We’re Not Burned Out — We’re Just Building Things Nobody Cares About
I’ve seen a pattern in software teams that nobody really wants to say out loud.
Developers aren’t burning out because they work too much. Some of the most drained engineers I know are working 30–35 hours a week, fully remote, with “reasonable” deadlines.
And still — they feel completely done with it.
Not tired. Not stressed. Just… disconnected.
The Real Problem Isn’t Workload
We’ve been sold a very simple story: burnout = too much work.
So the solution is always the same — take breaks, reduce hours, rest more.
But that advice completely falls apart in real teams.
Because people aren’t collapsing from exhaustion. They’re collapsing from doing work that doesn’t seem to matter.
You Ship Features. Nothing Changes.
You build something. It goes live. Everyone moves on.
No one talks about it again. No visible impact. No real feedback.
Sometimes it quietly gets disabled a few months later and nobody even notices.
That’s not burnout from overwork. That’s burnout from irrelevance.
Feature Factories Are Killing Motivation
Most teams don’t build products. They produce output.
Features are shipped because they were planned — not because they were proven to matter.
Success is measured in velocity, not in whether anything actually improved for a user.
So developers keep shipping, keep closing tickets, keep moving… but nothing meaningful changes.
That’s Where Motivation Dies
Most developers don’t hate coding.
They hate coding when it doesn’t connect to anything real.
When effort and outcome are disconnected long enough, motivation doesn’t fade slowly — it just shuts off.
At some point, you stop caring not because you’re lazy, but because caring doesn’t change anything.
This Isn’t a “Take a Break” Problem
This isn’t solved by vacations, meditation, or better time management.
Because the issue isn’t energy. It’s meaning.
And you can’t rest your way out of something that feels pointless.
The Uncomfortable Truth
A lot of what we call “developer burnout” is actually just long-term exposure to meaningless work.
And once you start seeing it, it’s hard to unsee it.
Not every team has this problem. But many do — quietly, structurally, and consistently.
Full Article
If this hits close to home, I broke it down in detail here:
