engineering culture

Spot and Stop Burnout in Your Dev Team

Agile Methodology, Dev Practices, Team Performance

Written by: Yamila Solari

A hand holding a transition from a sad face to a happy face, symbolizing emotional recovery from burnout in dev teams.

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. In the workplace, burnout is often quiet and not easily identifiable. But we can start thinking about it as a possibility when we encounter unexpected behaviors from our coworkers: a high-performing dev suddenly starts missing standups, a previously active team member goes quiet during retrospectives, or a senior tester hasn’t moved their tickets in a whole week. However quiet, burnout is always costly for a dev team because it means losing critical resources for at least one sprint.

In this blog, I’ll cover how to spot early signs of burnout in your dev team, understand the root causes, what to do when someone is experiencing burnout, and how to prevent it together.

Subtle Signs You Might Be Missing

Burnout makes everything feel overwhelming. It leaves us emotionally drained, low on energy, hopeless, helpless and -very often- resentful. And it doesn’t happen overnight; it builds over time if left unaddressed.

Software teams are especially vulnerable because they work under constant deadlines and with complex technologies that aren’t always predictable. Add to that unclear priorities, contradicting messages, and the challenges of distributed or hybrid work, and it’s easy to see how stress can accumulate fast.

But in high-achieving dev cultures burnout often goes unnoticed and may even be intentionally hidden. There’s still a lot of stigma around struggles like burnout, depression, or any challenge that suggests someone isn’t “handling it.” That’s why it’s so important for all of us to know the signs and symptoms that may indicate burnout:

Physical signs:

feeling tired and drained, frequent illness, headaches.

Emotional shifts:

irritability, detachment, or lack of enthusiasm.

Cognitive signs:

slower decision-making, forgetfulness, procrastination.

Behavioral clues:

missed meetings, less collaboration, silence in discussions, not responding to feedback, isolation.

Team-level red flags:

frequent miscommunication, drops in quality, blame spirals, and reduced productivity.

Visual representation of burnout warning signs in software development teams

Understanding Root Causes of Burnout

Burnout tends to have three sources: work-related, lifestyle, and personality factors. Often, they interact and reinforce each other. Here are some common ones:

Work-related causes

Feeling like you have little or no control over your work
Unclear or overly demanding job expectations
Chaotic or high-pressure environments

Lifestyle causes

Working too much, without enough time for rest or socializing
Lack of close, supportive relationships
Taking on too many responsibilities without help
Not getting enough sleep

Personality traits that can contribute

Perfectionism, nothing is ever good enough
A pessimistic outlook
A strong need to be in control and reluctance to delegate

What to Do When Someone in the Team Is Facing Burnout

Reach out with curiosity.

Ask how they’re doing. Acknowledge their experience and listen without judgment. Active listening goes a long way in helping someone feel seen.

Encourage time off.

In software development, deadlines are always looming and letting someone take extra time off can feel risky as it might delay delivery or impact sprint goals. But when someone is facing burnout, a break can be essential for recovery. Instead of seeing this as an individual issue, treat it as a team challenge. Could you all pitch in a little extra to lighten the load? Could the PO agree to drop a story or two from the sprint? Creative solutions like these not only support the teammate in need but they reinforce a culture of care and collaboration.

Rebuild connection.

If appropriate, consider spending time together outside work as a team. Socializing, even casually, can help most people recharge.

Tackle the root causes.

Take time as a team to address what’s causing excess stress. Consider inviting your PM or PO into the conversation. Is your sprint pace sustainable?

What You Can Do as a Team to Prevent Burnout

Strengthen your team agreements around availability and communication. Include how breaks will be handled and normalized.
In retrospectives, celebrate more than just delivery: acknowledge learning, collaboration, and any form of improvement.
Encourage team members to voice their needs and limits and respect them when they do.
Allow for delegation and task rotation, not just to ease the load, but to foster others’ growth in leadership skills.

Agile development team collaborating around a laptop, illustrating teamwork and sustainable collaboration to prevent burnout.

Sustainable Agile Teams Don’t Need Heroes

Agile teams are built to be self-organizing and to set their own limits, like how many stories to take on each sprint. These are safeguards against burnout. But sometimes, leaders or POs push for velocity in a way that backfires.

Let’s remember preventing burnout is essential to keeping teams resilient and high-performing.

So, If you’re a team leader,  what small shift could you make today to help your team feel more supported?

If you’re part of a dev team,  what conversation could you start at your next retro to make sure your team has what it needs to thrive without burning out?

Yamila Solari

General Manager

What does success look like to you?

