Burnout doesn't announce itself. For Stephen Townsend, SRE team lead and host of the Slight Reliability podcast, it crept in over months of mounting pressure on a massive transformation program, and announced itself overnight with an inability to sleep.

In this episode, Stephen shares his personal burnout story with rare honesty: the physical symptoms he dismissed, the org structure that left him without autonomy, and the full year it took to recover.

But this isn't just a cautionary tale. Stephen brings a practitioner's eye to what the industry can actually do differently, from optimal team sizes and slack time to compassionate leadership and the org design changes that reduce burnout risk before it becomes a crisis.