97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 19. Sustainability and Burnout

Denise Yu

GitHub

Building, running, and being part of an SRE team is a marathon, not a sprint. Incident response in many organizations is an inherently high-stress situation, and repeated out-of-hours escalations can easily contribute to cycles of professional burnout. As we fine-tune SLOs and iterate on rotation design, it’s equally important to keep touch on the pulse of the health of the team, and constantly ask: As a group, are we working in a way that is sustainable over the long haul?

What does burnout look like? Burnout is, fortunately, a well-studied clinical condition; doctors like Dr. Herbert Freudenberger, starting in the 1970s, have researched and characterized burnout as having three telltale signs:

• Emotional exhaustion: too much time spent on caring too much

• Depersonalization: you find yourself empathizing less with others

• Decreased sense of accomplishment

The signs of burnout will of course manifest differently in every individual and, if you’re an individual like me, who places a lot of pressure on themselves, learning to recognize our own emotional states is not a muscle we’ve spent much time developing, which makes having high-trust conversations about our well-being all the more difficult.

A group of technologists and researchers created an online questionnaire that your team can take to assess risk levels for burnout ...