 Please, brothers, in case you didn't know, sort of fitting, because everybody does need somebody. So I'd like to introduce you to one of my somebodies. I'd like to introduce you to my friend Bob. Bob's not his real name. I asked him if I could share his story. He agreed, but in order to help maintain his privacy, I changed his name. The rest of the story is very true, though. So Bob and I worked together a long time ago. We were both developers at a company. And I really, the three things that I really love about Bob is, first, that he's genuine and honest. Second is that he's enthusiastically curious. And the third is that he's an optimistically hard worker. So these are a great combination, because when Bob says to you, how's it going? It's not just another way for him to say hi. He actually does care about how you're doing. And he really actually wants to know what you're working on, because he's curious to learn about the technologies that you're using. And then being optimistically hardworking means that whenever there's a challenge and you're working with Bob, Bob's attitude is always just, we can work harder. Like, we're smart people. If we work together on this, we can solve anything, which is really great. So I worked with Bob for a long time. We ended up moving on as people do in tech, got new jobs, ended up moving to different cities, but we still kept in touch. And whenever Bob would talk about his current company, I would think of this meme. His current company, from my outside perspective, they were an out-of-touch tech company who really didn't understand their market, didn't understand their customers, so they were constantly pivoting what their product was, and it was hard to actually figure out what they actually did. From Bob's inside perspective, they were just an out-of-touch tech company that was chasing Bud's words, like microservices and containers and DevOps, and they didn't understand what any of those words actually meant. And so this meant that Bob spent a lot of late nights just building things, and once they'd get built, he would get told that they didn't actually matter because the company had pivoted again, so they'd throw it away and they'd tell him to build something else. And this led to other problems. Like, one month, Bob said that he worked on this project for two months, it was fantastic. He actually optimized the end-user experience, improved checkouts, and they actually saw a sales revenue increase of 2% across the company. I was like, this is amazing, Bob. He's like, yeah, nobody really liked it because apparently my new team KPI was web performance and driving traffic, and the website didn't load any faster, so no congratulations, just it was like, you did the wrong thing. Bob worked remotely, which is really, it's great when you can, but his manager and the leadership team decided one day that really, they wanted to have better communications with Bob. So they weren't gonna end remote work, but because of his position, they were ending his remote work. They forced him to move from where he was living to the Silicon Valley, which as you know, very expensive. So Bob moved across the country, left all his friends, spent a bunch of money to move to a city, and he ended up stopping doing the things that he really loved to do, because he was now in the office, so he was working overtime to build more things, didn't know anybody in town, so he just felt really alone and isolated. So during all of this, Bob and I had kept in contact, and one day I started to notice that his tweets were growing more cynical. That optimism that I really loved about him had really just started to die. He had this one tweet one day where he compared the cap theorem to life. The cap theorem, as many of you know, is consistency, availability, partition tolerance, and you can only pick two in a distributed system. And Bob tweeted out that, well, there's work success, family, or health, and you can only pick two. I was like, this is really, really bad, so that was a red flag for me. I immediately gave him a call and realized that he'd actually, he didn't even pick two, he'd picked one. Burnout had destroyed his relationship, his girlfriend had left him. His health had taken a dive, and I realized even more so, not just his health exercising and doing the sports that he loved, but when I called him, he was actually pretty high on some drugs. So he was self-medicating. So in this situation, what the hell do I do? Someone that you care about is going through crisis. I had no idea, right? Do I put in my own hold and I call for help? And if I call for help, who would that help be, right? I mean, could call 911, but depending on where you're at in the country and who you are, cops are more likely to hurt you than to help you. And is it even safe to put an amount on hold? So I realized I was grossly unequipped for this. What am I equipped for? So take a step back, I'm Jason, I work at Datadog, I do docs and talks. So Docside, I talk to our engineers about what our product does, I read through our code, I help it make our product easier for engineers and