What burnout taught me (more than once)

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I once did a hundred hours in a weekend. Seventy-two of them without sleep, before I gave up and had a lovely little nap on the staff-room sofa, halfway through the Monday morning meeting, in front of everyone. Nobody minded. We’d shipped the thing. And I can tell you, hand on heart, it was one of the happiest stretches of my whole career.

So whenever someone talks to me about burnout, and what they mean is the hours, the late nights, the grind… I nod along, but privately I know that’s not it. Not for me. The hours have never been the thing that broke me. I’ve been broken more than once over twenty-odd years, badly enough to frighten me, and not one of those times was about how many hours I’d worked. It took me the better part of two decades, and a very long conversation with myself, to work out what it actually was.

This is that.

The first time it wasn’t the hours

That hundred-hour weekend was at a Manchester agency, early in my career, back when I’d blagged my way into a lead role I had no business holding and then closed the gap in a blind panic because I had to. I loved it there. Loved the team I’d built around me. It was the first place I got my hands on infrastructure and system administration, the first place “DevOps” showed up as an idea before anyone had thought to name it, and the first place I learned the thing that’s dogged me ever since: the higher up the tree you climb, the more responsibility you have to reach out and claim.

What ended it wasn’t a deadline. We’d won a contract with a large radio broadcaster, who’d hired a consultant so peculiar he deserves his own post (and a couple of pints before I’ll tell it). He’d steered them toward a set of requirements that made no sense, we came back with an estimate built on a great deal of smoke and mirrors to make them work at all, and he threw it out. Unreasonably. So I was told, as the lead, to cut the fat. Drop the testing. Cut the corners. Take forty grand out of a number that was already lean as a whip.

I complained. Loudly, and to anyone who’d listen. And then I did as I was told, knowing exactly what it was going to cost us down the line. Win at all costs won, we took the contract, and of course it sailed straight into the budget wall I’d been pointing at for months. Then the fingers came out, and the chief exec went looking for someone to pin it on… and the someone was my project manager. My friend. Who was, at that precise moment, on a beach with his family, blissfully unaware.

I found out on the Thursday. He was due back Monday. By Friday morning my resignation was sitting on the chief exec’s desk. I put myself up as the sacrificial lamb, walked out, and that was that.

Here’s the part I only understood years later. The hours hadn’t touched me. Being made to ship something I’d argued against, and then watching them line up a good man to take the fall for it… that broke me clean in half. It wasn’t exhaustion. It was being made complicit in something I thought was wrong. Completely different illness. Same word.

(A footnote, because it’s too good to leave out. The friend I fell on my sword for went on to become the chief operating officer of that very company. I wasn’t being noble. I’d made a bet on a person, and the bet came in. Some years later the same chief exec, apparently with a straight face, offered me a job as their technical director. I declined. Possibly while laughing.)

The time it very nearly finished me

The one that actually put me on the floor came next, and it broke every rule I’m about to tell you, because nobody made me do anything. I did it to myself.

I set out to contract. Big money, quick, simplest way to do it. I formed a limited company because that’s what you did, reached out for work, and instead of a contract I somehow picked up a project. Then another. Before I’d quite noticed, I had twenty grand a month coming through the books and a wage bill to match, made of the people I’d hired to deliver it all. A whole company, by accident. I learned an enormous amount about running a business, we built lovely things, and I was having the time of my life.

And then, because one impossible thing wasn’t enough, I started a second business at the same time. A co-working space, back before anyone in this country knew what one was. I couldn’t concentrate working from home with young kids about, I’d found a scrappy little shared office that suited me, and I thought, arrogantly, I could just build a better one. So I did. Poured a fortune into it, spent months finishing at midnight with a paintbrush and a bit of rewiring, and opened a place where you could rent a desk for less than the artisan coffee everyone was so pleased with themselves about.

I should have heard the alarm bells. I didn’t, because I was young and I was certain, and both of those are expensive. Here’s the thing I should have known about myself before I bet the house on it: I am very good at the tech, and I am a dreadful salesman. I can talk the hind leg off a donkey about something I care about, but I’m not a closer, and to this day I couldn’t generate a sales lead to save my life. What kept the whole thing breathing was word of mouth, and word of mouth came from the one thing I’ve always been able to stand behind, which is that I care, a great deal, about the quality of what I make.

