Burned Out by Design? — The Book by Rich Owen
The burnout book that IT professionals didn’t know they needed — until they read the first page.
If you’ve ever rebooted the server at 3am, smiled through an exec demo where the Wi-Fi chose violence, or answered “I’m fine” at a speed that would impress a hostage negotiator — this book was written for you.
Burned Out by Design? is part insider confession, part survival guide, and part the funniest book about professional suffering you’ll ever read. Written by veteran IT leader Rich Owen, it finally says the things the industry whispers but never puts in writing.
What’s Inside
- Why on-call culture creates adrenaline addiction, not resilience
- How perfectionism and imposter syndrome quietly eat IT professionals alive
- The real cost of always being the one who knows
- What happens when your identity becomes your job title
- Practical, honest strategies for setting boundaries without torching your career
- The funniest, most painfully accurate descriptions of meetings, ticket queues, vendor calls, and change requests ever committed to paper
Plus: a Burnout Self-Assessment, a ready-to-send Letter to Your Manager, and real anonymous stories from IT professionals who asked to remain unnamed — which tells you everything.
Get the Book on Amazon
Paperback
£9.99 — 324 pages
Kindle Edition
£5.99 — Available instantly
About the Author
Rich Owen is a technologist, writer, and long-time survivor of the modern IT machine. Having spent years around service desks, infrastructure, transformation programmes, late-night incidents, and the quiet pressure of always being the one who knows, he writes about the human side of technology work with honesty, humour, and hard-earned realism.
On this site, Rich also writes about gaming — particularly Elite Dangerous, Subnautica, and other titles where the pressure of survival, resource management, and split-second decisions feels surprisingly familiar.
For IT Professionals Who Game
If you work in IT and you game to decompress, you’re not alone. The same mind that thrives under incident pressure also finds flow in a cockpit in Elite Dangerous, or problem-solving survival mechanics in Subnautica. Read more about that crossover in The IT Professional’s Guide to Elite Dangerous.
“If rebooting fixed people the way it fixes servers, HR would have been replaced by a power button years ago.”
— Burned Out by Design?, Rich Owen
Book Details
| Title | Burned Out by Design?: How Modern IT Broke Our Brains and What to Do About It |
| Author | Rich Owen |
| Format | Paperback and Kindle |
| Pages | 324 |
| Published | 13 May 2026 |
| ISBN-13 | 979-8196274053 |
| Publisher | Independently published |
| Amazon Rating | 5.0 out of 5 |