Burnout. We all hear about it. Many experience it. I think many who experience it have a similar path: “This stuff I’m doing is awesome, solving that problem felt so great, folks said how much they appreciated that hard work and how quickly it got done. What? No, I’m fine, I’m doing awesome! I feel like I’m making an impact! Oh, yeah I’m tired, I mean I worked hard, but there’s days like that right?” And more days go by like that.
So it goes, days turn to weeks turn to months. You’re told you’re appreciated, how you’re crucial, you’re the go-to person for the infrastructure, or for your IaC, or for the observability stack, or for system troubleshooting (or maybe multiple of these)… It feels good. You feel valuable. Then more work is piled on. You become the person that’s trusted to handle it all; or if you’re lucky, there’s a few others that take on the huge workload with you, but you’re all spread too thin.
I dealt with that in my first DevOps role — one I took on last year and finally managed to leave. The work was modernizing a legacy system’s infrastructure and transitioning it from VMWare to AWS. AWS was new to nearly the entire team, including myself. Part of this was my personality: I hate saying ‘No’, I want to help my team. Good traits to have in a teammate, I think. But also the traits that burnout-prone environments hunt for.