developers to use. I'm a travel hacker, I like to travel a lot and fly on planes sometimes to know where in particular. I'm a Pokemon trainer, so if you wander around with me at all around Chicago, or if you see me wandering and I look like I'm lost, I'm not, I'm probably just trying to catch something. And then I'm a whiskey hunter, so I like to taste whiskey wherever I go. These are the ways that I help relieve the stress in my life. But let me be clear, especially about the whiskey, enjoy it for the flavor. I love the craft of it, but if you like whiskey, don't self-medicate with it. If you find yourself enjoying it for other reasons than the flavor, ask for help, talk to someone. A little bit about Datadog since they did cover my trip here and pay me very well for what I do, which I appreciate. Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring platform. We have thousands of customers, we handle trillions of points of data every day, and we are hiring. So if you are in a work environment that you're not happy with, that you may be facing some burnout, Datadog is hiring. I like the company, I think we have a great culture and we do not burn people out, or at least we try very, very hard not to. But so back to the topic. I've called this talk, burnout, community problem, community solution, because it's an issue that affects all of us. And it's an issue that's gonna require all of us if we want to actually solve this. And in particular, I wrote this talk because of that situation. I realized that most of us aren't equipped to help others. So when I say it's a community problem, what do I mean? Well, first we have to ask, is this really a community problem? And I think it's fair to say that we are a community. We've all come here around shared beliefs, shared ideas, and we're sharing that information. So we are a community, but is burnout really a problem? So GFI is a company, they're in the tech space, they run an annual survey about stress that happens in IT. And so this, from this last year's report, this is one of the stats that came out. 40%, 40% of us in tech across the US regularly lose sleep due to stress. And this doesn't mean when we're on call. This is purely just because we're totally stressed out. Actually here in Chicago, when you break down the numbers, the numbers higher, 46% of Chicagoans in tech lose sleep because of stress. If we look at the amount of overtime that we're working, 50% of Americans in tech work between eight to 20 hours of overtime. If you look at Chicago, 63. 63% of you guys are working eight to 20 hours of overtime. And then this last one, 82% of people in tech in the US are considering leaving tech, right? Our jobs are just so stressful that we want out. Interestingly, here in Chicago, this number drops to 77%. So you must be doing something a little bit better here in Chicago. But actually, if you look at all these numbers, a third of all people in tech consider leaving on a regular basis. So they're constantly thinking about it. So if I ask, is this a community problem? Well, we're all here at DevOps Days because we're here to learn about implementing cultures, to build better systems by implementing better cultures. But if 82% of us are thinking of leaving this job altogether, that's a problem, right? You can't build better systems if nobody's working. So what are some of the ways that we can start to address this issue? Community solutions. Well, this is DevOps Days, so I do have to mention DevOps. DevOps does address a lot of the issues that create the environments that make people prone to burnout. John Willis, who's one of the founding members of the DevOps Days movement, had a fantastic talk a few years back. That's a link to his talk. I'm not gonna go over a lot of it. We've already talked about a lot of those issues. For example, Katie this morning mentioned some of the issues that you can actually help to encourage people to adopt DevOps. And a lot of those are the same things that actually prevent burnout. Things like recognizing people and providing good incentives. The other thing that we can do is self-care. And this has been talked about a lot as well. There have been some open spaces yesterday. Ken McGrage talked last year at DevOps Days Portland. He gave a great talk about Christina Maslick's six areas of mismatch that lead to burnout and how we can recognize them in ourselves and actions that we can take to help solve those burnout issues with ourselves. But just to go over some of these mismatches. So the first one is work overload. This one's super obvious for most of us, just having way too much work. As I mentioned Bob had mountains of overtime because he just had these long lists of tasks. And it was worse without that clear direction because he couldn't prioritize what he should do with the constant pivoting. If you have a Bob in your office and you notice him or her making commits on the weekend, you notice him or her staying late at night. Don't applaud that. Don't reward that. Discourage that kind of behavior. Talk to your managers. Ask them to discourage that behavior as well because