This question consumed me for about eight months before I finally did something about it. I kept telling myself it was the job. Just leave and everything resets. Took a new SRE role at a different company, same industry, slightly better pay. Three months in and I felt exactly the same.
So here's the rough test I wish someone had given me earlier. Ask yourself: when was the last time you felt genuinely interested in a work problem, even for an hour? Not "got through it" or "handled it professionally" but actually engaged? If you have to reach back more than 6 months to find that moment, that's burnout talking, not just a bad manager.
The other tell: the exhaustion bleeds into non-work hours. Bad job, you close the laptop and you're mostly fine. Burnout, you're still tired on Saturday. Things you used to enjoy feel like tasks. Social plans feel like obligations. That's not your company's problem anymore, that's your nervous system.
For me it was on-call. Years of it. Two incidents in a single week that lasted until 4am each time, back-to-back. At some point my brain just permanently stayed in that threat-scanning mode even when nothing was on fire. Off-call weeks didn't feel like relief, they felt like waiting for the pager to go off.
What actually helped: real time away. Not a long weekend. I negotiated a 3-week contiguous block before starting the new job I eventually took in 2025. People told me that was too long, that I'd lose momentum in the search. Maybe, but I was useless in interviews before I did it. Just a hollow resume in a button-down.
Also: distinguishing the symptoms helps. Cynicism about work that didn't used to bother you. Reduced performance even when trying. Detachment from teammates you used to like. Those are the textbook three. If you have all three and they started before you started disliking this particular job, the job isn't the cause, it's fuel on something that was already there.
Anyway. Not trying to diagnose anyone. Just the distinction that took me too long to make.