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Three weeks ago, we shared the results of our first-ever large-scale tech worker sentiment survey. The post generated tons of conversations, in particular about burnout. Readers asked, “Who are these people who aren’t burned-out?”

So we decided to do a timely follow-up investigation to find out the common threads among respondents who:

1. Haven’t felt much (or any) burnout in recent months/years

2. Have felt burned-out but were able to deal with it extremely effectively

3. Feel like they’ve cracked the “secret code” for dealing with burnout

We ran open-ended, video-based surveys with about 175 respondents and interviewed about 15 people who reported low to no burnout in the original survey.

Our respondents revealed that dealing with burnout isn’t simply about resilience or stress management. The key is to systematically design a career and lifestyle that make burnout structurally unlikely.

We call tech workers who manage to do this “burnout conquerors.”

P.S. If you prefer, you can listen to this post in convenient podcast form: Spotify / Apple / YouTube.

Introducing ARMOR: five shields against burnout

My investigation revealed five core strategies for dealing with burnout. These strategies are the armor that tech workers are donning to protect themselves from burnout.

A: Autonomy

Many people we heard from immediately identified that autonomy is a critical ingredient to being happy at work.

We also saw this again and again in our research.

“I’ve had strong leaders who believed in my development and let me run with high autonomy to solve challenging problems. I’m happy more than 95% of the time.”

“I intentionally seek out environments where I have autonomy and variety in my day-to-day work, which keeps things fresh and prevents stagnation. Ultimately, choosing a path that matches my strengths and curiosity has made all the difference in sustaining my motivation and well-being.”

Burnout conquerors continuously strive to create as much autonomy over their work lives as possible. Here’s how:

1. Proactively take control of your time and efforts

Burnout conquerors keep a keen eye on how they spend their time and energy at work to make sure they’re working smarter, not harder. An open block in their calendar to do deep work isn’t just going to drop in from the sky. Their most productive hours aren’t going to magically become available for priority work. Burnout conquerors make their days their own.

“For me, burnout happens when I become ineffective at my job, no matter how many hours I put in. When I start to feel like I’m not making progress, I immediately start examinin