RTO is burning people out faster than the pandemic ever did

The argument is this: RTO is not the same as pre-COVID office work. And that is completely right.

I see this a lot in my work with engineers and tech professionals. The people coming to me now are not struggling because they hate their jobs. They are struggling because the rules changed mid-game and nobody acknowledged that.

What actually changed

Before 2020, most people in tech had already built a life around remote-friendly work. Not fully remote, necessarily. But flexible enough that they could structure their days, manage their energy, and function like adults.

Then the pandemic happened. And the experiment ran for two to three years. People moved. Some left expensive cities. Some had children. Some finally got enough sleep for the first time in their careers.

Now they are being told to come back. Not to the office, they left in 2020. To a version that has been redesigned around hot-desking and open plan noise and back-to-back meetings that somehow still happen on Zoom, even though you are sitting in the building.

What it actually feels like day to day

You wake up earlier than your body wants to. You commute. You spend the day performing in a space that is not set up for the work you actually do.

You get home later than before. There is less time for food, exercise, the people you live with, and the quiet that used to buffer your evenings. You are tired in a way that sleep does not fix.

The weekends start feeling like recovery time rather than actual time off. Sunday evenings have that specific dread again. You recognize it. You do not say anything because everyone else seems to be coping.

That last part is the one that gets people into trouble.

The thing nobody says out loud

In my experience, engineers are very good at telling themselves they are fine. They troubleshoot. They adapt. They push through.

But there is a difference between adapting to a hard situation and slowly draining in one. The symptoms are quiet at first. Difficulty concentrating on work that used to feel easy. Irritability that you blame on traffic or noise. A flatness where motivation used to be.

You stop being curious. You stop caring about the interesting problems. You just want to get through the day.

That is not a personality shift. That is what depletion looks like in a technical person.

Why RTO specifically makes this worse

The thing about burnout from RTO policies is that it comes with a particular kind of resentment attached. Not just exhaustion. Resentment.

Because you are not being asked to do harder work. You are being asked to do the same work, in a worse environment, with less autonomy, and no real explanation that holds up. The business logic rarely makes sense when you look at it.

And you know it. You are an engineer. You can see through a poorly designed system. Watching yourself be forced to operate inside one, with no way to fix it, is its own kind of cognitive cost.

The feeling of having your life handed back to your employer without consent is not dramatic. It is accurate.

What this tends to lead to

Some people quit. Some stay and go quiet. Some start job searching while running on empty, which is one of the hardest positions to be in.

A lot of people start wondering if they are just not cut out for this anymore. They are. That is not the issue. The issue is that the conditions have changed significantly, and the body keeps counting even as the brain rationalizes.

What to do with this

The first useful step is getting an honest read on where you actually are right now. Not where you think you should be. Where are you?

There is a free burnout assessment at killburnout.com that takes about five minutes. It is not a quiz designed to sell you something. It is a tool to help you see the pattern more clearly, because sometimes the hardest part is just admitting that something is actually wrong.

If you are an engineer working through a forced RTO situation and you are feeling the edges of what I described here, that is worth paying attention to. Not next quarter. Now.

Originally published at https://killburnout.com.