Tech Burnout Recovery: What I Shared at SCaLE 23
This one was personal. I gave this talk at SCaLE 23 in Pasadena as part of Open Source Career Day, and I will be honest, I almost did not write it because it meant putting some very uncomfortable things on a slide.
In 2025 I lost a job I had held for five and a half years in a seven-minute call. Over the next 96 days I worked overnight shifts at a gas station, interviewed on no sleep during what should have been my sleep hours, and spent a lot of time figuring out who I was when the job that had become my identity was gone. I also said yes to teaching Linux administration at Johnson County Community College, which I almost turned down, and eventually landed at CIQ. Both of those came through my network, not job boards.
The talk covers what burnout actually looks like before you realize you are in it, the patterns that get technical people there faster than most, and some practical steps I used to stabilize and rebuild. I talk about the hero trap, context switching, the identity trap, and what a blameless postmortem on my own situation taught me. There is also a question I started asking people in my life that has saved me more arguments than I can count, and I share it in the talk because it is genuinely that useful.
This is not a polished keynote. The slide deck had some technical issues live, I was processing some heavy personal news the morning of the talk, and it shows. But I think that is part of why it landed the way it did.
Watch the full talk on YouTube: From Bash to Burnout | SCaLE 23 Open Source Career Day
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