The Keystone Burnout: How Engineering Leaders Break Under Constant Vigilance

I had three major burnouts in seven years at the same role, and the consistent mechanism across all of them was domain switching — holding many distinct mental models and moving between them under pressure. The through-line wasn't entirely the quantity of work, though the quantity was a contributing factor. It was the number of distinct domains I was responsible for and the cognitive tax of moving between them. The mechanism is both structural and largely invisible — to management, to colleagues