The IT Burnout Episode: Running on Empty

Every night, IT professionals across the country go home and cry. They work until 10PM unpaid. They become "the guy" their entire organization depends on. They stay in toxic jobs because they feel guilty, or because people are counting on them, or because they simply can't imagine leaving.

In this episode of The Catalyst by Softchoice, we follow two IT professionals through their burnout journeys. Sean stayed at a behavioral health nonprofit for years, supporting 1500 users with just two techs and management that thought IT "just helps people log in." He rebuilt the entire infrastructure while crying himself to sleep at night, driven by mission and what clinical psychologist Dr. Rick Ginsberg calls "responsibility handcuffs."

John worked at a Manhattan company where he felt so grateful for his salary that he stayed through years of abuse and lies. He'd sit at his desk until 9 or 10PM—not because of emergencies, but because he had no energy left to stand up.

One stayed and rebuilt his broken department into a world-class operation. The other escaped to his dream job doing Linux work. Both had to heal from trauma. And according to Business Insider, 57% of IT workers report the same burnout they experienced.

Through their stories and expert analysis from Dr. Rick Ginsberg, we explore why burnout has become epidemic in IT, what the warning signs are, and—most importantly—what can actually be done about it.

Key Takeaways:

• Why IT professionals are particularly vulnerable to "responsibility handcuffs"
• The difference between staying to rebuild and knowing when to leave
• How gratitude can become a trap that keeps you in toxic environments
• What managers need to do differently to prevent team burnout
• Why 76% of IT workers say job stress is getting worse every year

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This episode is brought to you by Softchoice Cloud Lifecycle Services Plus for Microsoft Azure. Get control of your Azure subscriptions, optimize your cloud spend, and access the technical support you actually need when you need it. 

Visit softchoice.com/azurecls to learn more.

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.

