I was sitting across from one of my best technicians the other day when I noticed something I’d seen before but never really wanted to acknowledge. He was staring past me while I talked, nodding at the right moments, but his eyes had that glazed look of someone who’d already clocked out mentally hours ago. When I asked him directly about a project he’d been excited about just three months prior, he gave me a half-hearted response that told me everything I needed to know. This person wasn’t lazy. This person was burned out.

We live in an interesting time in IT. The job market is strong, unemployment is hovering around 2%, and positions across the industry are sitting unfilled because there simply aren’t enough qualified people to fill them. Companies are desperate for talent, and it shows. Yet despite all this demand, despite the security and career opportunity that comes with a hot job market, I’m watching talented people I know leave the industry or check out entirely from roles they’re still physically showing up to. The irony stings, and it’s worth understanding.

The Paradox Nobody Talks About

In 2019, if you’re any good at IT, you have options. Real options. The BLS data bears this out, and every recruiter in Portland and beyond is calling people with solid IT credentials. You’d think this would mean people would be satisfied, engaged, excited about their careers. Instead, I’m hearing the same story from managers across different organizations. Their teams are exhausted.

The thing about burnout is that it doesn’t care about your job prospects. It doesn’t care that you could probably land three new positions by next month if you decided to leave. Burnout is about what’s happening right now, in this job, in these hours, with this workload. And for a lot of people in IT, what’s happening right now is unsustainable.

I realized recently that burnout got official recognition in May when the World Health Organization classified it as an actual occupational phenomenon in the ICD-11. It’s not just something we complain about anymore. It’s a real, documented condition. That classification matters because it signals that this isn’t weakness or laziness on anyone’s part. This is what happens when the job itself is designed in a way that wears people down.

The Helpdesk Grind

Let me talk about the helpdesk, because that’s where I see some of the clearest burnout patterns. A helpdesk technician’s job is inherently repetitive. You’re working through queues of tickets, solving the same problems over and over again with different user names attached. Reset password. Printer not printing. Check if they turned it off and on again. Rinse, repeat. All day. Every day.

The problem compounds when you layer in user frustration on top of the repetition. People don’t call the helpdesk when they’re having a good day. They call when something’s broken and they’re already annoyed. You’re absorbing that frustration, managing it, staying professional, while you’re burning through your fifth identical issue of the morning. Do this for months, and something inside you starts to break.

What I’ve noticed is that helpdesk burnout creates this vicious cycle. When someone’s burned out, their patience thins. They start cutting corners on documentation or ticket quality. This makes their job even harder down the line because nothing’s properly recorded. Their performance metrics might start to slip. And suddenly, instead of addressing the burnout itself, we’re asking them why their quality is declining. We’re treating the symptom instead of the disease.

Alert Fatigue and the SOC

I want to talk about a specific type of burnout that’s been getting more attention lately, and it’s hitting the security operations center hard. Alert fatigue is real, and it’s brutal.

A SOC analyst might be responsible for monitoring thousands of alerts in a single shift. Thousands. The systems are configured to catch potentially malicious activity, which means they cast a wide net. That net includes a lot of false positives, and I mean a lot. An analyst is supposed to triage, investigate, and respond to all of this, knowing that the one alert they dismiss could theoretically be the real breach.

The psychological toll here is immense. You’re constantly scanning for threats that mostly aren’t there, but you have to treat every single one as if it might be. You can’t afford to be cavalier or lazy about it because the actual risks are serious. So you stay on high alert, constantly vigilant, running on adrenaline and coffee. Do that for months, and you’re not just tired. You’re exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t really fix.

Ponemon Institute data from security professionals supports what I’m seeing anecdotally. The burnout rates are high, and people are telling researchers that alert fatigue is a major contributing factor. When your job is predicated on staying perfectly alert for eight hours while most of what you’re monitoring is noise, burnout isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a natural response to an unsustainable workload.

The On-Call Prison

Then there’s the on-call responsibility, which deserves its own conversation. I’ve managed plenty of engineers who are on-call rotations, and I’ve been on them myself. The thing about on-call is that it doesn’t stop when you leave the office. It follows you home. It follows you to dinner, to your kid’s soccer game, to your bedroom at 2 AM when an alert fires.

Yes, most of the time nothing happens. But that “most of the time” doesn’t matter to your body. You’re in a state of partial readiness. You can’t fully relax. You can’t have a drink at a restaurant and forget about work. You can’t sleep deeply because part of your brain is listening for your phone. This is true even when things are quiet. The on-call responsibility is always there, always demanding a piece of your attention and your peace of mind.

Multiply this across weeks and months, and you’re looking at accumulated sleep disruption and chronic stress. Your personal life suffers because you’re never fully present. Your relationships take a hit because you’re mentally elsewhere. And your work suffers too, because an engineer running on fumes can’t do their best work even when they’re technically at their best intellectually.

I’ve seen talented engineers leave because of on-call stress, and the frustrating part is that the company didn’t realize they were losing these people until they’d already given notice. The burnout was silent and invisible from above.

What We Can Actually Do About This

As managers and leaders, we have some responsibility here. We can’t fix everything, and we can’t eliminate stress entirely, but we can make things better.

First, we need to acknowledge that burnout isn’t a personal failing. If someone on your team seems disengaged or performing below their usual standard, start with a real conversation about workload and stress before you start performance managing them. Sometimes people just need to know that their manager sees them struggling and cares about it.

Second, look at your alerting thresholds, your ticket queue expectations, and your on-call rotations with real scrutiny. Are people realistically expected to handle their current workload? I’m not talking about pushing people to work harder. I’m talking about whether the volume of work itself is sustainable. If you’ve got a SOC analyst dealing with ten thousand alerts a day and most are false positives, that’s a system problem, not a people problem.

Third, respect the boundaries that prevent burnout. If you have on-call rotations, make sure people actually have rest days. Don’t let someone stay on-call indefinitely because you’re short-staffed. That’s burning the bridge while standing on it. Protect your people’s time off. Make sure they actually take it.

Fourth, be honest about career path. Some people thrive in support roles and some don’t. Some people love the SOC and some find it soul-crushing. Some people can do on-call indefinitely and some need different responsibilities. Have these conversations and help people find roles where they can succeed sustainably.

Looking Ahead

Here’s what I’m optimistic about as we head into 2020. The IT industry is aware of burnout now in a way it wasn’t before. We’re talking about it more openly. Organizations are starting to realize that burning through good people because you won’t invest in better systems or staffing is actually expensive and short-sighted. The job market gives us an opportunity to do better, to attract and keep great people by offering them sustainable work environments, not just competitive salaries.

The people on your team who seem lazy or disengaged right now aren’t broken. They’re exhausted. And if you want to keep them, if you want their best work and their loyalty, you’re going to need to address the burnout directly. That’s the work ahead of us, and I think we’re finally ready to do it.