Burning Hot Or Burning Out?

A few months after I started working on my first team, my product manager sat me down and asked, "Are you burning hot or burning out?". It was a week or two before Thanksgiving, and more importantly for our team, Black Friday. We were juggling a lot of projects at the time since our team had formed only a few months ago, and Black Friday would be our highest traffic period for months. This presented us with a unique opportunity to test a bunch of hypotheses about our product's purchase funnel and learn how to optimize each step from awareness to checkout. I was a newly minted engineer and the first engineer my manager recruited for the team, so I was an integral part of the juggling act too.

My product manager continued,

"I recently learned that there's a fine line between burning hot and burning out. There's nothing wrong with burning hot, but you have to be really careful to know which side of that line you're on."

I burned hot on that team for a while, pushing out experiment after experiment for months. We had a great half. Our team grew, and my role grew with it. Suddenly, instead of just juggling features and experiments, I was juggling projects, managing interns, and advocating for new initiatives. I was pushing myself hard, to the detriment of my health, but I was learning a lot, our team was getting recognition, and I felt like I was burning hot. In retrospect, it wasn't sustainable. I was slowly sliding down the path from burning hot to burning out, but it's hard to notice it happening when you're in the thick of it.

Three years later I was still on that team, and Fall was rolling around once again. It had been a thrashy 18 months for the team, and I was feeling it acutely as it compounded with other things going on in my life. By the time summer ended, I was working on projects on my own team and another team at the same time, mentoring an intern, and ramping up new folks. All of a sudden, I couldn't deny that I was starting to burn out, so I took some time off. Less than a week after I got back, I started feeling the burnout again.

My engineering director offered to chat with me about it, and when I explained the situation to him, he said:

"If you take a vacation and immediately start feeling burnt out when you get back, there are probably systemic things about the work you've taken on and the expectations you're under that are causing you to burn out. No matter how many vacations you take, you'll always keep burning out if you don't address it. I'd rather you declare bankruptcy on some of the projects you're working on now and find a more sustainable workload than have you burn out trying to do too many things at once."

It took me a while to accept it, but it was good advice. I dropped some projects, sequenced projects from both teams instead of trying to do both in parallel, and eventually transitioned to work on the other team full time. The switch worked out really well for me and I managed to do better work without immediately burning out again. It made me wonder why I took so long to make a switch.

In retrospect, here are some of the reasons:

• I was working towards a promotion, and switching teams can be risky. I had been trying to get promoted on my old team for a while, and was building up to it by taking on more and bigger projects. I had a track record of mentoring interns and new engineers on my old team, and I had built the first version of many of the surfaces that the team owned, so I had a lot of institutional knowledge about what we had tried in the past. Switching teams meant potentially complicating that story or having to prove myself to new teammates. Fortunately for me, I'd already been working with my new team for a while before I switched, and my old team vouched for my work.
• My friends were on the old team. I had friends on the new team too, and I knew when I met them that it would be a solid team, but it's hard to let go of seeing people you've gotten really close to every day. The way the company worked, you spent a lot of time working with your team, and the kinds of teams I like to work on are especially collaborative (and chatty), so changing teams would be a big shift in my day to day routine.
• It felt like I was giving up on my old team and abandoning my friends who were still there. Our team was experiencing a lot of thrash then, and had been for over a year by the time I left. Thrash like that causes a lot of stress for everyone in the org, and it can be a big impediment to the growth (and career advancement) of more junior engineers like I was at the time. It felt like maybe if we could launch a few good projects, we could get the team back to a happier place. Of course, it was never my problem to solve. As a junior engineer and a junior person lacking both the technical and organizational experience to navigate these sorts of issues, no amount of effort on my part would have "fixed" it. Addressing the team's problems required skills I lacked and triggered my anxiety in a way that put me at a disadvantage to contribute to a solution. Far more senior folks were already working to right the ship, but such change is slow and not obvious to a junior person.
• I was nostalgic for the "good old days" from the team's first 18 months, when we were riding high and having a lot of fun working together. That was the carrot dangling perpetually beyond the current period of thrash. Of course, things could never go back to the way they were. The world doesn't stay still for three years, and especially not in tech. The way the company worked was different, our product's place in the market was different, and leadership's expectations of our team were different too. If I'd had the maturity to try to create something good for the moment instead of pining for the past, I might've had a clearer idea of what was possible.
• I was pushing myself close to (and often beyond) my limits. There were many weeks where I felt like I was barely above water, and every moment spent outside of work was just recovering enough mental and emotional energy to drag myself through the work day. That situation made it hard to really rationally reflect. I was dependent on my routine and support from my friends on the team just to stay sane, so I was having a hard time compartmentalizing work, and I was too emotionally drained and anxious to take risks.

Some of these lessons I had to learn the hard way, but as I reflect on them, I'm very grateful that the people I worked with chose to mentor me through burn out instead of coming down on me for it. I value the culture that the company had of trusting that they hired the right people and making it easy to try out different teams. A culture that avoids blame views burn out as a sign of systemic failure instead of personal failure, and I think that gave me the mental space I needed to recover and learn from the experience.