Transcript

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This episode of The Catalyst is brought to you by Softchoice Cloud Lifecycle Services Plus for Microsoft Azure. Get control of your Azure subscriptions, optimize your cloud spend, and access the technical support you actually need when you need it. Visit softchoice.com/azure CLS to learn more. Sean doesn't remember the first night he cried. He remembers that by the time he finally took his two week vacation, it had become routine. You know, I was crying at night, man, you know, I'm a grown man. I go home and cry. Sean's asking us not to use his real name. He's a vice president now at a behavioral health nonprofit. And what he went through, what he's about to tell you could identify his organization, so we're protecting that. But back then, in the thick of it, he was just trying to hold together a network that was falling apart. 1500 users, two support techs, unlicensed software, a data center running on a Ted Meg connection and senior management who thought all it did was help people log in about a thousand miles north. A guy named John, also not his real name, also protecting his career, was sitting in his office until nine or 10:00 PM every night. Not because there was an emergency, because he didn't have the energy to stand up. You know, I remember just sitting in the office and I don't know what to do. I'm just sitting here. I, I have no motivation to get up away from my desk. I don't wanna be in front of the computer. I don't wanna be doing any of this anymore. Two IT professionals, two different traps, both stayed far longer than they should have. One stayed because of his mission, because people were counting on him. The other stayed because of gratitude, because he felt like he owed them everything. From Softchoice, a worldwide technology company, this is the catalyst. I'm Heather Haskin. This season we're doing things a bit differently. We are making audio documentaries, real stories from the front lines of it, exploring the challenges of small teams chasing big dreams. Today's episode running on empty. Let's start with Sean. Because his trap was built from something good mission, he'd been bouncing around for years, contract work, layoffs, always looking for the next gig. He was tired of it. I decided I was gonna find a nonprofit to work for 'cause uh, obviously profit work wasn't working out. He found a behavioral health organization. They served people who couldn't afford care. Sean liked that. They serve people who are unable to afford care for themselves. So it's a good place to be. I thought he aced the interview. He got the job, showed up on day one to find a disaster. None of the computers were properly managed. They were running Windows XP in 2011 with no vision to replace it. They were imaging off of, uh, discs to, uh, pres P one version of XP and turning off updates. Um, they were just doing everything possible that they could do wrong. Sean started working constantly. This turned into just kind of a, an all day, all night kind of thing. Wake up and go to work and work until I go to sleep, work at work, work on my commute, work at home, trying to hold everything together because the mission mattered because people needed help. That's one kind of trap. Dr. Rick Ginsburg, a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with IT professionals. He calls it responsibility handcuffs. It's kind of like a captain going down with the ship. There's this sort of exaggerated feeling of responsibility that people have and and I sort of liken it to, and we often hear that term, golden handcuffs when somebody gets paid a lot and they have to stay. And I think sometimes a lot of people we work with and we see in the IT world have these responsibility handcuffs. John's trap was different. It started with gratitude, but first you need to know John's been obsessed with computers since he was a kid. Not in the normal way, in the dumpster diving way. So in my teens, um, just as a hobby, I would go around the neighborhood and I would see used PCs on the side of the road. My first Linux computer that was a dedicated for Linux was a, uh, old Penem 100 megahertz PC that I just found on the side of the road. Put a, you know, a boot. It was like a floppy disc that booted into Linux on a router that was basically at the start of my Linux career. He'd spend weeks. Literally weeks downloading Linux over dial up. When I was at like 11 or 12, I had the idea that hackers used Linux. So I remember trying to download Linux. It was like 1.5 gigs over dial up, which took a few weeks, uh, maybe a couple months. So by the time John's in his early twenties working at a computer shop for 15 bucks an hour off the books, he knows he's good at this stuff, fixing computers, making things work. I always wanted to work at a computer shop. I love fixing computers. I love looking at them as like a puzzle that just needs to be solved. And I didn't really understand how much more there was and how much I was kind of being taken advantage of.'cause this guy just sees a young kid, then a friend tells him about a real job. It's in a fancy Manhattan office and it's a real company. During the interview, John throws out a number, something high, expecting to negotiate. But then one of the partners immediately agreed to it and he is like, yeah, that's great. You know, let's do it. You know, that sounds good, you know, when can you start? And then I was thinking, he's like, wow. Oh my God, they hired me. I was like having a little panic attack. I was like, I wasn't expecting this. John felt like he'd won the lottery. I didn't realize I was worth this much. And right there, that feeling of not realizing your worth, that's where the trap starts to close. So I asked for, you know, what I thought was a very decent salary and thought I'd negotiate up to a, you know, meet halfway, but he immediately gave it to me on the spot and I just thought, wow, I owe them everything. They're giving me such a huge salary. Like, that's amazing. I owe them everything. Hmm. Dr. Rick says it Professionals are particularly vulnerable to these kinds of traps, and it's partly because of the work itself. The work is so intense, it's often very isolating. Um, and it's very specific in its construction and what people are trying to do and isn't easily understand by a lot of people who are running the businesses themselves. Dr. Rick says the situation reminds him of James Bond, specifically q the Gadget guy. I think about the character Q, who's sort of in charge of all the technology and all of the gadgets and gizmos that James Bond uses. You know, there's a incredibly tense moment in the film, and then he presses a button and something happens. This technological gizmo saves his life or many other people's lives. They're responsible for these incredibly. Technological, sort of hard to understand, uh, aspects of, um, of their work. Sean became q at his company, the guy who kept the systems running, the guy who understood the technology, nobody else did. John became q at his company, the guy who could fix anything, the professional Googler. And here's the thing about being q. You become irreplaceable, which means you can't leave even when you know you should. For Sean, the nonprofit IT leader, the problems kept