HR Engineering Burnout Diagnose

Overview

Detect and diagnose engineering burnout risk using data across workload patterns, after-hours activity, on-call load, and team context, then turn it into a concrete mitigation plan.

When to Use

Use this skill when:

• You see sustained after-hours/weekend work and want to know if it indicates burnout.
• You need a structured burnout risk assessment for a specific engineer or team.
• You want to review on-call load for fairness and sustainability.
• You’re preparing a manager/HR discussion about potential burnout or attrition risk.
• You want a pre-mortem before pushing the team harder (big launch, incident spike).

Do not use this skill when:

• The primary question is performance quality or underperformance → use hreng-perf-diagnose.
• You’re designing career progression or promotion cases → use hreng-ladder.
• You’re assessing skills coverage vs. roadmap → use hreng-skills.

Inputs Required

• Time window to analyze (e.g., last 3 / 6 / 12 months).
• Workload and incident signals you can access (git, incidents, on-call, calendars, tickets).
• On-call rotation details (if applicable).
• Team context (org changes, big launches, layoffs, restructurings).

Outputs Produced

• A structured burnout indicators JSON for the person/team.
• A manager-ready risk assessment report.
• A prioritized mitigation and monitoring plan.

Tooling Rule

• If MCP tools are available, prefer them for incident/workload data (PagerDuty, Jira, calendars, git, HRIS).
• If scripts/templates exist in this repo, always base your output on them instead of inventing new formats.

Core Pattern

1. Collect signals across code, incidents, on-call, meetings, and qualitative feedback.
2. Score each indicator (low/medium/high) using quantitative thresholds plus context.
3. Determine risk level (low/medium/high/critical) and what’s systemic vs. individual.
4. Generate artifacts using templates (indicators JSON, manager report, recommendations).
5. Highlight trade-offs (burnout vs. short-term delivery pressure) and concrete next steps.

Quick Reference

Data Collection & Indicators

1. Git & After-Hours Activity

Goal: Detect sustained, not one-off, patterns of after-hours and weekend work.

Example commands (adapt author filters as needed):

# Commits by hour (detect after-hours work)
git log --author="Name" --date=format:'%H' --pretty=format:'%ad' | sort | uniq -c

# Commits by day of week (weekend work)
git log --author="Name" --date=format:'%u' --pretty=format:'%ad' | sort | uniq -c

# Commit velocity trend by week
git log --author="Name" --since="6 months ago" --pretty=format:'%ad' --date=short | uniq -c

Interpretation guidance:

• Look for multi-week patterns, not single crunch weeks.
• Correlate spikes with launches or incidents before labeling as burnout.
• Account for time zones and personal preference (some engineers prefer evenings).

Typical warning signs:

• >20–30% of commits outside local 9am–6pm for 6+ consecutive weeks.
• Regular weekend commits (>10% of total) that aren’t tied to agreed launches.
• Late-night activity spikes (after 10pm) in multiple weeks.
• Declining commit velocity paired with increasing after-hours work.

2. On-Call & Incident Analysis

Metrics to assemble:

• Incidents per on-call shift/week.
• After-hours pages per shift.
• Time to acknowledge / resolve.
• Rotation fairness (how often each person is on-call).

Typical warning signs:

• >3 incidents per on-call week for multiple weeks.
• >5 after-hours pages per shift (people woken up multiple nights).
• Uneven rotation (same person carries outsized share, even if “volunteered”).
• Long incident resolution times (>4 hours) due to exhaustion or overload.

3. Workload, Meetings, and Context Switching

Signals to gather:

• PR review load per engineer (opened vs. reviewed PRs).
• Number of concurrent projects/initiatives.
• Meeting hours per week, especially fragmented across days.
• Distinct repos/domains touched per week.

Typical warning signs:

• >10 PRs to review per week for multiple weeks.
• Working on >3 significant projects simultaneously.
• >20 hours of recurring meetings per week.
• Frequent context switches (5+ different domains in a week).

4. Qualitative Indicators

Pull in:

• Recent 1:1 notes (energy, frustration, disengagement).
• Peer feedback about responsiveness, tone, and reliability.
• Self-reported stress, sleep, or health clues (without over-interpreting).
• Changes in participation (silent in meetings, cameras off, less proactive).

Risk Assessment Structure

Always normalize your output to the JSON structure in templates/burnout-indicators.json. A typical filled-out structure looks like:

{
  "employee": "Name",
  "assessment_date": "2026-01-22",
  "risk_level": "high",
  "indicators": [
    {
      "category": "after_hours_work",
      "severity": "high",
      "evidence": "35% of commits between 8pm-1am over last 8 weeks (team avg: 9%)",
      "trend": "increasing"
    },
    {
      "category": "on_call_load",
      "severity": "medium",
      "evidence": "4.2 incidents per on-call week (team avg: 2.1)",
      "trend": "stable"
    }
  ],
  "overall_drivers": [
    "Incident spike since Q4",
    "Understaffed platform team"
  ]
}

Map your indicator severities to an overall risk level:

• Low: Mostly healthy patterns, occasional spikes with clear context.
• Medium: Several medium indicators or one high indicator; risk if trend continues.
• High: Multiple high indicators or one critical (e.g., repeated all-nighters).
• Critical: Clear harm signals (health, medical leave, meltdown, attrition risk).

Intervention Strategies

Anchor your recommendations in templates/recommendations.md and produce a short, prioritized list (3–7 items) with owners and timelines.

Immediate actions (high/critical risk):

• Reduce workload (remove lower-priority projects, stop scope creep).
• Pause or soften on-call rotation for the individual.
• Encourage real rest (PTO, no-slack expectation, explicit manager support).
• Manager to run a non-judgmental 1:1 focused on support, not blame.

Medium-term (systemic fixes):

• Redistribute work and fix unfair rotations.
• Address systemic sources of load (incident reduction, tech debt, broken process).
• Add automation and tooling to reduce toil.
• Plan headcount or scope cuts explicitly instead of “heroics”.

Long-term (culture & norms):

• Make “sustainable pace” an explicit team norm.
• Clarify expectations about after-hours work and responses.
• Invest in on-call quality (runbooks, SLOs, better escalation).
• Cross-train team to reduce single points of failure.

Manager-Facing Report

Use templates/burnout-risk-assessment-report-manager.md as the base and populate:

• Context: Time period, team, role, data sources used.
• Summary: One paragraph: current risk level and main drivers.
• Evidence: 3–7 bullet points tying indicators to specific data.
• Recommended actions: Ordered by urgency and impact.
• Follow-up plan: How and when you’ll re-check indicators.

Using Supporting Resources

Templates

• templates/burnout-indicators.json – Canonical indicators JSON schema.
• templates/burnout-risk-assessment-report-manager.md – Manager-facing narrative assessment template.
• templates/recommendations.md – Mitigation and intervention plan structure.

Scripts

• scripts/check-hreng-burnout.sh – Pre-run checks for the skill.
• scripts/validate-hreng-burnout.py – Validate indicators JSON and report structure.

Common Mistakes

• Treating single crunch weeks as burnout without trend/context.
• Ignoring self-reported signals because “metrics look fine”.
• Focusing only on an individual when patterns are clearly systemic.
• Confusing high engagement (voluntary extra work) with unmanaged burnout.
• Producing vague recommendations like “improve work-life balance” without owners or timelines.

Aim for specific, data-backed, and humane recommendations that a manager can act on within the next 1–3 sprints.