you're gonna burn people out. The second mismatch is a lack of control. We all need to feel empowered. Feel like we have some sort of say in what we're doing. Bob had no input into the direction because it was constantly changing. And in fact, when I talked to him it sounded like pretty classic micromanagement. Unfortunately, this is a sign of toxic cultures. So if your management is open to it, encourage them to listen to not only to your voice but if you notice that others in your team aren't being listened to, encourage them. Encourage your management to listen to them. The third is insufficient rewards. Money's a weird thing in our culture. We don't talk about salaries because it's taboo. So I don't know what Bob was actually making. We didn't talk about that. But I do know that having a move to Silicon Valley, the most expensive place to live in the country and not giving him a cost of living increase, like that's clearly insufficient rewards. But also rewards don't have to be money. Rewards can be just appreciation, gratitude, recognition for what you're doing. One thing to point out is, you know, with that, we talked, or we heard yesterday from Rhea. She pointed out that giving people credit. So when people help you out in your teams, recognize them for what they're doing. The fourth is a breakdown of workplace community, according to Maslik. And I think this is really a breakdown of any sort of community. We all need to feel connected to people. So for Bob, he lost that when he moved to Silicon Valley. He no longer had the band that he played with. He no longer was playing the sports that he loved. He was just doing work all the time. If you're not regularly going to lunch with the people on your team or going to happy hour, hanging out with them, just having an actual connection beyond work, I'd encourage you to do that. Start creating a better community with your teams. The fifth that Maslik points out is an absence of fairness. This is pretty obviously. We all need to feel like we're getting treated fairly. I don't have to say too much more about this, but if you do see injustice in your organization, obviously say something. And the sixth is a values conflict. Now sometimes this is super obvious, right? If you believe in gun control, you don't go work for the NRA. But there's also like mismatches, like the small things can build up. Mismatches like with Bob, right? He worked on UX that was important or he thought it was important for the company. Increased sales and turns out that it wasn't. So small mismatches add up to really being out of alignment with your company and leading to burnout. So these are the six things that we need to be aware of. But really when I wrote this talk, I wanted to focus on this, equipping ourselves, right? Because we've talked about spreading DevOps. A lot of the other speakers have done that. A lot of the other DevOps days talk about how we spread DevOps. That's the main point of the conference, really. And then we always talk about burnout and how to self-recognize and what we can do on our own. But as I mentioned before, in my situation, I was grossly unqualified to deal with that. So how do we equip ourselves? The first thing that we need to understand is that burnout is prevalent. I didn't realize it when I faced that situation, but a third of all Americans know someone that's been diagnosed with burnout. So there's a good chance that you may end up in the situation that I was in. So equipping ourselves. The first thing that we gotta do is recognize burnout. How to recognize it? Well, if you watch Ken's talk, he brings up the Maslick burnout inventory. Essentially the research is people that go through burnout experience three main areas. The first is exhaustion. The second is cynicism. And the third is loss of efficacy. Essentially people that burnout don't feel like they're doing a good job. I don't particularly love that description, partly because it was designed as an identifier for people that work in human services. So healthcare industry, mental health professionals. So I actually, there's another definition out there, SMBM, that defines burnout as physical fatigue. So people are just physically tired. Emotional exhaustion. And I really like this over cynicism because emotional exhaustion means that people don't necessarily have to be cynical. They could just be apathetic, which I find more often when I meet people with burnout. It's not that they get really cynical and they hate everybody, they just don't care. They don't give a fuck anymore. And then cognitive weirdness. And I like this over the idea of efficacy because it's really hard to know if someone feels like they're doing a good job without asking them. But it's really easy to see when they're just like brain dead and you ask them a question and they're just staring off into space and they can't answer it or it takes them a long time to be able to like realize what you're asking. So the other way that we can be equipped is to be connected, right? Having real relationships with people puts us in a better place to be able to help them. Also puts