Tech Industry Mental Health
When Your Career Becomes the Problem
Developer burnout: why you feel empty despite the high salary
You got into this because you liked solving problems. The logic, the craft, the moment when something finally works.
Now you solve problems all day and feel worse. The money is good, and lately it's the main reason you stay. You haven't had a proper conversation with a colleague in weeks, unless you count Slack threads and review comments.
You're not sure when it happened. Somewhere between the third reorganisation and the AI tools, the work stopped feeling like yours.
The job ads say they want "passionate" developers. You can't remember what that felt like.
Monday, on Saturday afternoon
You're tired in a way the weekend doesn't touch. Your chest tightens before you open the laptop. You've started dreading Monday on Saturday afternoon.
You go numb during the day and can't switch off at night. The jaw tension you only discover in bed. The headaches you put down to the screen.
You've probably searched for this. You were hoping for an article that explains what's wrong with you. Something with bullet points and a solution at the end.
This isn't that kind of page.
Code you didn't write
They said AI would take the boring parts and leave you the interesting ones.
Instead you spend your days reading code you didn't write, looking for the mistake you know is in there somewhere. When it works, it doesn't feel like you made it. When it breaks, it's still your name on the pull request.
The part you used to enjoy, the building, has quietly gone. What's left is the watching, without the satisfaction.
Everything's fine
You say "all good" at standup. You find something positive to say in the retro about a sprint that went badly, because everyone else is. When you raise a risk, you're told you're being negative. When you mention you're struggling, someone sends you a link to a wellbeing webinar.
After a while you start to doubt what you can see. The codebase is in trouble, the deadline was never real, and everyone in the planning meeting is nodding. Maybe you're the one who's got it wrong.
You feel like a fraud. You can do the job. What you can't do any more is pretend you're fine while you do it.
The one everyone asks
If you're senior, there's another layer. You're the person people come to when production goes down. Your calendar fills with other people's problems, and your own work happens after nine at night. On on-call weeks your phone sleeps next to you.
Being needed felt good once. Now it's one more thing you can't put down.
Why you stay
You think about leaving. Then you think about take-home tests, six rounds of interviews and no reply, and you close the tab.
Looking for a job is a job in itself, and burnout has already spent the energy you'd need for it. So you stay, and tell yourself it's for the money.
The sofa
You probably wanted remote work. Maybe you changed jobs to get it.
But the office had small gaps in the day: the walk to the station, waiting for the kettle, five minutes of moaning before a meeting. You didn't notice them doing anything. They were where the day's frustration went.
Now you click "Leave meeting" after a tense code review and the silence hits straight away. There's no walk home, nobody to catch your eye. The frustration doesn't go anywhere. It sits next to you on the sofa for the rest of the evening.
The question underneath
A lot of this is the job. It would be strange to feel fine in it. But you're still the one lying awake, and underneath the tiredness there's often a thought that's harder to say.
I've built my identity on being competent and I don't know who I am if I can't cope.
A new job might help. A four-day week might help. But that thought tends to come with you.
A room with no standup
I won't be trying to get you back into shape for the next release.
What therapy offers is fifty minutes a week with someone who isn't assessing your output. You can say the things you can't say at work: that you're angry, that you're tired of pretending, that you're not sure you want this any more.
Over time you start to notice what you feel and what you want, rather than what the sprint needs. Sometimes that leads to a change. Sometimes the job looks different once you're not carrying it alone.
If this is you
You don't need to arrive with the right words for what's wrong. "Something's not working" is enough. "I'm struggling and I don't know why" is enough.
I see people in person near East Croydon station. The first meeting is 90 minutes, and after that we meet weekly for 50.
No standup required
First meeting £120 (90 mins), then £70 per session · Croydon · Weekly sessions
Book a session