Tech Industry Mental Health
Developer burnout: why you feel empty despite the high salary
You got into this because you liked solving problems. There was something satisfying about it: the logic, the craft, the moment when something finally works.
Now you're solving problems all day and feeling worse. The salary that once felt like freedom has become golden handcuffs. The remote work that promised flexibility has become a prison of your own making. You haven't had a proper conversation with a colleague in weeks, unless you count Slack messages and code reviews.
You're not sure when it happened. Somewhere between the third reorganisation and the AI tools that were supposed to make everything easier, the work stopped feeling like yours. You spend your days reviewing code you didn't write, debugging errors you don't understand, attending standups where everyone pretends things are fine.
The job ads say they want "passionate" developers. You can't remember what that felt like.
You've been Googling. "Developer burnout." "Tech industry mental health." "Should I leave software engineering." Maybe "therapy for programmers" or "why do I hate my job."
You're hoping to find an article that explains what's wrong with you. Something with bullet points and a solution at the end.
Here's what you might not be ready to hear: there may not be something wrong with you. The industry you entered is not the industry that exists today. The promises that brought you here (stability, creativity, meaningful work) have been quietly revoked. What feels like personal failure might be a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions.
But that doesn't mean you're not suffering. And it doesn't mean you have to keep suffering.
The symptoms are predictable. You're exhausted in a way that weekends don't fix. Your chest tightens before you open your laptop. You've started dreading Monday on Saturday afternoon. You go numb during the work and then can't switch off when it's over.
Maybe you've noticed the physical stuff too. The headaches. The jaw tension you only discover at night. The heart palpitations that send you down a WebMD spiral before you reassure yourself it's probably nothing.
Your body is keeping score even when your mind refuses to.
Nearly a third of burned-out tech workers have been prescribed medication just to cope with their employment. This isn't a statistic about weak people. It's a statistic about a system that has learned to extract maximum output from human beings without concern for what happens when they break.
They told you AI would handle the boring parts. You'd be freed to do the interesting work, the creative architecture, the deep thinking.
Instead, you're spending more time debugging code you didn't write than you ever spent writing your own. The AI generates output faster than any human could, but it doesn't understand what it's doing, and neither do you anymore. You're not creating. You're cleaning up after a machine that hallucinates confidence.
The satisfaction of building something has been replaced by the anxiety of catching errors you didn't make. You feel less like an engineer and more like quality control for a system you don't trust.
67% of developers report spending more time debugging AI-generated code than they previously spent writing their own. The "productivity boost" has somehow left everyone more exhausted.
This isn't just about workload. It's about meaning. The thing that made you feel competent (the craft of it, the problem-solving, the sense that you built something) has been hollowed out. What remains is vigilance without satisfaction.
If you're thinking about leaving, you've probably already discovered what's out there. Multi-stage interviews for roles that don't exist. Technical tests that take days to complete, followed by silence. The ghosting, the "fake jobs," the sense that you're performing for an audience that was never watching.
40% of companies admit to posting fake job listings. The recruitment process has become dehumanising: a series of hoops that lead nowhere, designed by systems that don't account for the human beings passing through them.
It takes the energy of a full-time job to find a job, and if you're already burned out, that energy doesn't exist. So you stay. Not because you want to, but because leaving seems impossible.
You've noticed the gap between how you're feeling and what you're allowed to feel. Especially if you're young, especially if you're new, especially if you don't have the reputation and relationships that would protect you.
35% of workers under 25 have taken time off due to stress-related mental health issues. But the number who feel comfortable discussing this with their manager has plummeted from 75% to 56% in a single year. The message is clear: your distress is not welcome here.
So you hide it. You show up, you perform, you pretend to be engaged in standups and planning sessions. You feel like a fraud, but the alternative (being honest about how you're doing) feels like career suicide.
It's exhausting. It works, for a while, until it doesn't.
Then there's the relentless optimism that filters down from the top. The "we're a family" rhetoric. The refusal to acknowledge that a deadline is impossible, replaced by talk of "stretch goals" and "exciting challenges."
It creates a form of corporate gaslighting. When you point out a technical risk, you're labelled negative. When you mention burnout, you're told to watch a mindfulness webinar instead of having your workload reduced.
You sit in retrospectives where everyone searches for positives in a sprint that was a disaster, because telling the truth feels dangerous. The dissonance between the reality you see in the codebase and the fantasy presented in the All-Hands meeting fractures your sense of reality. You start to wonder if you're the crazy one for noticing the house is on fire.
You probably fought for remote work. You might have changed jobs to get it. And now you're discovering its shadow side.
It's not just the isolation. It's the erasure of liminal space. Those in-between moments that used to act as psychological airlocks.
In an office, the walk to the station, the wait for the kettle, the five minutes of venting before a meeting: these weren't wasted time. They were pressure valves. They let you metabolise stress before moving on to the next thing.
Remote work removes the buffer. You click "Leave Meeting" after a tense code review and the silence hits instantly. There's no commute to walk it off, no colleague to share a knowing look with. The frustration doesn't dissipate; it sits next to you on the sofa.
For remote workers, the risk of burnout is 20% higher than for those who commute - despite the theoretical gains.
You wanted flexibility. What you got was the freedom to be alone with your anxiety, with no way to switch off.
If you're looking at therapy, you probably have questions. Whether it's worth it. Whether talking to someone could actually help when the problem is structural, economic, real.
Here's what therapy isn't: mindfulness apps, gratitude journals, being told to take more breaks. It's not life coaching with a certificate. It's not someone giving you productivity hacks for your burnout.
What therapy offers is different. It's a space where you don't have to perform. Where the person opposite you isn't evaluating your output or expecting you to be fine. Where you can say the things you can't say at work (the anger, the hopelessness, the sense that something fundamental has gone wrong) and have them met with genuine attention.
It's a relationship where your distress makes sense. Where you're not a problem to be optimised but a person to be understood.
The work isn't about fixing you for the job. It's about recovering access to yourself: to what you actually feel, what you actually want, what might need to change for things to be different.
You're searching for help with developer burnout, programmer mental health, tech industry stress. Those are legitimate searches. But there's usually something underneath.
I've built my identity on being competent and I don't know who I am if I can't cope.
These aren't technical problems. They won't be solved by a new job, a better employer, a four-day week - though those things might help. What they need is attention of a different kind. The kind that doesn't rush toward solutions. The kind that's willing to sit with you in the difficulty until something shifts.
You don't need to arrive with the right diagnosis or a clear explanation of what's wrong. "Something's not working" is enough. "I'm struggling and I don't know why" is enough.
I've spent ten years in the tech industry. I don't just understand the pressure of a release cycle or the fatigue of endless standups theoretically - I've lived it. I know that "take a break" isn't useful advice when the system itself is the problem.