Leaders, Developer Burnout Is Your Responsibility. Here’s How To Avoid It

On the surface, it may seem like developers have it made. They earn good salaries doing intellectually interesting work that makes a real impact on their companies. However, these highly valuable employees are vulnerable to one big problem: burnout.

Developers perform demanding, technical work that’s not always understood by other parts of the business. So, they’re often subject to unreasonable demands and unrealistic targets that don’t value their time. Because developers are specialists, it can be difficult for them to delegate tasks, which easily leads to overwork. From there, it’s a quick path to burnout — and high rates of turnover for these uniquely skilled, hard-to-replace employees.

I’ve seen these patterns take hold both as a developer and as a leader of developers myself. And in every case, developer burnout is a leadership issue. Managers must take the initiative to protect developers’ time, hear their concerns and maintain reasonable workloads — or watch burnout destroy morale on their teams and throughout the company.

What causes developer burnout?

It’s not just about the long hours. Developer burnout is a slow accumulation of many small issues that grow out of three main problems: lack of ownership, lack of control and lack of recognition. Once you’re on the lookout for these problems, you’ll be able to spot situations that put developers at high risk for burnout before any symptoms set in.

A project is more likely to cause burnout if:

• A lot of work is required before code can be shipped (and work recognized)
• Developers don’t trust the product team’s understanding of customer requirements, which increases the likelihood that code will have to be scrapped or reworked extensively after being shipped
• The developer has no input into the project scope or schedule or other decisions that impact their work life

Maintaining legacy code is a good example of a high-risk project. Often, the decision to constantly patch legacy code rather than refactoring or simply rewriting it has been made by senior management without much input from the developers, taking away their sense of control. The developer is working with code they didn’t write, so they lack ownership over the work product. And since they’re maintaining code instead of creating it, recognition will likely be limited.

You won’t be able to avoid these high-risk situations in all cases. But if you can flag them in advance, you can take proactive measures to keep them from wearing down developers’ motivation and morale.

Take action before you see signs of burnout

Burnout doesn’t happen overnight. You can avoid it by addressing developers’ dissatisfactions before they lead to behavior changes.

That means scheduling regular one-on-one check-ins with your direct reports where you discuss what they want from their careers and how you can guide them toward those goals. Follow up on these meetings with concrete actions, whether it’s setting a developer up with training that supports their goals or assigning them more of the types of work they’re interested in.

Then, carefully monitor team workloads. No one developer should do too much of one thing — if possible, make sure to rotate them from project to project to ensure variety.

You should also provide clear guidance on which tasks developers should prioritize and which are okay to put on the back burner. Unfortunately, it’s often the most passionate, hard-working developers who are at highest risk for burnout. They’re deeply curious about their work and want to over-deliver on every task. A good manager will help them set aside less urgent jobs (even if they’re intensely interesting) to focus on important work.

The 3 signs of burnout you never want to see — and what to do about them

Unfortunately, you may not always be able to stop burnout before it starts. Developers tend to react to burnout in one of three ways:

1. Anger: The developer becomes argumentative, refuses to collaborate and takes feedback poorly.
2. Withdrawal: The developer stops showing up to or contributing to meetings, becomes harder to reach on Slack or email and commits only small code changes infrequently.
3. Rudderlessness: The developer over-focuses on small tasks and lets other more important work pile up, refusing any assistance.

If you spot any of these behavior changes, it might be too late to talk it out. Proactively move the developer in question off a difficult project, give them time off or temporarily reduce their workload. Giving them some time to recover may help restore their equilibrium so you can open a discussion about what caused their burnout and how you can avoid the same situation in the future. However, the best protection against burnout is never letting it take root at all, so don’t wait for visible symptoms to take proactive measures.

Use developers’ independence to your advantage

Developers often find it hard to ask for help. They’re fiercely proud of their abilities and love to problem-solve on their own. As a manager, you should take advantage of those qualities to steer your team away from burnout. By ensuring variety in their everyday work, empowering them to speak up about their dissatisfactions and giving them opportunities to learn and challenge themselves, you’ll boost morale and support productivity.

Keeping developers happy also has major benefits for the company. Better retention means you have an experienced team that knows your systems and stack — and who are focused and motivated enough to ship quality code fast. All it takes is for managers to step up and shoulder the responsibility for avoiding developer burnout.

Chris O’Malley, Senior Manager, Cloud Native Development Practice, RackspaceTechnology