Saying The Quiet Part Out-Loud: The Bargain for Burnout
Acknowledgement is half the battle; a post-mortem on the unique contributing factors for Tech Worker burnout
Every choice is a trade-off decision in life.
But let’s be real for a second and say the quiet part out loud. Working in “Tech” burns you out in a very specific way.
It’s a unique flavour of burnout that you only really admit to when you’re trading war stories with other tech worker veterans, whether you came from a scrappy startup or of the “big” variety.
Me and my colleagues (of the same title) used to joke that our 1:1s weren’t status updates. They were really therapy sessions. We laughed about it but we weren’t the ones laughing last.
Startups offer one flavour of chaos, often lacking structure or rules, running on an emergent culture that can feel like nobody is at the wheel. Big Tech offers the opposite. It can bury you in process. The institutional friction ramps up until you’re spending 40 hours a week coordinating work and maybe 4 hours actually shipping it.
The tradeoff for the golden handcuffs.
Burnout is more than just working too hard. It’s a mechanical breakdown. It’s what happens (mostly latent) when the work is out of alignment with your design.
But long before you even have a symptom of misalignment, it shows up in a few areas. Think of these are a collect of post-mortem Single-Points-of-Failure (not your failure, the system’s):
Move Fast and Break Things
The Artificial Harmony Trap
The Always On Notification Loop
Addicted to the Golden Handcuffs
The Hero Mode Complex
Obsession over Title & Tribe
Visibility Theatre
Trying To Be The Smartest Person In the Room
Chasing the Shiny Object
We’re gonna unpack a few of these tech burnout through this one story from these two Amazon employee and experiences. I know it’s a small sample of one but bear with me it’s very indicative of the general state of things.
Failure Point 1: Visibility Theatre
> PM says there's not enough Disagree and Commit
> we need to disagree about something
> team spends 2 hours debating whether the config file should be YAML or JSON
> engineering insists on XML "for backwards compatibility"
> what backwards compatibility, this is a new service
> doesn't matter, we disagree and commit to XML
We’ve all been in this meeting. The culture demands a show so we do the song and dance. Alex McCann calls it “Manufactured Necessity”. Nobody in that room actually cares about XML or a splashier presentation through careful wordsmithing. But to play the game, you need to solve problems in full visibility even though it can be done quieter. It drains your battery because you aren’t working. It’s a performance.
Failure Point 2: The Smartest Person in the Room
> manager asks "but does it Dive Deep?"
> show him 37 pages of technical documentation
> "that's great anon, but what about Customer Obsession?"
> model literally convinces customers to buy more stuff they don't need
> "okay but are you thinking Big Enough?"
> mfw I am literally increasing sales
The manager here is just throwing out buzzwords like “Dive Deep” as a shield because they are terrified of uncertainty or need to cover their a$$. It placates the values and the part of them soothes their own mental anxiety. It’s the literal definition of dotting the I’s and crossing the T's. Drudgery that leads to burnout.
Failure Point 3: Chasing the Shiny Object
> VP decides we need to "Invent and Simplify"
> requests we rebuild the entire thing using a new framework
> framework doesn't exist yet
> "show some Ownership and build it yourself"
> 3 months later, framework is half done
This is the addiction to the “New.” The working solution was boring because it was finished and finished work doesn't get you promoted. Leadership feels massive pressure to escape the present and live in the fantasy of the hallucinated future. Ironically, this is where we lose focus and just build to satisfy a restless need for the constantly moving. Some call it The Red Queen Effect.
Failure Point 4: Obsession Over Title & Tribe
> org restructure happens
> new manager says this doesn't align with team goals anymore
> project cancelled
> model never ships
> manager gets promoted to L8 for "successfully reallocating resources"
> team celebrates with 6-pager retrospective about what we learned
> mfw we delivered on all 16 leadership principles
> mfw we delivered nothing else
The project failed. By all measure this isn’t a success you celebrate or reward. But in may roles and teams, survival in tech depends on merging your identity with the company. The manager got promoted because they followed the “16 Principles” perfectly even though they produced zero value. It’s a game afterall. This is ultimate homogeny. You burnout trying to find direction in a system that rewards you for playing the corporate game expertly.
The Background Frequency Is Changing
AI Is Adding Fuel to the Fire
The money has moved. It used to go to headcount now it goes to GPUs. I’m hearing it from my circles that the budgets are gone and they are looking for “efficiencies” to pay for the AI compute which means salaries are the target.
The hiring spree of 2020 is over. The bar is higher. Look at what Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke put in a memo to staff on AI:
“Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI. What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?”
One-Size-Does-Not-Fit-All
I’ve written before about companies being “Agile” in name only.
In the Amazon tech worker story, burnout comes from trying to force specific Values into every interaction even when it makes no sense. I get the need for principles but there has to be room for judgment. Taste. Discernment.
The irony? These human skills are exactly what we need as AI Agents take over the grunt work but the current system crushes them in favor of compliance.
Burnout as a Signal
Burnout is not an emotion. It is a System Error Message.
One last story.
I joined a company as a Senior Technical PM. About four weeks in, my Lead PM told me live on a call that to have the desired output for the team, I “at least needed to make one person upset.” That is a direct quote.
We treat our bodies like servers that never overheat. We tell ourselves it’s a necessary “trade-off” for the career capital and the salary. But that ‘burnout’ you feel is actually bio-feedback. It has nothing to do with grit. It’s your internal dashboard flashing a ‘Check Engine’ light because you are functioning against your design.
The trade-off isn’t working for many tech workers.
This could be the outcome, from another Amazon experience:
I’m Eugene, a former tech builder (Engineer, Designer, PM, Founder) who learned the hard way that burnout is a bug, not a feature. Whether you need to Level Up, Enter, or Exit the industry, I help you debug your career and decode your unique Career and Business Success Code to navigate AI displacement without the system crash.
Interested to learn about your unique Career/Business Success Code Report, download yours today.
When you’re ready to do a 1:1 Consult on how to apply these to your career as you think about transition to or in and out of Tech, reach out below for a free consult!