Diagnosed with burnout, developer instantly adds recovery to their task backlog

Description

Image is a cropped screenshot of a tweet on a white background. The tweet shows the user name “Meghan Scott Molin - Camp NaNo…” with handle “@megfuzzle” and a small circular profile photo on the left. The text of the tweet reads: “My therapist: "you definitely have clinical burnout." Me: "Oh man. Well, how long is that going to take to fix, because I've got a _lot_ of stuff that needs doing." My therapist: Me: Me: what?” The humor comes from the abrupt silence after the therapist’s diagnosis, highlighting a developer’s tendency to treat personal wellbeing like another ticket in an already overloaded sprint. Technically relevant because clinical burnout, deadline overload, and task backlogs are common issues for engineers juggling heavy workloads and unrealistic delivery schedules

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DeveloperBurnout MentalHealthInTech DeadlinePressure DeveloperAnxiety StressManagementInTech DeveloperFrustration RelatableDevExperience WorkLifeBalanceTips

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Anonymous ★ Top Pick Therapist marked my burnout as a P0, but the roadmap’s booked through Q4 with “strategic initiatives,” so self-care just got triaged next to “finish strangling the monolith” - ETA: the heat death of the JVM

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Therapist marked my burnout as a P0, but the roadmap’s booked through Q4 with “strategic initiatives,” so self-care just got triaged next to “finish strangling the monolith” - ETA: the heat death of the JVM
Anonymous

Ah yes, the classic senior engineer approach to burnout: 'Just give me the ETA for the hotfix so I can schedule it between my 14-hour debugging session and the production incident at 3am. Maybe we can parallelize the recovery process across multiple threads?'
Anonymous

Classic developer response to burnout: immediately trying to estimate the sprint velocity for mental health recovery and wondering if they can parallelize self-care with their existing workload. The real bug here isn't in the code - it's the infinite loop of treating every life problem like a JIRA ticket that needs to be closed ASAP so you can get back to closing more JIRA tickets
Anonymous

Only in engineering do we treat burnout like a Sev-1 and ask the therapist for a same-day hotfix so we can keep breaching our personal SLA
Anonymous

Therapist flags burnout; dev instinctively SLAs the recovery time - because blockers wait for no one
Anonymous

Only engineers treat burnout like a Sev-2: open a ticket, request an ETA, and squeeze the patch between two sprints - meanwhile the error budget is you
@s2504s 4y

Explaining squad, please
1. dev_meme 4y
  
  Clinical burnout = клиническое выгорание
  
  @Zhenyokmsk 4y
  
  That much is clear )
@MrZarei 4y

I didn't get it
@feskow 4y

doctor indirectly says Meghan needs to remove stress from their life, and they think it's just another stuff that needs to be done
1. @s2504s 4y
  
  Got it, Lol 🤣
@slnt_opp 4y

Why lot is lot and not lot?🤔
Денис 4y

Lol, cannot take a vacation more than a month, cuz I have to finish a JOB first
@beton_kruglosu_totchno 4y

Clinical or chronical?
@DagNo1 4y

Do devs really burn out? What does even mean?
1. @RiedleroD 4y
  
  I don't know why it happens, but when someone works too much, they can lose all mental energy they have for a while, depending on how much they overworked themselves.
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  consult wikipedia if you want to know more specific info
2. @ArchieWindragon 4y
  
  Think of your brain as a muscle. If you over exert yourself, or don't take care of it and let it rest, you can sprain or injure it and it won't be as useful until it recovers

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Diagnosed with burnout, developer instantly adds recovery to their task backlog

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