How Always-On Delivery Cultures Can Lead to Burnout
Thu 4 Sep 2025
It’s well-known that people in the tech industry often face long working hours and an unforgiving, always-on culture that requires them to be on call around the clock. The drive to resolve issues, deploy updates, and address incidents as quickly as possible is leaving data engineers and platform teams overwhelmed with numerous tasks.
Once seen as beneficial to organisations, the value of an always-on delivery culture is being reassessed following reports from employees that this level of overload is causing long-term damage to both employee health and organisational well-being.
Continuous integration and employment pipelines, alongside hybrid work, have effectively eliminated the 9-to-5 workday and given rise to a workforce that is expected to be available continuously. After the pandemic, the lines between home and the office have become increasingly blurred, forcing many staff to work at times when they need a break.
Widespread Burnout
Today, engineers and platform teams are facing exhaustion, burnout and ultimately resignation. A number of studies illustrate the extraordinarily high rates of burnout across tech teams. According to a survey of 600 data engineers published by DataKitchen and data.world, 97% of data engineers are experiencing burnout. In addition, half of the respondent say their work-life balance is always or often disrupted, directly as a result of unplanned work.
The impact of this stress doesn’t just end with data engineers; 70% of these individuals say they are likely to leave their current employer for another job in the next 12 months. The vast majority (80%) say they have considered leaving their career completely because of challenges like burnout.
Take, for example, cybersecurity experts who are required to drop everything the moment a major cyber incident happens. Not only will they face acute stress during the initial incident, but workloads after the attack will undoubtedly increase as they are tasked with both recovering from the attack and ensuring that no more hacks like it happen again.
With cyber threats having the potential to cost millions upon millions of pounds and destroy the hard-earned reputations of organisations, the stakes are extremely high and mistakes are simply not tolerated, leading to a culture where any perceived weaknesses are brushed under the carpet.
Sustainable Processes
Of course, when a crisis hits an organisation, all hands have to be on deck. But failing to recognise the damage that a non-stop approach can have on staff throughout an organisation is not an effective route in the long term. There are practical actions businesses can take to reduce the impact of an always-on culture and the risk of exhaustion cycles.
Ensuring staff have actual breaks between intense projects, like short-notice weekend sprints, isn’t a nice ‘treat’ or benefit for employees, but rather a non-negotiable part of an unusual working pattern. Building in days in long-term projects focused on essential maintenance that would otherwise be left to build up can help reduce strain as well as contribute to more realistic project timelines.
Companies like Spotify introduced so-called squad models where teams are given the power to decide when they feel is the best time to go all-out and when to take it slower. This type of flexibility removes top-down pressures and includes data engineers in choices that they will be impacted by most acutely.
On a human level, providing non-judgmental spaces for teams to speak openly about workloads and when they feel completely overwhelmed can be beneficial to better understand when team members are close to burnout. In the past, Microsoft incorporated staff energy levels alongside other business metrics, with teams reporting higher morale and fewer people resigning as a result.
Reaching a more sustainable level of engineering velocity doesn’t mean leaving behind delivery and producing slower. It’s focused on protecting employees who work much more effectively when treated holistically and not like a machine. Burnout damages both organisations and staff, leading to weaker teams and businesses.