us in a better place to be helped if we ever need it. A friend of mine has a very, very simple test for this that he calls three AM friends and it's simply this, that you should be able to easily name three friends that you could call at three AM to bail you out of a problem and if you can't, you're not connected. Similarly, if you don't know three people that would maybe call you at three AM to bail them out of a problem, you're not connected. And I'm not saying that we need on-call pager duty rotations for friendship. Friendship isn't a duty, right? What I am saying is that caring about people and being cared about by other people is necessary for us to fight burnout. And so when it comes to recognizing burnout, like, you know, MBI and SMBM are, they're great definitions for people that are actually psychologists and researchers, but when it comes down to it, when you're connected, how do you recognize burnout? You'll know. You'll know because you'll see changes in the people that you're friends with. You'll know because more often than not, they'll actually just tell you. They'll be like, hey, work sucks, and I'm burnout. It's also important to remember that we're not mental health professionals. When I say that you know, I say that with a caveat that you could be wrong. It might not be burnout. It could be something like depression, but they are closely linked. An interesting point about burnout and depression. Actually, burnout was once defined as depression at work. So actually there was a research study last year that did a survey of, they took a bunch of teachers that had all been diagnosed with burnout and they ran studies on them, matching them up with depression symptoms. And actually 86% of the subjects in the study who were diagnosed with burnout actually met the criteria for being depressed. So again, when I say you'll know, I mean that you'll know something's wrong. You may not know that it is burnout. You could be getting confused with depression. You're not a professional. But the great thing about this is actually the actions that you should take are exactly the same. So you don't have to be an expert. You don't have to feel like you need to know everything. Just being connected with people, just knowing that something's wrong allows you to take the steps that you need. So what steps do you need? Well, first, get training. How many people here have taken a first aid class? Yeah, wow, that's great. That's way more than I thought. You took a first aid class, right? Not because you wanted to be a paramedic. Not because you did it because you thought you'd be a doctor. You're clearly here, so you're not working in the medical field. You do it because you know at some point that you'll be in a situation or you could be in a situation where someone has an immediate need and you want to be able to help until professionals come, right? So you learn, tell someone, shout call 911 and then you start CPR. Similarly with mental health first aid. Not saying that any of us should leave the field and go become mental health experts, psychologists, people like that. But it's the same thing. People are in mental crisis all the time and there isn't someone there to help them immediately. So that's the idea behind mental health first aid. It's a fantastic course. Takes one full day or you can do it in a series of evenings. Highly recommend you do that. But I'll give you a head start on the class. This is algae, algae the koala. Algae is an acronym. It's actually the core of what you would learn in mental health first aid training. Algae is an acronym. Unfortunately, mental health people aren't nerds so A does not stand for algae. It's not like a self-referential acronym. A stands for assess of risk of suicide or harm. Pretty clear, right? Like the first thing that you need to identify with if you're dealing with somebody in crisis is are they gonna hurt themselves and then trying to prevent that? A few things about talking about suicide. First, it's a myth that if someone's talking about suicide they're not gonna do it. If someone's talking about suicide, believe them. The second is it's totally okay to say the word suicide. I know when I say that like part of you inside is like ooh, scary word. But it's totally okay to talk about it, especially with people in crisis. You're not gonna be planting the idea in their head by bringing it up. If they're thinking about it, they've already thought about it and by talking about it and putting it out there in the open you can gauge how serious they are. Ask them when, where, how they're gonna do it. Have they planned this out? It helps you really understand how serious they are about that. If you do feel like somebody's at risk of committing suicide, there are some great numbers and folks that you can call that first number is the Chicago Community Counseling Center. They're all across the Chicago Metro area. That's their number that's available 24-7. And nationally is the National Suicide Prevention Hotline and then there's also an SMS line from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And of course, if