compounding senior management, didn't understand what it did. They thought all we did was, you know, help people log in. They didn't understand any of the underlying technology. He'd ask for money to fix critical problems. The answer was always no. He'd suggest improvements. The answer was no. I was getting it from all, all different directions. Everybody telling me what an awful job I was doing while not letting me do my job, and then at night alone. You know, I was crying at night, man. You know, I'm a grown man. You know, I go home and, and, and I cry because I just, it was so much. Dr. Rick Ginsburg says, this is where socialization and corporate culture create a perfect storm. So many of our IT professionals are men, and the way that they, uh, men are socialized in this culture is to, uh, not feel anything, not express emotions. And then if we move forward, um, you know, we see the corporate environment, which oftentimes is an extension of sort of the male socialization process in it, but because it's highly competitive. It's, um, it's sort of geared towards performance. It's geared towards measurable progress. Getting emotional isn't always bad, says Dr. Rick, the real problem is when the pain becomes chronic, when it doesn't stop. Where it becomes problematic, I think, is when it's chronic, it's pervasive. It doesn't feel like it's providing any sort of relief. The systems administrator had a different kind of breaking point, less about crying, more about what he now calls PTSD. I think in my post I wrote that I had PTSD from those jobs and like I just feel like I was an abusive relationship for so long and I came out of it and I'm like, I can't trust anyone. I'm like slowly opening it up, but I just feel like at any moment someone's gonna beat me down and say, no, you're wrong. I'm the expert. 10 years at a real job, not a single raise. I worked there, I think 10 years, not a single raise. Once he tried once after maybe six, seven years, asked for a raise and the CTO told him to write an email explaining what he did on a daily basis. How do you not know you're, you know, we're a company of 10 people. How do you not know what I do on a daily basis? So I put together an email, and then the CTO kind of had a heart attack. So I put that off. I was like, oh no, I don't want. Stress him out, and we can't do that right now. So John felt bad, so he never followed up in the email. But the pain he was going through wasn't just about money. It was about respect and trust or the lack thereof. John would spend months on a project, do exactly what the CTO told him to do. Then the vendor would come back and say, no, this is wrong. This will never work. And the CTO would blame John. I just lost it because I said, listen, I went to you. I said, here's the documentation. Here's what it says that we need to do, and you told me not to do that. But John stayed because he felt guilty, because he felt like he owed them. I felt guilty because the owners, I was regularly just being told, no, you don't know what you're doing. You really don't know. But at the same time, he would be going to the owners and telling them this. Himself, that feeling that you're the only thing holding it together. Dr. Rick Ginsburg says that's often a fallacy, but it's a powerful one. These organizations need and want them to stay, but can also operate without them. And part of helping somebody out of the burnout situation, out of that responsibility trap is having them understand that these groups can continue and these businesses will continue and that they can be. They are replaceable. John's awakening came suddenly COVID hit, and all of a sudden John was laid off after eight years. He took one day to feel depressed, then started job hunting. He got an offer within a week, 33% raise. That's when it clicked. He'd been massively underpaid, massively exploited. He wasn't out of the woods. Second job had better pay, but the same old problems. There were two senior admins where he started, both left within months. Everything fell to me. Every support ticket that couldn't be handled, any customer that was down. Um, that all fell on me and that is definitely where I felt a lot of burnout. Then came Job three. Married now new baby at home and the company was making him lie on his time sheets. Two men both trapped, both breaking. Sean crying himself to sleep while trying to secure a network with no budget. John lying on time sheets while fearing he might have a mental breakdown, and both of them stayed because people were counting on them because they cared too much. Here's something we keep hearing from it. Leaders managing Azure subscriptions has become a full-time job. Nobody actually has time to do. You're dealing with subscription sprawl across the. Departs, you're trying to get clear answers on billing, and when you need technical support from Azure or the broader Microsoft stack, you're stuck in vendor queues with resolution times that don't match your business reality. Meanwhile, cloud costs keep climbing, and you don't have the visibility or the tools to get ahead of it. That's the gap. Softchoice Cloud Lifecycle Services Plus for Microsoft Azure was built to close. It's a tiered offering designed to meet you. Wherever you are, whether you need help managing subscriptions and optimizing spend, or you need dedicated technical support with response times that are actually customized to your needs, here's what you get access to. VMware Tan, Zu Cloud Health. An industry leading cloud cost management and optimization tool, which gives you visibility into cloud usage and costs across your entire environment. You also get proactive subscription and spend forecasting, so you can actually budget with confidence, plus you get technical support with response times customized to your business requirements, not generic vendor tiers. And last but not least. You get a single dedicated partner who knows your environment and can extend services beyond reactive support. Softchoice has helped hundreds of customers migrate to Azure CSP, and we manage over $1 billion in spend across more than 2000 cloud customers. That's 25 years of Microsoft partnership experience working for you. If you are ready to get control of your Azure environment, head to softchoice.com/azure CLS to learn more about Cloud lifecycle services. Plus, Sean finally snapped, the senior admin resigned. Sean saw an opening, but also he saw his limit. I told them, you know, either I'm gonna be the director over IT infrastructure, or I'm leaving and you really need me. You know you're gonna be in big trouble if I leave. He got the title, but then more problems. They hired a CIO above him. Guy turned out to be a mess. Turned out he was a drug addict. He did not have very much knowledge. He was trying to steer things in a direction that he could make a commission off of. That guy didn't last long, but by then Sean was done bundle of nerves, twitching, exhausted, so he did something radical. He took two weeks off phone off, don't call me. When he got back, there was a new CIO, a qualified one, and that CIO asked what needs to be done. Sean told him everything. I told him, I said, we need to rebuild this. I said, we need to start from scratch. There was only two of us in this IT department about about 