And here’s the thing about burnout—it’s not just exhaustion. It’s losing a piece of yourself.

I used to be a machine. An unstoppable, relentless force of will. A whirlwind of productivity. Thinking clearly, making decisions, holding massive amounts of information in my head—it was second nature. But after this? My brain fogged over. I’d sit down to solve a problem I’d spent years mastering… and I just couldn’t.

TomManages wrote one of the best accounts of the serious developer burnout I have ever read. It took him years to recover (fully?) from after working on Halo Wars 2. The comments about it on the gamedev forum were just as insightful.

I have been on a project like this in my early 20’s. Crunch and burnout like this are real. They take both professional and personal tolls. Some folks have to disengage from their career for months, years, or even permanently to recover. Sometimes folks never fully recover. Even if you do recover, you often find you have a new ceiling that is lower than before, or you start getting scared when you start getting those old feelings of being pulled too far. On a personal front, your mental health and relationships suffer. Many developers find themselves having to choose between game dev and having a family or a serious personal relationship/marriage. Relationship issues and divorces are common.

As I have gotten older, this kind of burnout seems to come with even less hours/mental strain. We don’t have the infinite energy of our 20’s forever. One of the things I’m most proud of is that when running a team of my own was reducing the crunch that was going on until we could deliver reliably, on-time, and without crunch.

Crunch that leads to burnout is a leadership failure. Period. Technical leaders cause this by mis-estimating time required for tasks, taking on too much technical complexity/risk that later turn into fire drills, or simply not doing their homework to ensure all the use cases and design pieces will work. Managers cause this by agreeing to ridiculous timelines, accepting marketing demands that should be out of scope, and poor change management that just keeps adding things instead of trading one task for another of equal complexity after the schedule is set.