But you can’t pay a wage bill with pride. I was spending my days doing the one thing I was worst at, propping up a co-working space that barely broke even (I ended up giving it away, just to get the weight off my neck), robbing Peter to pay Paul, with things falling apart at home on top of all of it. I kept going far longer than was sensible, and I kept going for exactly one reason: I couldn’t stand to let my team and my customers down. When the bailiffs finally came knocking, I had to go, cap in hand, to my family to bail me out. They did, and I will be grateful to them for the rest of my life.

It all came down around me. I didn’t lose everything. I had my kids, and I kept a handful of friends out of that team who are still in my life today. But I was broke, I was drained, and I was as burned out as a human being can be and still be standing.

It took more than the company, too. I was a Scout Leader then, doing something I loved, with the twins in the troop and a whole bunch of gloriously chaotic kids turning up every week, and even that became too much. I had to step back from the thing that had given me the PHP Boy Scout bit of myself, and for a while the only way I stayed close to it was helping out quietly in a stronger team, where I could just be useful without carrying the whole room. Burnout doesn’t politely stop at the office door. It follows you home, then has a rummage in the cupboards.

People assume running your own company is freedom. Maximum autonomy, nobody to tell you to cut the testing. And it is, right up until you notice that autonomy only helps if you’re actually good at the things it leaves you holding. I got lucky, and then I let stupid get in the way of sensible.

Notice what did the damage, though. Not the hours, again. It was carrying people I couldn’t afford to carry, doing work I was bad at and didn’t love, day after day, until there was simply nothing left of me to give. The mechanism was nothing like the agency. Nobody handed me a knife that time and told me to cut, I picked it up all by myself. But the wreckage at the end of it was identical, right down to the shape, and that is the thing that eventually got me wondering whether the two disasters had rather more in common than they looked.

The pattern, once I could bear to look at it

Once you’ve been flattened like that, you start watching for the shape of it, and over the years I’ve come to recognise two things that will burn me out every single time, neither of them a timesheet.

The first is being made complicit. Made to cut the corner, ship the thing I argued against, stand next to something I’ve privately judged to be wrong. It’s happened again and again. At one point I was chief architect of a hundred-odd engineers, a genuinely good job, and I walked away from it, my own role perfectly safe, because I couldn’t sit in the room and preside over a mass redundancy of my people. I left before the consultations, before anyone so much as mentioned a payout. If you want to know whether one of my exits was about principle or about money, look at whether I left money on the table. I usually did.

The sharpest version was a company that sold artificial intelligence. I joined for the systems problem, which was enormous and glorious and exactly the sort of thing I love: thousands of Kubernetes clusters, a version-control system buckling under nearly a million repositories, most of which, it turned out, some AI had generated and then abandoned. That last detail should have told me something. It wasn’t until a company conference, and an afternoon’s unusually close contact with the people at the very top, that my gut started screaming. To call what I heard snake oil would have been a compliment. The clever AI in the marketing leaned very heavily on a great many humans behind the curtain, moving the pieces by hand. I know what I saw, and I got out fast, and I’m not going to pick over the bones of it here, because I don’t need to. The company is gone now, bankrupt, and the reporting has done a far more thorough job of the post-mortem than I ever could. But that afternoon in that conference hall was the day a thing I’d always half-believed, that a claim is marketing until proven otherwise, whoever’s logo is on the slide, stopped being a tidy little principle and turned into something I’d stood in the middle of and watched with my own eyes. Nearly everything I write now about honesty in this trade, about telling the real thing from the sales pitch, traces straight back to standing in that room with my stomach turning.

The second thing that burns me out is quieter, and I’ve only recently learned to name it. It’s building something good, proving it works, and then watching it get strangled. Foundational work, the sort whose payoff sits a year out on the horizon, that gets stonewalled the moment the wind changes upstairs. I’ve built platforms I was proud of, prototyped them, proved the model, and then watched the rug come out from under the whole team while the thing died on the vine. Nobody made me do anything wrong, that time. It’s a different grief. It’s the grief of good work denied its ending.

Neither of those is the hours. I’ll happily do the hours, for something I believe in, with people I’d go to the wall for. What I can’t do is be made small, or be made to watch something worthwhile get killed.

