A Year of Fire and Fog
Or: I lost a year of my life to work and all I got was this lousy burnout
I once went something like 11 years without taking a vacation.
I’d had a bit of time off over the holidays here and there, but I usually just sat at home working on side projects. And I was probably on call anyway. Even on the streak-breaking vacation — a trip to Spain with Jenny — I found myself huddled under the sink in our hotel room’s bathroom, phone pressed between my shoulder and cheek, logged into a production load balancer. I was the company’s only ops engineer which meant that I was on call, vacation or no.
I used to consider myself immune to burnout. By that point I’d been working in tech for 17 or 18 years, with a long list of product crunches and stints as an individual contributor. I’d been an ops team of one for growing companies and I’d built teams and scaled infrastructure and organizations. I figured I had seen it all. And I was part of the problem.
Then I got punched in the head by a possibly mentally ill man on BART.
Digression: On Concussions
If you’ve never had a concussion before, you’re not really missing much. There’s a constant low grade headache which becomes a full blown migraine with physical activity — which at the beginning can be triggered by just walking to the kitchen. Concentrating or focusing on anything for too long will also trigger a migraine.
For months I struggled; not just with work, but with basic things. I had trouble summoning words when I needed them — I still sometimes do over a year later — and I stuttered and slurred for a few weeks. My memory was hilariously poor for a while. And of course there were the headaches.
When it comes to brains, there’s not much that can be done. My prescription was for cognitive rest which basically means don’t use your brain. Whenever I wasn’t working I was locked in my bedroom — banned from TV, video games, any sort of a screen, and even books.
But I worked.
Work / Health Imbalance
There I was; an ops team of one* heading into our most important quarter with a mountain of work to do and the added pressure of having committed to an influential board member that we’d have a smooth quarter. We agreed that we’d celebrate our success on the other side of it. I had put my reputation on the line.
I probably forgot to knock on wood.
The list of things I had to do myself — or at least have some level of involvement in — was already overwhelming for a completely healthy person. There was no one else, and no help was offered.
I would usually start at 8am to be available to support the early shift and occasionally earlier to monitor traffic during big events. I’d eat leftovers at my desk for lunch. Most days would include a call with my boss where I’d give a status update and describe the severity of the day’s headache. At some point my wife would come home and some time later would deposit dinner next to my keyboard. She’d come by my office to say goodnight on her way to bed. I’d wrap up my work anywhere from 10pm to 2am.
On weekends I would sleep until noon to catch up on what I’d missed during the week. When I was awake I had no energy to do anything and for a month I was locked in my bedroom for cognitive rest. Eventually I graduated to a couple hours of TV a day before heading back to bed.
It is true that I would insist that I could handle it, and I guess I did, but don’t organizations have a responsibility to their employees to stop them from harming themselves in the name of the job?
Culture and Expectations
When my dad broke his back and was hospitalized I visited him as often as I could, but I didn’t book a block of time off. Maybe I could have — and maybe management would have been okay with that — but I felt obligated to keep working. That feeling did not happen in a void.**
In an age where many startups have unlimited or even forced vacation policies, we had strict vacation accounting and I already had a two week vacation scheduled the next month. Not only that, but my own importance — and my being a single point of failure — was made clear to me when I was forbidden from getting on an airplane during Q4 so that I was always reachable and had access to reliable internet.
Senior leaders set the tone and the rest of us followed their example. I would regularly get emails at all hours of the night. Engineers ordering pizza at the office was the norm. We scheduled high risk operations — which was almost all of them as our tolerance to risk decreased throughout the season — during our low traffic periods, aka the middle of the night. As the sole ops engineer, that meant I was up late a lot. It’s not like I could say no, so I worked.
Pressure and Priorities
Two weeks after my dad was hospitalized, I got the call from my mom. We’d known for a few days that it could go either way but our most recent update had been optimistic.
It was the middle of the day. I think it was a Tuesday. I was at my desk.
I’d fallen pretty far behind in my work. The concussion made everything a slog, and pushing myself only exacerbated the problem. Unfortunately I did not have the luxury of allowing someone else to take over for me or even to pick up some of the slack. Though I definitely should not have been working, I worked.
She never actually said that he had died, just that I should get over there. I sent a message to my boss over HipChat and ran out the door. That was probably the first time that I’d left my house without my laptop in 5 months. Although now that I think of it, I probably did bring the damned thing with me.
I took the maximum allowable five days to grieve. I spent all of it playing video games, taking my dog out to the park, and sleeping.
Digging My Way Out
After the dust settled, I did take that vacation. I’ve never needed a vacation like I needed that one, and I’ve never had a less restful vacation despite spending ten days split between the beach and the couch.
I was being hounded to join meetings with just a few hours’ notice, and would get back from the beach to find I’d missed calls from work. Apparently the expectation of someone at my level was to always be available, even on vacation.
So I did what any highly privileged person should do in this situation: I handed in my resignation with no plan other than to sleep for a month, play video games for another month, then maybe start to figure things out.
What happened next is what should have happened from the start, and what every person in that position should hope for: suddenly the company was concerned for my well being and committed to fixing the problems. I was skeptical but agreed to at least stay for the transition period to a new head of engineering.
The organization finally agreed that even a two person on call rotation was inhumane, and that our workload required a fully staffed team. I ran the entire hiring process myself, a task I committed myself to full time for a few weeks. My job posting for a DevOps Regular Human outlined the ops culture that I wanted to build. It struck a chord and we hired a fabulous team.
Becoming a Better Leader
Even as a director I take my leadership cues from my manager, and he from his. Given no leeway and no support while facing long odds, I had no choice but to keep an oppressive schedule and ask it of my team. Today I have freedom and support to not kill my team and I am now able to be the leader that I needed a year ago.
I’ve been struggling with this section for a couple days. I wanted to tie the whole thing together and wrap it up with convenient takeaways. It does not appear to be that simple, or maybe I just am not seeing it. What I will leave you with instead is my easy to digest list of rules I’ve adopted:
- Put people in a position to succeed and provide support throughout
- Trust and empower them to make good decisions
- Respect their time away from work
- Enforce boundaries between work time and personal time
- Set a good example — i.e. LOG OFF
Footnotes
* at the time I was technically part of a two-person ops team, but in practice it really wasn’t due to <reasons>
** that feeling was validated when I was on vacation a month later and was criticized for not being responsive enough to same day meeting invites or answering my phone while I was at the beach.
