Your best engineer says they're fine. Their resignation letter arrives two weeks later.

On-call burnout follows predictable patterns. Christina Maslach and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory mapped them decades ago. Yet most engineering leaders still rely on 1:1 vibes to catch it. Here's the problem: social desirability bias means people tell managers what they want to hear. Fear of appearing weak, culture of heroism, or simply forgetting what "fine" actually feels like.

In this talk, I'll connect burnout research to the signals hiding in your on-call data. After-hours pages correlate to sleep disruption. Consecutive on-call days block recovery. Incident severity drives emotional load. And critically: the same load that's routine for a veteran can break someone six months into their first rotation.

You'll leave with:
• A framework for detecting burnout before it becomes a resignation
• Why observed data beats asking, and when to combine both
• How to have evidence-based 1:1s that get past "I'm fine"