you think there's an immediate threat, an immediate problem, 911 is there. The L analogy is for listening and listening non-judgmentally. So three ways that you can really listen non-judgmentally is first to have an attitude of acceptance. Respect that the person, the friend that you're dealing with, that their feelings are valid. Don't judge or criticize. Be genuine with them. And then finally, have empathy. And oftentimes when we talk about empathy, especially in DevOps, we talk about it in a very cognitive way of listening to them and understanding the facts of this situation. When in actuality, for someone in crisis, it's better to have true empathy. Approach their story and imagine yourself in their position and having that imagination of what they're going through helps connect you. The GNL algae is to give reassurance and information. So what does reassurance mean? Well it means that burnout is real and like many things that we talk about in DevOps, it's a systemic problem. It's not a personal issue. Burnout isn't somebody's fault. So reassure them of that. The other great thing to be reassuring of is that unfortunately burnout is common. But the positive side of that is there are a lot of people who've gone through it. There are a lot of resources out there. So there are success stories. There is hope. The first, the analogy. Encourage appropriate professional help. Go see a doctor. Medical doctors are fine. Go see a mental health professional. But I think also the secondary line of encouraging help is to encourage people to speak with their managers or their HR people. This can be tricky, right? Because if they're in a toxic culture, their manager probably doesn't want to help and may actually try to fire them. I'm not a lawyer. But one thing to keep in mind is that if you do seek medical help, if you go to a doctor and you get diagnosed with depression and then your company tries to fire you, there's a thing called the American Insuit Disability Act which will actually kick in and protect you. Some professional help resources, 211 is available in over 90% of the country. Give them a call. They have resources. They can point you to mental health professionals. OSMI is a fantastic one. Open-sourcing mental illness. They have a huge list of resources, particularly oriented towards people like us, people in tech. And then again, mentioning the community counseling centers of Chicago. They have a ton of resources as well. The final analogy is to encourage self-help and support strategies. This could be things like exercise, regularly taking breaks from work and getting out and walking around, playing Pokemon. One thing to note about this though is I hear a lot of people recommending that someone just take a break, go on vacation. Vacations are not, I repeat, vacations are not a good strategy. They don't help with burnout. Vacations are useful for taking a break and clearing your head, thinking about your next action steps, but they are not a sustainable way to prevent burnout. Some self-help resources. Burnout.io is another tech-oriented site that talks about burnout, has some good strategies on how to deal with that. Mood Gym is actually a really interesting one. It's an online tool that actually does help you with your self-awareness, helps you with your moods, and actually has some pretty great science behind it. And then MBCT, so mindfulness-based cognitive therapies. You can actually get training on this. It helps you to be more mindful, more aware of your emotional state, and that can be very, very helpful. So, algae, just to recap. Assess for a risk group of suicide or harm. Listen non-judgmentally. Give reassurance and information. Encourage appropriate professional help, and then finally encourage people to have self-help or other support strategies. So, back to that call that I had with Bob. I didn't put him on hold, I didn't call the cops. I asked what he'd taken, and as with anybody taking drugs, like, I don't do them so, they all freak me out. But I had him on the phone, I looked it up on Google. Turns out, like, not too bad. He wasn't, there was no chance of odying and dying, or real, actual self-harm. So I ended up just listening, and we talked. And I reminded him that I cared about him, and that he had other people that cared about him. And without knowing it, without having gone through mental health first aid training at that time, I'd actually managed to do some of algae. I assessed him for thinking about those drugs, and I listened to him. And so we talked for hours that night, until Bob was ready to just sleep it off, and until I realized I could be fairly certain that he was safe. I managed to visit Bob a few weeks later. I flew down to the varia. He was still burnt out. Obviously, burnout doesn't go away. And actually, shortly after my visit, the company did lay him off. They cut a lot of people. So being out of work is a new type of stress for him, but I think he's dealing with it well, and it's a stress that isn't burning him out. He's got some savings, so he's taking some time off. But unfortunately, he does fall into that 82% of