Read more on avoiding burnout.
The last few months have been wild. Some of the busiest of my life, actually:
- Attended Honeycomb’s yearly offsite
- Gave the closing keynote of two conferences with Charity (CodeBEAM and SRECon), both different talks and on the West Coast, taking me two days of travel each way
- Saw old friends and met many of the RISF folks in person, which fucking ruled
- Somehow got elected to the board of the RISF
- Wrote more blog posts
- Co-authored a nifty article on IEEE
- Hit my four year anniversary at Honeycomb, which comes with a neat perk: a one month sabbatical
For context: I’m Canadian, and all of this happened during the continued threats of annexation. All this to say, it’s been rough.
I anticipated this would be a challenging time and that I would be exhausted. So, the plan became: do all the demanding things, take my sabbatical in May, and use April as an ‘in-between’ period with a bit less pressure. I would willingly step off the gas and let other SREs on the team cover pressing matters, as a sort of pre-game for my full month away. In the meantime—if nothing weird happened, I could use my time to actively transfer fuzzy ideas into more concrete plans and processes, and act more as a safety net.
Why am I telling you this?
I’m mentioning these things because I think there are two axes to it:
- You have to learn how to self-regulate to avoid burnout. You do better giving 80% in general, because there has to be a cooldown period after high effort periods.
- People who have been around a long time become tangled in everything in invisible ways. Sabbaticals like this are a smart way to highlight these issues without needing to lose employees to burnout to discover them.
On the self-regulation point, I can’t emphasize enough how much the tech industry has managed to externalize the burden of learning and keeping up with things onto its workers.
Workers are in a perpetual rush to stay up-to-date on specific technologies, frameworks, languages, and tools with the hope of remaining employable. People are stuck playing a divination game in hopes to bet on the right stack with the right skillset such that they’ll check all the boxes in a job ad that sounds like a Christmas wishlist in a letter to Recruiter Santa—job ads that, in this current climate, look like they’re drying up, often coupled with an explicit threat of getting your job automated away soon anyway.
On top of that, as we’re seeing reductions in workforce while demands for growth apply more pressure, it’s easy for organizations to ask for people to do more with less. Folks at SRECon highly recommended Christina Maslach’s 2024 talk on burnout where she mentions, among other things, that unaddressed chronic stressors are the things that can lead to negative work outcomes. And you need to fix the job, not just the person, for this to work.
I tell everyone I work with to make sure their health is not the implicit buffer used to amortize their organization’s shortfalls. You can’t personally absorb all the shocks of a flawed system that may or may not actively be forcing you in that position.
Establishing and communicating limits lets the rest of the system react and adjust to them in the long run, rather than taking them for granted. Willingly oppose “burning more people out to meet objectives” with “calling out tradeoffs that need to be negotiated.” People who self-regulate help teams self-regulate, which helps organizations self-regulate.
(If that doesn’t sell it for you, then I’ll just say that you, as a full person, deserve to care for your health; corporate persons do not have the same right to life you do.)
Depending on one person’s knowledge
My second point is on using sabbaticals as chaos engineering. The longer someone’s been around, the more time there’s been for them to get tangled into all sorts of processes, to become a living roll of duct tape keeping things running.
One of our longest tenured engineers had a sabbatical a few years ago, and I still clearly remember the amount of stress I felt being on call while he was out—he was an implicit safety net for everything happening and we took it out willingly. I realized after the fact how much more stressed I had been during his entire absence. There were things that happened and we figured them out, but it was really painful to deal with. There were also things we realized were scary but thankfully never happened. All of these were now known issues instead of hidden dependencies on his knowledge.
Testing for these while the person on leave eventually comes back is much more comforting than figuring it out after they’ve gone for good. On top of that, knowing that someone’s sabbatical is coming lets you and your team make plans and look for these gaps ahead of time.
All in all, I wanted to write about my appreciation of this policy, in that it gave me some margin to push myself harder on some levels while allowing a safe time to fill back up on energy to avoid burnout. But it also helped me make sure my team is prepared for a broader set of challenges—whether I’m there or not.
