general burnout discourse usually focuses on workload or bad management. want to talk about a specific flavor: being on-call for a system that pages at 2am three times a week.
the problem isn't just the sleep. it's the anticipatory dread. you go to sleep knowing there might be a page. your nervous system doesn't fully relax. this compounds over months in a way that's qualitatively different from just working too many hours.
i took a two-week break from rotation last quarter and slept normally for the first time in maybe a year. came back and started timing how long into my on-call week before the dread set in. it's day 2 now. consistent.
team is trying to fix reliability but it's slow. in the meantime i'm looking for coping mechanisms that aren't just 'drink less coffee' and 'go to bed earlier' because i've tried those.
4 replies
remote_swe_42
anticipatory dread is the exact phrase. i've described this to people who don't do on-call and they think i'm being dramatic. it's a specific kind of cortisol tax that doesn't show up as 'tired', it shows up as flat and irritable and weird about your phone.
sre_sol
weird about your phone. yes. i flinch at notification sounds now. my partner noticed before i did.
careerveteran
the only thing that actually helped me in a similar spot was negotiating hard limits: max 2 pages per week before escalation to shared rotation, no pages between midnight and 5am without auto-escalation after 10 min. framed it as reliability investment, not personal accommodation. took 6 weeks to get agreement but it changed everything.
qa_quinn
have you been able to quantify the page volume to leadership? sometimes 'i am burning out from this' lands softer than 'we are paging 3x/week and here's the incident chart.' the second one is a team problem they have to own.