people that's now just not sure if he actually wants to continue in tech. So recapping some community solutions for burnout. The first, spread DevOps. Continue to work to implement good cultures in companies, because that'll fix the environments that make people prone to burning out. And that's the link, again, to John's talk. Encourage self-assessment and awareness. So the more that we can talk about this at places like DevOps Days, the more that we can talk about this in our organizations, make people aware of themselves so that they can start to realize when they're burning out. Super helpful. But finally, equip yourselves. Equip yourselves by simply being connected. Create real relationships with your coworkers. Have real true relationships with people that you've worked with. And then take training. It's cheap, it's available. The more of us that have mental health first aid training, the more people that will be able to help and address when they have crises. So that's all I've got. I'm open to questions, but keep in mind I am not a professional in this. So I'll try to answer as best I can. And that's the link to the slide. So there's a ton of resources there. So once you identify somebody with burnout, and you were looking at all the stats, was there any stats from the onset of burnout to the meaner of average time before they leave your company and you can't either A, help them at your company or reclaim them as a useful employee? That's a great question. And I don't know of any stats around that. So yeah, unfortunately, you know, to be honest, if I were to just like make wild conjecture, which is what I do a lot of, I guess. Now, yeah, wild conjecture would probably mean that most of the people that burn out, like if they're not getting help from your company, you'll never hear from them again, to be honest. And it is because most of them do leave. I think, I'm trying to recall, there is a stat about how many people end up burning out and leaving. And the people that have been diagnosed with burnout, I think the stat is like half of them never go back to tech. You had mentioned about one of the ways to prevent this is to make sure you're building your community in your company. And so like doing lunches together and going out to drinks or something like that. Do you have any suggestions for very distributed teams that are maybe like almost 100% remote and like don't have the chance to get together for that kind of thing? Yeah, so actually work on a remote team within Datadog, we try to get together face to face, once a quarter. Similarly, a few jobs back, it was at MongoDB and worked remotely and we did the same like every six weeks or a couple of months we just get together in person. The other thing that I have implemented at Datadog is a remote happy hour. So once a month everybody remote and at this point it's like 75 remote people. Not everybody can make it but we just have a giant Zoom video hangout. So it's whatever time zone you're in grab an appropriate beverage. Yeah, no day drinking for us but yeah, definitely get together online and hang out. Oftentimes it's because we're growing it's we're meeting whoever's new to the remote part of the company but other than that it really just becomes hanging out and not talking about work. Just talking about like what people did. How was your weekend? See any good movies? What should I be watching on Netflix? Stuff like that. So a lot of the causes you've recognized kind of seem to be company based. I'm not wondering when you were kind of going through looking at the statistics on this. It seems very bad that any company would do anything that would promote burnout but it also seems like a lot of companies don't seem to care. So it seems like kind of self harm to the companies. Have you seen anything like companies like kind of recognizing that this is an issue and maybe trying to do something about it consciously rather than reactively? Yeah. I don't know. So I haven't first hand seen many companies addressing that but I only work at one company right now so I can't really say what other companies are doing. Definitely though things like not encouraging people to work long hours of overtime. Katie was up here mentioning those things of like incentivizing, right? Like it's not a badge of honor to be working 16 hour days. So starting to try to think of ways to incentivize people to be reasonable with their time and stuff like that. So I think there are companies that are doing it. It's just really hard to see into companies unless you have people like Katie or others who come up and talk about some of their issues. But yeah, I don't think that it's very widespread at this point. I think we still live in a culture that very much rewards people for investing their whole lives in being loyal employees, which is a sad thing. I honestly, maybe that's an open space topic but I'm interested in how do you not get hired into a company like that and how to we recognize the signs and run away before you kind of get all in to that mentality. Yeah. Thank you very much. Let's give it up for Jason. Thanks. Thanks.