when I know them personally. How do you break it to someone that they have a number of options, but their best one might be to leave their job and all the security that comes with it? Or, worse, that if they don't deal with the issue they are probably going to burn out, spiral downwards, and quite possibly end up sacked anyway?

I suppose, at the end of the day, all I can really do is be supportive and spell out the options, while avoiding advising on any particular path. I just wish I could help more of the people going through this. :(

How much is too much?

1 January 2014

I've worked for a number of startups and so far have seen about half of them fail. I don't take that as a personal judgement; it's more the nature of startups.

The failures generally aren't about the product – although some did suck big time. They are more about cultural failings.

It is common for people in IT to work long hours. We generally enjoy what we do and try to deliver what the business needs. We aren't generally rewarded for it, or at least not well, but working harder isn't the answer to making a business work.

I'm not saying there won't be crunch times, when you need to get something done by a deadline, or an outage is affecting customers and has to be dealt with even though you've already put in a day's work. These are exceptions, or at least they should be. You can't ask people to give their all and not expect them to burn out.

I don't hide the fact that about a year ago I burnt out. Along with a friend I'd brought with me, I had turned around the infrastructure of the company I was working for in less than six months. That is hard to do, especially with minimal downtime, and the stress was hitting me hard – and not just because of the long hours. It is mentally draining to be responsible for so much change in so short a time.

It wasn't just the stress from work. A lot of other things were happening in my life at the same time, each taking a little of my time and attention and adding a tiny amount of extra stress to the mix.

When you burn out, you need to deal with these stresses. You need to remove the causes as well as get far better at coping with them – especially by taking time to relax.

One of the most stressful things, I found, was commuting by train every day. It is only an 18-minute trip, but I first had to get the two miles from home to the station… and once on the train it was cramped, with narrow aisles and lots of people trying to get their bags into and out of the racks and pushing to find a seat. All in all, not a relaxing environment.

Once I switched to the bus, I stopped arriving at work stressed from the journey. Yes, the commute is about twice as long, but it doesn't stress me out the way the train did.

Many of the other stresses are still there in one form or another, and may stay that way for a while yet, but I feel I have a better handle on life.

Even now, a year later, I still have the scars from burning out, but I still enjoy what I do and want to keep working in the startup world.

2026 note: The short companion piece from the same week is Burnout Is a Security Issue Too. The on-call side of this – how rotations wear people down, and how to design them so they don't – is in The Pager Is a Smoke Detector, Not a Doorbell.