Burnout is Not a Badge of Honor

Burnout doesn't announce itself as a performance problem. It looks like normal output, slightly degraded, for months before the collapse. A tired mind reaches for familiar solutions instead of the right ones. It misses the edge case, approves the risky deploy, and cuts the corner that becomes next quarter's incident. By the time it's visible, the damage is already done.

The deeper cost is harder to measure. Burnout is the spark dying. You start to resent your IDE. The problems that used to pull you in start to feel like a burden. That erosion of curiosity is what makes burned-out engineers so costly — they stop caring whether the work is good.

Software culture mistakes this for dedication. The engineer who's always on, always shipping, always available gets treated as the standard to meet. The grind gets celebrated. But what's actually being celebrated is a system running itself into the ground.

Sustainable engineers treat their capacity as part of the system they're responsible for maintaining. They push back on the 10 PM Slack message, the weekend guilt spiral, the reflexive yes to one more thing — because they understand that the craft requires a mind that's actually present. The work will be there tomorrow. The spark, once it goes out, takes much longer to relight.