The True Cost of Tech Worker Burnout

Tech industry employees are depressed, and it costs tech companies a fortune

Let me ask you a question.

Are you burned out?

Because 80% of you are, at least a little. That’s four out of every five of you.

Thanks, Dave, good to hear that things are really going well for you. Be quiet for a second.

What’s more, at least one of you five is at “critical levels” of burnout.

Shut the hell up, Dave, we don’t need your advice right now. We already know how pickleball changed your life.

Tech worker burnout is real. It’s been building for years, and it’s about to reach a costly critical mass.

Techies Fought The Law and the Law Won

Last year at about this same time, I penned a rather snarky piece on the beginnings of the Great Tech Revolution. In it, I listed all the reasons why folks like you and me had had enough. Enough of the RTO mandates, enough of the AI-replacement threats, enough of being told to do impossibly more with increasingly less and expecting double digit growth on top of it.

But, unfortunately, I know how tech folks operate. And I called it at the end of the article. The Great Tech Revolution sputtered out like a memory leak finally eating the last of the available RAM.

Like, three people laughed at that. But I know my audience.

The reason why the coup failed? That aforementioned WORST TECH JOB MARKET EVER. Compliance to avoid joining the army of the tech undead who have been unemployed for a year or more.

What Happens When a Revolution Fails?

While my reasons for the Great Tech Revolution revolved around what I scientifically referred to as “dick moves” from management and leadership, most of the recent articles documenting the reasons for the resulting Great Tech Burnout focus on organizational chaos, vague requirements, shifting goals, and so on.

I have no argument with that. It really is all the reasons. Like, think of a reason. Yeah, it’s that too.

But look, I’ve got enough experience inside and outside of the executive washroom to know that when the problem is everything, the problem is that no one knows what the problem is.

So here’s the real problem:

Tech burnout is indeed everything, but it’s also happening everywhere, all at once. The burnout and its resulting hellfire of unproductive humans is overwhelming management and leadership. No one has a solution, so they’re throwing band-aids at a bullet wound and everyone is acting like it’ll be fine. Which is just making things worse.

This isn’t rocket science. But it might end up costing as much.

The True Cost of Software Developer Burnout

It’s about $1 trillion a year.

What, you were expecting me to paint the “true cost” of tech burnout with some pithy emotionally-driven wisdom?

No, dude. Sandblasted tech workforces cost companies real dollars. Lots of them.

Let me do some quick math. Last year, the cost of tech worker burnout was pegged at $1 trillion.

Did things get better or worse this year?

A + B = I need to eat this entire bag of chocolate bars.

So what do we do about it? Well, not what we’ve done, that’s for sure.

Depressed? There’s An App For That!

We’re already spending over $100 billion collectively on wellness apps and programs.

How’s that working out?

And, of course, Dave’s got his pickleball.

But here’s something I learned as soon as they let me use the executive washroom.

When you don’t know the problem, you should use soft, vague qualitative terms to discuss the unknown cause, then just go ahead and attack the obvious symptoms – high workloads, inefficient processes, unclear goals and targets, constant context switching. Those all sound like horrible things that nobody likes, so leadership’s go-to move is to talk about how we should really tackle those things head-on with our full organizational effort.

Let’s put a committee on it. In the meantime, let’s buy Calm for everyone.

But wait.

Those symptoms. High workloads, inefficient processes, unclear goals and targets, constant context switching… what causes those horrible symptoms?

Or rather… who?

Tech Workers are Moving Through the Grief Cycle

Tech is dying and bad tech leadership is collectively killing it, by focusing only on short-term returns, mandating AI as a solution for all the problems, and touting bogus numerical quantification of every possible productivity metric.

Why are we so burned out? We’re grieving. We’re grieving growth and we’re grieving innovation. Anyone who got into tech to ride the rocket of innovation, but instead became cogs in a slow, systematic grind to stagnation, has moved through the grief process from anger straight to depression. To burnout.

We skipped right over bargaining, because we don’t have leverage. Because job market.

The Best Payback is a Better Paycheck

When anger is unchanneled, it leads to depression. But when channeled correctly, anger can be a great motivator.

Channel that shit.

One time I got so mad at a potential business partner who last-minute surprise-scrubbed a company-saving deal with me, that I immediately went out and co-invented one of the first generative AI platforms. It was a five-year, anger-fueled long game, but everybody won. I mean everybody.

Except the former potential business partner. But at that point, I didn’t care. Years later, that same former potential business partner congratulated me and apologized to me, and it meant… absolutely nothing.

After that, I realized, in business anyway, anger is just motivation without a channel.

You have talent. You have drive. You’re not burned out. You’re pissed off.

In over hundreds of years of business history, that cocktail eventually wins. It’s up to you, not them, to figure out how to channel all that anger into your own success.

Join the rebel alliance of over 10K tech professionals on my email list. Look, maybe we won’t rage-innovate our way to glory, but at least we’ll all get a couple good laughs along the way.

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