A Survey Reveals That Employees In The Cybersecurity Field Are Exposing Businesses To Potential Harm Due To Burnout

Workers across multiple industries are complaining of burnout, which could potentially have detrimental effects on their output, and will definitely have detrimental effects on their mental health.

I can already hear some 50+ year old businessman in the background, snidely remarking about how he didn’t ever get burnout because his generation worked hard and got what they earned, yada yada, add a stock comment about spending less, saving more, and so on. You probably get the point since, like most people in their 30’s working or looking for jobs, this reaction from overgrown snobs who had an easier marketplace and cheaper living costs to work with is far too common. Perhaps this doesn’t mean much, coming from a random tech article, but allow me to say this: your burnout, your stress, and all associated feelings are valid. Earning a living is quite the struggle, no doubt, and doing it in such an unfriendly, hypercompetitive environment is even harder. We are the children of late stage capitalism, reared on the idea that working hard will result in easier living. However, that simply isn’t the case, and we’ve all been therefore consigned to a strict work ethic that, for the most part, companies and businesses simply aren’t willing to accommodate for.

A report, entitled “The Burnout Breach”, from the developers of 1Password decided to take a look at burnout, and how it affects one’s output. The goal here, hopefully, is to establish a steady decline in effectivity and productivity with one’s simultaneously increased workload and work hours, proving that an overworked worker does not make for an efficient one as well. Of course, the mere fact that workers are suffering burnout should be enough for our corporate overlords to keep things down for a bit. However, such individuals have never really listened to anything beyond the sounds of their own profit returns, and that’s the only language they’ll ever understand.

The Burnout Breach entails a survey of 2,500 working adult individuals, all from the cybersecurity industry, with the intentions of tracking how their burnout leads to potential security breaches for businesses large and small. It turns out that trends such as remote working, anti-work ethic spreading due to collective post-COVID exhaustion, and worsening behavior from the likes of managers are leading to businesses and like being much more exposed to cybersecurity threats.

Over 80% of the security professionals are feeling overworked, which is leading to an overall increase in inadvisable work office practices. For example, many individuals admit to using software that helps ease their overall workload, even if the end result may not be of the same quality that employers expect. 64% of the sample population stated that they were either looking for a new job, or were looking to quit altogether and slum it out for a while. Which, while being a terrible position to go to from having a stable job, is understandable. Gen X and millennials are currently going through what is being referred to as the Great Resignation; a phrase that perfectly sums up both the action of resigning, as well as the mindset that such individuals have developed.


The current system that businesses adhere to essentially have owners earning either the exact same amount that they started out with, or higher. Which is fine, sure, but it comes at the expense of the workforce getting supplied a workload that only keeps piling higher and higher. When owners and employers won’t make the necessary budget cuts (i.e. their salaries) in order to account for hiring more personnel, this author sees no way that things will get better in the coming times.

Read next: HackerOne releases its ethical hacking security report for the year 2021
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