Agile Methodology, Healthcare, Remote Work

By Scio Team

Scio software developer reflecting on personal definition of success</p>
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It’s easy to see the idea of success as a default goal, something everyone should be looking for in any endeavor they start. And while it’s true that always looking for a specific destination is part of our nature, what does success mean? Because when we talk about success, it’s easy to forget that it never looks the same for everyone.
Truth is, success comes from a very personal place for most people, where our experiences and expectations shape the way we work and collaborate, and the specific things we choose to focus on. That’s why at Scio we believe that a good organization leaves enough space to let every collaborator reach success on their terms. So what is a success, then? As we were curious about what drives each of our developers and engineers, we sent a survey to all the Scioneers to ask this very important question: what does success look like to you?

The importance of balance

“Success is feeling in control of my personal life”, states one of the responses we got. “Being able to feel like I’m doing something valuable, having the strength and motivation to continue doing the things I love, and also being happy with the ones around me.” This image of success, for example, points out the important balance between work and personal life, one of the core values of Scio regarding their collaborators. We consider this is an important topic because developing software is as much of a creative endeavor as a technical one, and having people who keep healthy boundaries is crucial to always arrive at the best outcomes. To this end, fostering a good culture of collaboration and camaraderie is the best approach to ensure that a project is completed successfully, as it can also mean that your work doesn’t go unnoticed. “I like that Scio’s culture promotes the gesture of congratulating the team, both individually and as a whole”, says another of the answers we got. “I like the post-mortem charts we have about our successful projects, where they make sure all the team knows we are aware of their achievements. We even have social meetings to celebrate successful goals, which I think it’s a good idea. So let’s continue promoting the gesture of congratulating our teams for their achievements.” This is one of the examples of the ways Scio tries to maintain mutual support in everything we do, and something as simple as notifying everyone that a team has achieved a goal, or having a group call to just chat and relax, goes a long way toward it.

Success beyond the office

Illustration for blog What does success look like?

However, for some, success transcends the workplace and instead focuses on how it affects a collaborator’s everyday life. “Having my own home, seeing my kids happy, and maybe even running a marathon in another country is success” was one of the answers we got, as well as “Feeling full, and having yourself, your family, your significant other, your mind, your work, and your world in balance” and “Being able to do what I like in life and enjoy every second.”

This topic keeps coming out because a clear balance between work and personal life has been increasingly desired among both developers and companies starting to embrace the advantages of remote work and hybrid collaboration models, so making sure a healthy equilibrium exists is one of our core values here at Scio. “Feeling happy and comfortable with where you are”, another one of our responses, sums it up very well.

We understand that, due to the nature of software development, sometimes keeping this balance is tricky, even if Nearshore companies like Scio offer plenty of flexibility and options to work, so taking the steps to ensure that our collaborators can define success beyond the needs of a project goes a long way.

This also ties with another concept that many developers find attractive in any workplace: the chance to learn and grow as they work, which seemed to be a focal point in many of the answers we received. “Meeting the objectives and goals, keep the things I learned, as well as learning from the mistakes to improve”, and “Creating something of value that has a positive impact on the people you care about” get to the point of it, as a successful person might also be one that learns, grows and creates useful things from the work they do.

“Looks like having a clean conscience, lots of self-caring, not reserving everything to myself, feeling useful, achieving a wisdom state” was an unexpected answer. A lot of people can see success in purely personal terms (i.e. “how I feel about this thing I did?), so creating an environment where collaboration and personal growth are on the same frequency tends to deliver the best outcomes.

The success of living well

Blog header: What does success look like?

And last, it’s not a secret that many go into software development because it’s a very in-demand field with lots of organizations to choose from to collaborate with, and compensation is always important for anyone looking to join an organization that shares their values. “For me, is to be financially stable enough to give my family a better life, while also being happy in your job and what you like. To be successful is also to be recognized in your work and know that you are an important part of your company”, reads one of the answers, highlighting success as having the means to support your loved ones while also working on something you feel passionate about.

“For me, success is when your lifestyle and quality of life improves significantly and money isn’t an issue at all”, continues another of the responses. “While also achieving your personal and professional goals, feeling full and happy. Then you have a balance of these ‘pillars’ and yet you are further away from where you started.”

As we reveal more responses, we can start to see that “success” is, at the end of it, directing your life in the way you want to, down to every detail, as this answer manages to explain beautifully: “For me, success has many shapes. From small achievements to the greatest goals, success can happen anywhere, in any place, both in our personal and professional lives, in the financial sense, or even with the people around you”, trying to get across how success is present in our daily lives.

“Even in defeat, we can see success in learning something, feeling good about it, making ourselves proud, and gaining more knowledge in return. If we see it like this, anything we achieve is a success.”

So what do you think? How do you personally define success and how does it get reflected in your personal life? Is it something concrete you work towards every day, or a state of life you want to achieve? Because no matter what your definition of success is, at Scio, we are willing to lend you a hand and achieve your best possible outcome.