The On-Call Burnout Epidemic

I watched three senior SREs leave our team in six months. Exit interviews all said the same thing: on-call was unsustainable.

We were spending $500K+ recruiting replacements for a problem that could have been fixed with $0 and better practices.

The Warning Signs

Before someone quits, they show these signals:

1. Cynicism in post-mortems — "This will…

One behavior change that has decreased my burnout risk: when someone asks for help, i now place the burden of explanation on the asker instead of taking it on myself.

For example: people often tag me in super long threads with "Hey Kat, can you help us here?"

I used to respond with, "Sure let me catch up on context first"

But when i'm oncall and have many teams pinging me at once with "urgent"…