It’s the middle of the night and you’re awakened by a phone call. What could it be? You’re not on-call this week. You glance at the caller-ID and see that it’s a teammate who has been struggling at work. Maybe it’s a serious outage and they’re escalating it to you? You answer the call to discover your teammate is having a mental health crisis. What do you do?

Late one night in 2016, this happened to me. It left me terrified and motivated me to get certified in mental health first aid.

With the constant demand to build systems rapidly with more resiliency and less budget, compounded with on-call support duties and a seemingly endless stream of alerts, it’s no wonder that burnout has become a serious problem within the tech industry.

In this session, I’ll share ways that you can identify burnout and action steps to prevent yourself from burning out. But more importantly, because we are a DevOps community, I’ll share a framework from mental health first aid that will help you identify, help and support your teammates and friends experiencing burnout and mental health issues.