Burnout is a state of exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress (being overworked) – it negatively impacts your life, both in and out of the workplace.
Burnout has long been associated with the IT world. While Salesforce promotes wellbeing and a healthy work-life balance, we are still working in a project-based world where deadlines, stress, and overtime can be seen as part of the job.
This isn’t the first time you’ll be reading about burnout on SalesforceBen.com. It’s our mission to help advance the careers of Salesforce professionals – wellbeing is an important part of that.
Paul Ginsberg shared advice on identifying potential burnout before it happens. Then, later that year, we investigated the extent of burnout in the community as part of the Salesforce Careers and Hiring survey: 60% of Salesforce professionals admitted to experiencing burnout, with 37% admitting that burnout was not a one-time suffering.
The most interesting finding was when burnout was sliced up by job role; Salesforce Architects were the most frequently burned out (62%), followed closely by Admins (61%), before dropping for sales roles (57%), developers (57%), and consultants (56%). Taking a step back, the rates are pretty high across the board.
Burnout cropped up again in the results of the 2021 study, with 33% of respondents feeling uncertain about their potential future prospects – burnout being a major driver (source).
What about now, in 2022? As demand for faster innovation continues to rise, pressure makes its way down to Salesforce professionals. ‘The Great Resignation’ has taken hold; employees have more weight to move away from roles that don’t meet their expectations for career progression and a desirable work-life balance.
Burnout Among Developers [New Research]
A new study from MuleSoft reveals that developer talent is becoming harder to retain; 93% of the CIOs and IT decision-makers surveyed agreed that the ‘Great Resignation’ has made it more difficult to retain skilled developers. A significant 86% claimed that this has been felt sharply over the past two years in particular.
The takeaway? Developers feel burnt out by digital transformation and repetitive tasks. This leads them to search for opportunities to innovate and go beyond repetitive work.
This sentiment was echoed in a Salesforce survey that investigated whether automating repetitive, manual tasks can help employees focus on their actual jobs, which should make for a happier, more productive workforce.
The top three causes contributing to developer burnout were reported as:
- Increasing workload / demand from other teams (39%)
- Pressures of digital transformation (37%)
- Learning skills to adapt to new technologies and approaches (35%)
Salesforce orgs are becoming increasingly complex – no news here! Have we considered the cognitive load required to learn this architecture? 76% of organizations say it’s a source of angst and low productivity for developers. Hindering the growth of technologists (both in number and in proficiency) more specifically are:
- Difficulty managing the integrations across multiple cloud platforms without specialist IT skills (47%)
- Limited automation in software development (46%)
- Data silos (42%)
- Governance and security (41%)
- Limited access to lightweight tooling (38%)
“The automotive industry never would have taken off if all the cars were being built by individual craftspeople — the job of building cars had to be broken down to make it accessible to the masses. We’re at that point in the software industry. We can’t expect a relatively small percentage of workers — software developers — to bear the brunt of mass digital production. We have to get the whole organization involved. Low-code tooling and automation technology are the means for doing that, and they’ve already been shown to improve employee satisfaction and reduce stress.”
– Matt McLarty, Global Field CTO & VP of the Digital Transformation Office, MuleSoft.
Read the full press releases here.
