> I have some highly engaged coworkers who are in the process of burning out.

This is a real problem. I'm consistently encouraging my team to take time off as and when they need it, and to make sure they're only working their contracted hours: everyone running themselves into the ground is the last thing we need.

Also, if everyone's running on the red line the whole time you actually lose the ability to plan effectively because you have no idea what the world looks like when everyone is simply doing a "normal", healthy, sustainable workload.

I highly recommend Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco.

Yeah, once the burnout reaches a certain point, they will disengage, and then their right in the middle of the pack of the leavers.

"they’re only still here because the entire company would crumble if they stopped."

Honestly thats a terrible reason to stay - unless you work at a charity.

I don’t know their situation, but it might be an illusion. Some people are great at making it seem like they’re doing a lot, when they actually just look very busy.

It’s more of a petard hoisting situation. Some people carved out an subject matter that could have been much smaller and now that some business conditions have changed, they have as much work to do as the next three groups combined. Those other groups, including mine, only have so much work because they’ve taken the message to delegate incorrectly, and instead of an orderly handoff starting three years ago, it’s now rushed because it’s load shedding.

Add to the middle of this that we have deals or licenses running out and have decided that on top of everything else we should save some money too. The opportunity costs are probably killing us. But to keep them from completely killing us, other people are still cranking out major features including architectural changes, so we have those disruptions hitting too. It’s chaos.