Burnout Generation Machine

Burnout on Aisle 3. An episode of "This is fine! Your favorite podcast about Resilience engineering and software." Colette Alexander and Clint Byrum. site youtube

Question: "There seem to be a lot of SRE type leaders who are involved in resilience engineering and seem to be burnt out and overloaded, especially related to the anti-patterns we tend to see around incidents and post incident activity. Why is this? What can we do to help them? What advice do you have for these leaders?"

Clint: What is different about SREs and system admins? We got to make sure everbody's okay. It's our job. Are the users okay? We fear we are the only ones who care if the users are okay.

Colette: I am on burnout leave. You can take leave for burnout.

Colette: Burnout is a thing. There are physical symptoms that show up. Burnout is not from working 80 hours a week. Burnout is from trying to accomplish a job and being unable. As if you were Sisyphus but you can't even move the rock.

Clint: People in our position are particularly prone to this. We tend to work in jobs like reliability engineering where we are asked to move metrics that we now know we cannot move but where other people think we can. Welcome to the Burnout Generation Machine.

Colette: I know that I have these radical ideas, but I always show up and do a stellar job at the rest of the stuff because I know it is important to build up my credibility so that people are willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, or give me the autonomy to try a different approach, if I have proven myself to them.

Colette: I got feedback a couple weeks ago. I was told I'm extremely good at my job and everything I do as a director. And also, "Colette, nobody in leadership respects your expertise."

Colette: Right there, the story I have been telling myself about earning credibility by doing the good work—well the gears came of and it all started smoking. This is not doing what I thought it was.

Colette: My reaction was to ask what can I do better? How can I improve? And the answer, of course, was "There is nothing you can do. You need to take a step back." I couldn't even think straight at that point.

Clint: There's this emotional battery that's part of our personal adaptive capacity and part of our organization's resilience. Yours had gone to zero where it's tough to even trust your own responses to things. There's nothing left in the tank.

Colette: there's an extra layer of icing on my anxiety which is knowing that you can never prevent the next big one from happening. When you accept that you do not have control, every morning looking at Slack waiting for the next thing where "Yep, now they're going to make me roll over and do something like a change review board."

Clint: Even if they won't fire you for it, your priorities will be shifted in a way that you disagree with.