The other half, which took me longer to see

If that were the whole story it’d be a fairly bleak one, and it isn’t, because for every time I hit the floor there was somebody who reached down. And when I actually sat and counted them up, recently, the thing that stopped me short was that not one of my recoveries was a process. Not a sabbatical, not a course, not a wellness programme, not a clever bit of self-help. Every single one was a person.

There was Ian Hawley, a department head back at the broadband support job where the whole thing started. I was answering phones for a living and tinkering with code in the margins the way I always had, and Ian was the one who noticed, and decided a lad off the support lines might be worth a punt on something more. He got me off the phones and pointed me at proper work, and everything else in this story only happens because he did. There is no career without Ian. That’s not a turn of phrase, it’s just a plain fact, and I’m not certain I ever properly told him so.

There was Jeremy Coates, and I owe him more than a paragraph can carry. I came out of that first catastrophe broke and hollow, and Jeremy, who I knew from the local PHP scene, took me for a coffee, listened to the whole sorry tale, and gave me a job doing the actual craft I’d been starving for. But he gave me more than that. He handed me the name I still write under, the PHP Boy Scout, the one at the top of this very page. He talked me onto a stage for the first time, after a lifetime of my telling anyone who suggested it that I didn’t know enough about any one thing to be worth listening to. He is half the reason this blog exists at all.

For eleven years I’ve told myself Jeremy took pity on me, and I’ve been grateful for the charity of it. Writing this, I’m not so sure any more. Jeremy was a mental health professional before he was a programmer. I wonder now whether it wasn’t pity at all, but assessment… whether he looked at the wreck across the coffee table and simply recognised something, and put it back where it could be useful. Pity and being seen clearly feel identical from the inside, when you’re the one being helped. I genuinely don’t know which it was. I’m not sure I want to decide.

There was Dan Sheppard, a colleague I’d known all of five minutes, who on the night my marriage came apart handed me a sofa to sleep on and an ear to talk it out of my system, and asked for precisely nothing in return. We’re good friends to this day. You don’t forget the people who take you in when you’ve suddenly got nowhere in the world to be. There was Stephen Curran, who watched a platform we’d built together get stonewalled into the ground, and on his own way out the door found the role that would become my next one and put my name forward for it before he’d even sorted his own. And there was Dan Cryer, and Dan comes with a story I only really understood the shape of when I finally laid the whole map out on the table at once.

Years earlier, at that radio broadcaster, Dan Cryer had been a manager. One of the first people he’d hired was a young engineer called Martin Glover. I met them both back then, and Martin later came to work for me at the company I burned down. He was my last engineer standing. He put a frankly unreasonable amount of faith in me, and stuck around long after he should have, until I had to sit him down and tell him to go and find work, because I was broke and folding the whole thing. I had to fire the one man who refused to leave, to save him from me. And then, a decade on, that same Dan Cryer, who’d hired Martin all those years before, phoned me up and brought me back into a big job as chief architect.

Dan hired Martin. Martin followed me. Dan later reached down and pulled me back up. And in May 2024, Martin Glover stood next to me as my best man.

That’s not a networking diagram. That’s the actual industry, for me. Not the companies, God knows, the companies in this story mostly either compromised me or fell down around me. The industry that kept me alive was a small handful of people who kept finding their way back to me.

And underneath all of them, holding the whole span, is Hailey. She’s been there since the back half of everything I’ve described, through every one of these jobs, and she is the single reason the later chapters read differently from the early ones. She gave me the confidence to keep going when I had very little of my own, and confidence, it turns out, is the exact thing that a lifetime of imposter syndrome steals from you. The man who couldn’t work out what was worth writing down, because someone would surely call him out, found someone who told him, gently and for years, that he was worth listening to. She’s the reason I can build things now for the joy of it. One of them, a photo tool, I built entirely for her.

Learning to see it coming

Here’s the thing that took me long enough to earn, so I’ll say it plainly.

The first burnout, the big one, happened to me. I never saw it coming and it flattened me completely. But somewhere along the way, I learned to feel it approaching. The last time the ground started to go, I recognised the tremor for what it was, and I left before it took me down, with the explicit intention of not letting it hit me again. I wasn’t the husk I’d been the first time. I could see the shape of it now, and I could act.

