If you hang around technology companies long enough, you or someone you know may experience “burnout” – a state of emotional exhaustion, doubt and cynicism. Burnout can turn productive employees into emotional zombies and destroy careers. But it can also force you to hit the pause button and perhaps take a moment to reevaluate your life and your choices.

Hitting “burnout” changed the trajectory of both ends of my career in Silicon Valley. This post, which is divided in two parts, is the story of the first time it happened to me.

Zilog
Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. Zilog produced one of the first 8-bit microprocessors, the Z-80 (competing at the time with Intel’s 8080, Motorola 6800, and MOS Technology 6502.)

I was hired as a training instructor to teach microprocessor system design for the existing Z-80 family and to write a new course for Zilog’s soon to be launched 16-bit processor, the Z-8000. Given the hardware I had worked on at ESL, learning microprocessors wasn’t that hard but figuring out how to teach hardware design and assembly language programming was a bit more challenging. Luckily while I was teaching classes at headquarters, Zilog’s field application engineers (the technical engineers working alongside our salesmen) would work side-by-side with our large customers as they designed their systems with our chips. So our people in the field could correct any egregious design advice I gave to customers who mattered.

Customers
The irony is that Zilog had no idea who would eventually become its largest customers. Our salesmen focused on accounts that ordered the largest number of chips and ignored tiny little startups that wanted to build personal computers around these chips (like Cromemco, Osborne, Kaypro, Coleco, Radio Shack, Amstrad, Sinclair, Morrow, Commodore, Intertec, etc.) Keep in mind this is still several years before the IBM PC and DOS. And truth be told, these early systems were laughable, at first having no disk drives (you used tape cassettes), no monitors (you used your TV set as a display), and no high level programming languages. If you wanted your own applications, you had to write them yourself. No mainframe or minicomputer company saw any market for these small machines.

Two Jobs at Once
When I was hired at Zilog part of the deal was that I could consult for the first six months for my last employer, ESL.

Just as I was getting settled into Zilog, the manager of the training department got fired. (I was beginning to think that my hiring managers were related to red-shirted guys on Star Trek.) Since the training department was part of sales no one really paid attention to the four of us. So every day I’d come to work at Zilog at 9, leave at 5 go to ESL and work until 10 or 11 or later. Repeat every day, six or seven days a week.

Meanwhile, back at ESL the project I was working on wanted to extend my consulting contract, the company was trying to get me to return, and in spite of what I had done on the site, “the customer” had casually asked me if I was interested in talking to them about a job. Life was good.

But it was all about to catch up to me.

Where Am I?
It was a Friday (about 3/4 of the way through my work week) and I was in a sales department meeting. Someone mentioned to me that there were a pile of upcoming classes heading my way, and warned me “remember that the devil is in the details.” The words “heading my way” and “devil” combined in my head. I immediately responded, “Well that’s OK, I got it under control – as long as the devil coming at me isn’t an SS-18.” Given that everyone in the room knew the NATO codename for the SS-18 was SATAN, I was thinking that this was a witty retort and expected at least a chuckle from someone.

I couldn’t understand why people were staring at me like I was speaking in tongues. The looks on their faces were uncomfortable. The VP of Sales gave me a funny look and just moved on with the agenda.

VP of Sales? Wait a minute ... where am I?

I looked around the room thinking I’d see the faces of the engineers in the ESL M-4 vault, but these were different people. Who were these people? I had a moment of confusion and then a much longer minute of panic trying to figure out where I was. I wasn’t at ESL; I was at Zilog. As I realized what I had said, a much longer panic set in. I tried to clear my head and remember what else I had said, like anything that would be really, really, really bad to say outside of a secure facility.

As I left this meeting I realized I didn’t even remember when I had left ESL or how I had gotten to Zilog. Something weird was happening to me. As I was sitting in my office looking lost, the VP of Sales came in and said, “You look a bit burned out, take it easy this weekend.”

“Burned out?” What the heck was that? I had been working at this pace since I was 18.

Burnout
I was tired. No I was more than tired, I was exhausted. I had started to doubt my ability to accomplish everything. Besides seeing my housemates in Palo Alto I had no social life. I was feeling more and more detached at work and emotionally drained. Counting the Air Force I had been pounding out 70- and 80-hour weeks nonstop for almost eight years. I went home and fell asleep at 7 pm and didn’t wake up until the next afternoon.

The bill had come due.

Recovery
That weekend I left the Valley and drove along the coast from San Francisco to Monterey. Crammed into Silicon Valley along with millions of people around the San Francisco Bay it’s hard to fathom that 15 air miles away was a stretch of California coast that was still rural. With the Pacific Ocean on my right and the Santa Cruz Mountains on my left, Highway 1 cut through mile after mile of farms in rural splendor. There wasn’t a single stop-light along 2-lane highway for the 45 miles from Half Moon Bay to Santa Cruz. Looking at the green and yellows of the farms, I realized that my life lacked the same colors. I had no other life than work. While I was getting satisfaction from what I was learning, the sheer joy of it had diminished.

As the road rolled on, it dawned on me that there was no one looking out for me. There was no one who was going to tell me, “You’ve hit your limit, now work less hours and go enjoy yourself.”The idea that only I could be responsible for taking care of my happiness and health was a real shock. How did I miss that?

At the end of two days I realized,

This was the first full weekend I had taken off since I had moved to California
3 years ago.
I had achieved a lot by working hard, but the positive feedback I was getting just encouraged me to work even harder.
I needed to learn how to relax without feeling guilty.
I needed a life outside work.
And most importantly I needed to pick one job, not two. I had to make a choice about where I wanted to go with my career–back to ESL, try to work for the Customer or stay at Zilog?

Lessons Learned

No one will tell you to work fewer hours
You need to be responsible for your own health and happiness
Burnout sneaks up on you
Burnout is self-induced. You created it and own it.
Recovery takes an awareness of what happened and…
A plan to change the situation that got you there
More about that choice in the next post.

Read more Steve Blank posts at www.steveblank.com.