1500 users, and in 2016 he got the green light. Sean stayed, he rebuilt, migrated to AWS, hired people, he trusted, trained them in our, our last, uh, external audit had us in the top 4%. John's path, the systems administrator with the dream of working in Linux. His path was different. He couldn't rebuild from within. He had to leave. The recruiter who'd found him, his second job reached out. He had reached out to me and he asked, how am I doing? I was like, I need to get outta this place. The recruiter found him options. John landed doing exactly what he'd always wanted. It's my dream job. I mean, it's something that, you know, as a teenager, finding PC into trash and making them work with Linux and doing all that, it's exactly what I wanted to do. It's like just working with Linux every day, supporting it, building systems in Linux and just getting my hands dirty in there. It's absolutely my dream job. Two cases of burnout. Two very different responses. Dr. Rick Ginsburg says Both are valid, but you should try to change the system first. It's really important that people do set boundaries for themselves and present those in the workplace when they can and really take those risks. Um, many people will leave jobs before they even try that step, but sometimes, sometimes you've done everything you can. And at that point. You need to find somewhere else to work. Sean could only stay because something changed. The green light, the budget, the CIO, who got it, John had to leave because nothing was going to change. Not the CIO, not the culture and not the lies. But here's what's interesting. I asked Sean, what would you tell someone in your old position going through what you went through? My advice to them would've been to leave. He stayed. It worked out and he's proud of what he built, but he wouldn't recommend it. Sean and John aren't outliers. They're the norm. According to a Business Insider survey, 57% of IT workers report burnout. 63% of cybersecurity professionals experience it. And according to Sofos, 76% say it job stress is getting worse every year. This isn't a few bad apples. This is epidemic. I think the only way that burnout is going to decrease is when we start to have discussions like this, right? We start to have discussions about the effect. The psychological and physical effect of the workplace and other factors in human beings lives. This isn't just about individual resilience, about meditating more or taking better vacations. This is about systems that aren't set up for human beings to succeed in business leaders. Uh, managers have really tough jobs and they are trying to balance the bottom line and make a profitable business, and they're also, um, needing to pay attention to their employees, uh, wellbeing So frequently, um, managers and leaders have not been trained well to help employees to communicate with them and to create systems that actually work. That's the problem. Most managers in it haven't been trained to lead people. They've been elevated because they're technically skilled, not because they know how to create healthy environments. And so you get organizations where senior management thinks it just helps people log in. Where budgets get slashed, where one person is expected to support 1500 users. Where asking for a raise means justifying your entire existence. But here's the good news. Both of them got out. Sean and John healed. Sean's a vice president now. He runs a world class IT department. When our producer asked him how he sleeps at night, really good, really good. He takes all five weeks of vacation every year. I take every bit of all five weeks. I get. And he's built a culture where his team doesn't have to sacrifice the way he did. It's about building trust. It's about letting people know what the mission is and getting them involved and taking ownership of it. You know, that's the same ownership that everybody takes and will take abuse to, to, to keep owning it. Well, it works even better when you're not getting abused and when you get to go home at five o'clock and you get to rotate on call and you get to, you know, you get to take your vacation time. Heck, I remind people to take their vacation time. Sometimes he'll catch someone working too hard and he'll pull them aside, catch him on a Friday morning and you know, say, why don't you take, why don't you take the day off and get a long weekend and come back Monday? Don't worry about it. All this work will still be here, I promise you. But Sean knows what it cost him, and he can't get those years back. You can't get the years back that you spend given away to somebody who doesn't care. John ended up at his dream job doing the Linux work he'd imagined as a kid digging computers out of the trash, making twice what he used to make full benefits. Competent team, and he's in therapy now. Learning things he wished he'd learned years ago. Therapy definitely helped me be the person that's gonna say, Hey, this is what I'm doing. You know, I haven't taken any vacation days whatsoever. I'm gonna take off on Monday and Tuesday, and I'm going to Boston and I'll be back on Wednesday and I'll see you then. Um, it helped me find my voice. It helped me learn how to communicate with, you know, my, my, my superiors and my peers even. He advocates for other system administrators. Now. On Reddit in forums, telling them what he wishes. Someone had told him. I've never felt this way before. And I wanted other cis admins to know that there are positions out there that treat employees well. They pay well. They have good work life balance. You know, don't be this solo admin. You can't get those years back, the ones you give away to people who don't care. But you can learn, you can heal, you can build something better. If you're willing to make the choice, if you are listening to this and you recognize yourself in Sean or John's story, if you're experiencing significant distress, Dr. Rick wants you to know help is available. Look for your employee's assistance program. Find a therapist on Psychology today. Talk to your doctor, and if you're a manager listening to this, ask yourself. Am I creating an environment where my team can thrive or am I creating one where they go home and cry? The work of holding systems together is hard enough. Nobody should have to do it alone. And if this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. Sometimes knowing you're not alone is the first step. The Catalyst was reported and produced by Tobin Dalrimple and the team at Pilgrim Content Editing by Ryan Clark With support from Philippe Demas, Joseph Byer, and the marketing team at Softchoice. Special thanks to Sean John and Dr. Rick Ginsburg for sharing their stories and expertise. If you are an IT leader dealing with the pressure of doing more with less, we might be able to help. Softchoice works with thousands of IT teams every day. Sometimes you need a partner who can help shoulder the load. Learn more@softchoice.com. I'm Heather Haskin. This is the Catalyst by Softchoice, a worldwide technology company. Thanks for listening. Thanks again to Soft Choice Cloud Lifecycle Services, plus for Microsoft Azure for sponsoring today's episode. If you are ready to get more visibility, control, and support for your Azure environment, visit soft choice.com/azure. Cls.