I have gotten burnout a few times over the last few years, and every time my reaction has been to drop the company like hot cakes and take care of myself. I nev

I have gotten burnout a few times over the last few years, and every time my reaction has been to drop the company like hot cakes and take care of myself. I never understood all the braying about loyalty to a company. They aren't loyal to employees, if the roles were reversed and I did the things they did to me they would have fired me on the spot. In the end I think people have forgotten that their work is nothing more than an at will contract, and they can walk away anytime. I'm always reminded of Chomsky talking about the early industrial revolution and saying many people thought of the 5 day work week as only slightly better than chattel slavery, the only difference being you get to go home at the end of the day. Of course there are consequences to such actions. If you live a lifestyle of debt, and you can't afford a few months without work due to all the needed payments, it becomes more and more difficult to break away from intuitively bad situations. To me, the real cause of burnout is the hopelessness that comes with being stuck in a bad situation and being unable to get out of it. Even if sometimes its more mind forged than reality. For me, work has always been a means to an end. Since I got out of the Marines work was what financed my efforts to study and understand the highest level geopolitical picture because I was not satisfied with the answers to my questions about our wars. In the process I became a pretty good sysadmin, and tried to maintain excellence in what I did, but what I often found was incompetence or mismanagement prevented me from being as effective as I could be. Once a certain level of frustration was hit that wasn't justified to my salary, I knew it was time to go. For me then, pay really did factor in, but employers are drastically underpaying IT workers in Texas so my bullshit tolerance levels were lower than they could should have been if salaries matched work. I was also never perfect, and separation from a company has often been the move I needed to reevaluate and improve my skills, for example, For a long time I just wanted to be a senior sysadmin in the server room just doing all the hard, high level back end work, but I've learned that if no one is playing the meeting room, board room political/business games for the IT department, those more technical roles can't get their job done without interruption. Which is why I am increasingly interested in the role of CTOs and CIOs who are the ones who should be doing that for an IT department. Bottom line is, burnout happens, don't be afraid to break away from it for your own health, and learn lessons in the process. Life is about making mistakes and learning from them.