Developers, watch out for these burnout symptoms
What is burnout?
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, theWorld Health Organization (WHO)accepted burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” (and not a medical condition) on the advice of many health experts around the world.
Definition of burnout
According to the World Health Organization:
First thing first, the burnout condition isalwayslinked to your job. The definition speaks aboutchronic stresstoo: 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, assuggested by this study(seeCauses and Outcomes).
It can explain whyburnout is going through the roofthe 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 possible burnout symptoms
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.
Involvement become cynicism
If you felt involved in your company and this involvement let place to cynicism, something is wrong. Be attentive to these signs:
These are clear indicators that you’re in the Poisonous Land of Cynicism.
No sense of accomplishment
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.
Your energy is gone
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:
Exhaustion is a strong sign that your burnout is real. Some studies suggest that exhaustion is mandatory to take theBurnout Road. However, it’s not enough by itself: you’ll need as well other symptoms to be sure you’ll reach theBurnout Vampire.
Negative emotions
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.
Physical symptoms
Freudenberger characterized burnout with physical symptoms such as:
These are the symptoms for chronic stress too.
The causes of burnout
What can cause all of these symptoms which can, if not taken seriously, bring you into theDark 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:
When you begin to walk the Burnout Road, it might seemnormalto 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.
Overworking / over-commitment
There are many misconceptions or incomplete information about burnout:
It’s true that exhaustion is an important cause of burnout, but it’snot 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.
Furthermore, you can havea normal workload and experience burnout anyway.
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.
Lack of control and autonomy
A lack of control or a lack of autonomy are often due to a lack of trust.
Lack of trust
It’s easy to see if your managers don’t trust you:
This list is far from exhaustive. If you have other examples, feel free to let a comment below.
Micromanagement
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.
Your colleagues
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:
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.
Absence of fairness
Companies’ management can be very good to create competition among employees, sometimes without even knowing it. They reward some “talents” because ofvisible achievementsthey’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:
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.
