Burnout

Managing Research Software Projects

Greg Wilson

2026

Learning Objectives

  • Distinguish burnout from ordinary fatigue and underperformance.
  • Describe research-specific drivers of burnout.
  • Explain how to identify early warning signs in yourself and your team members.
  • Describe steps a manager can take to prevent or correct burnout.

What Burnout Is

  • Three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced accomplishment.
  • People who are simply tired recover with rest.
  • People who are burned out do not, or not quickly.
  • Burnout is a mismatch between what work demands and what it provides.

Three Groups to Watch

  • Yourself: revise downward the expectation to do everything at pre-management level.
  • Team members: maintenance burden accumulates silently and is rarely celebrated.
  • External contributors: their burnout is invisible because they just stop showing up.
  • Warning signs include fewer commits, shorter messages, and unusual hours.

Research-Specific Drivers

  • Grant deadlines are fixed, immovable crunches that recur.
  • Publication pressure creates a second deadline outside the sprint board.
  • Postdoc job-search precarity runs in parallel with project crunches.
  • Treating burnout as underperformance makes it worse.

What Managers Can Do

  • Make maintenance work visible and allocate time for it.
  • Protect time: 60-hour weeks accumulate a debt that gets called in later.
  • Create explicit permission to not respond after hours.
  • Plan for the end-of-grant crunch and agree what will not be done.
  • Check in about workload, not just work.

What about AI?

  • LLM triage can filter duplicates before they reach an overwhelmed maintainer
  • LLMs cause expectation inflation: “why can’t you just” on a bigger scale
  • LLMs reach 80% quickly, but the remaining 20% produces cognitive exhaustion

Personal Sustainability Check (8 min)

Answer honestly:

  1. How many hours did you work last week? Is that typical?
  2. In the last month, have you done something purely for enjoyment that had nothing to do with work?
  3. Name one thing that used to energize you about this project that currently doesn’t.
  4. If a team member were behaving the way you currently are, what would you say to them?

You don’t need to share your answers. Write them for yourself.

Team Protection Plan (12 min)

In pairs:

  1. Describe one person on your team whose workload you are not sure is sustainable. What do you know about their current situation? What don’t you know?

  2. Write three concrete things you could do this week to make their situation more sustainable or to find out whether it is. Be specific: not “check in with them” but “at tomorrow’s one-to-one, ask whether the amount of work they currently have is sustainable, and listen to the answer without immediately offering solutions.”