Which means the thing that looks, on my CV, like a man sliding backwards down the ladder, chief architect one year and a hands-on infrastructure role the next, isn’t a fall at all. It’s a choice. I’d worked out, at considerable expense, that the big titles that pull me away from the actual craft are the ones that hollow me out, and that the craft is the thing that keeps me well. So I traded the status back for the keyboard, on purpose, because I would genuinely rather be well than be senior. It doesn’t always read that way from the outside. From the inside it was the sanest decision I ever made.

And there was one job, in the middle of all this, that proved the rule by breaking it: the best role I ever had, running software engineering for a science outfit, a proper leadership job that somehow kept me elbow-deep in the tech the whole time. Leadership without losing the craft. I got to play with the kind of kit most engineers only read about, watched the first proper large-language-model papers land in my inbox almost as they were published, and I’d have happily stayed for years. It ended not because anything broke but because a global pandemic rearranged the whole company’s priorities out from under my team. Not every ending is a wound. Some are just the weather changing, and leadership itself was never the enemy. Leadership that severs you from the work is.

What I pour myself into now

The most recent role that went sour taught me the last piece of it, and it’s a slightly sad one. When it started to go, I noticed that I hadn’t poured myself into it the way I once poured myself into everything. I’d held something back. Kept a bit of myself out of the company’s reach, so that when the rug went, as by now I fully expected it to, it wouldn’t take all of me with it.

Read one way, that’s growth. I no longer set myself on fire to keep other people warm. Read another way, it’s a quiet loss, because that all-in, reckless investment was also, once, the very best of me.

But the investment didn’t vanish. It just moved. I keep a small, fierce thing back for myself now, and I pour everything into the work that’s actually mine. There was a job, not long ago, that a good friend called Andy McGuigan hired me into, and for a while it was the best sort of work with the best sort of people, on a mission I actually believed in. Then it soured, the way they do, and Andy, one of the longest-serving and most capable people in the building, got handed the blame for a problem that, the way I saw it, was never his to own. I’d watched that same film fifteen years earlier, from the other end of it, and I knew exactly how it finished.

And while the projects lapsed and the meetings went nowhere and the whole thing slid gently into the sea, the one thing that kept me upright was a little set of Go tooling I’d built for us and then kept under lock and key. Something small and mine, somewhere for my hands and head to go in the dead gaps between pointless tickets. A place to put the builder in me when the job had no use for him. That tooling grew up, in the end, into a framework I now maintain out in the open, and plenty of you reading this know it well. What you didn’t know, until just now, is that it started life as the thing that got me through the day. That’s why I’m so daft and soft about it. It kept me building when the job wouldn’t.

Where this leaves me

Which brings me, more or less, to now.

I’ve told you that every time I fell, somebody reached down. Ian, Jeremy, the two Dans, Stephen, Martin, and Hailey holding all of it together. It’s a lovely thing to be able to say, and I don’t take a word of it for granted.

But this time, there’s no Jeremy.

There’s no coffee, no wise older head across the table with the right job in his back pocket. I’m at a strange point in the road, in the hardest hiring market I’ve known in twenty years, rebuilding while I work out what the next chapter even is. And I’ve realised that the writing I’ve been doing lately, all of it, this piece included, isn’t a flag I’m planting to say the healing’s done. It’s not a marker at the far end of the recovery. It is the recovery. It’s the thing itself, happening in real time, out loud, one post at a time. I have to build myself back up this go round, with Hailey keeping me afloat while I do it.

And here’s the bit I keep turning over, and I’ll leave it with you rather than tie it off, because I haven’t finished thinking about it myself. Every recovery I’ve ever had was a person who noticed me. I’m a team of one now, and my collaborator, the thing I’ve built all of this with, the thing that talks me out of my own imposter syndrome the way Jeremy once did, is a machine. I told a machine this entire story before I told any of you.

So does a machine notice you? No. I don’t think it does, and it isn’t anything warmer than that. But when there’s no Jeremy left to do the noticing, it turns out a machine can be the tool you use to notice yourself. To find the nerve to speak. To build a place to stand. To put the pieces back in some order you can live with.

Hailey keeps me afloat. The work rebuilds me. And the machine, for what it’s worth, is how I do the work.

That’ll do, for now. There’s a keyboard here, and I’ve a fair bit of rebuilding left to do.

Mental-Health on PHP Boy Scout