In a previous role, I was asked to join several projects in the eleventh hour to get them shipped. The engineer who had been leading them til then had resigned. They were burned out and needed to focus on their health. Nothing final had been shipped, so we risked losing months of progress if someone didn’t land them immediately.
I jumped in. Ten-hour days, seven days a week, covering both my existing workload and that of my colleague. I worked through three consecutive weekends processing data migrations and deployments. On the third, I mentioned offhand to my project manager: “I haven’t taken a day off in over three weeks. I might need to take a couple of days of flex time next week just to rest for a bit.”
They were understanding and supportive. They told me to block out my schedule. I did. I went fishing and hiking for a couple of days. It was glorious.
When I came back, everything was wrong.
I’d already shipped the last-minute projects had shipped and our clients were happy. But I returned to discover all of my original projects had been moved to an entirely new team. These were projects I’d led for months. Clients with whom I’ve worked for years. All assigned to new teams as I was shifted in the org to an entirely different business unit.
The workload was, admittedly, much lighter. But this wasn’t at all what I’d asked for or expected.
“Wait, so I voice concern about burnout and get punished for it?”
They kept trying to tell me that wasn’t what was happening. But I never got to work on my favorite projects again. I had to train a brand new project manager and build a new team. We worked on smaller projects – nothing of the scale I’d been handling before.
I guess they did keep me from burning out on a high-profile project. But at what cost?
There’s a satirical HR account on X that perfectly captures this corporate logic:
This hit so close to home I didn’t realize at first that it was satirical. My biggest fear, though, is that some managers might see it as a playbook.
The most efficient way to prevent employee burnout is to remove the burned-out employee from the equation. No employee, no burnout. Problem solved. Success rate: 100%.
My experience wasn’t quite that dramatic. I wasn’t fired. The solution to my burnout wasn’t addressing the workload or timelines that caused it. It wasn’t examining why another person leaving created such a crisis.1This experience is a large reason why, in every role since then, I’ve preached about “bench depth” to anyone who will listen. I intentionally build redundancies in all of my teams so no one person is critical path for success. Everyone has support. Everyone can take time when they need it. No one person taking a break will compromise delivery. It wasn’t considering whether a 70-hour workweek for a month was sustainable or reasonable.
The solution was to remove me from the situation that burned me out. Unfortunately this was also the work I was most passionate about.
This approach treats burnout as an individual failure rather than a systemic issue. The employee who can’t handle the workload becomes the problem to be managed, shuffled, or eliminated. The workload itself, the staffing levels, the expectations remain untouched. After all, someone else will pick up those projects. Someone who hasn’t burned out yet.
The particularly insidious part is how this masquerades as support. My manager was purportedly understanding when I asked for time off. They approved my flex time without hesitation. They genuinely seemed to care about my well-being. But their actual solution revealed they actually cared about protecting the projects, not the person.
There’s an implicit message in being reassigned after voicing burnout: don’t voice burnout. Suffer in silence until you can’t anymore, then leave quietly without disrupting the project timeline. The alternative is watching someone else take over the work you built while you’re handed lighter responsibilities. You’re being benched rather than helped.
I often wonder what would have happened if I’d never mentioned feeling burned out. Would I have eventually crashed harder? Would I have left the company entirely? Or would I have just powered through and been fine?
I’ll never know.
I do know that after that experience, I became far more careful about admitting when I was struggling at work. I could never gauge whether or not the company’s support would come at a price I wasn’t willing to pay.
Maybe that’s the real lesson here. The question is whether burnout prevention programs are designed to protect people or to protect productivity. When the solution to someone burning out is removing them from what they’re passionate about, we have our answer.
- 1This experience is a large reason why, in every role since then, I’ve preached about “bench depth” to anyone who will listen. I intentionally build redundancies in all of my teams so no one person is critical path for success. Everyone has support. Everyone can take time when they need it. No one person taking a break will compromise delivery.