Burnout in cybersecurity isn’t just about long hours — it’s about impossible expectations, broken incentives, and a system built to fail the people it relies on.
Let’s stop pretending burnout in cybersecurity is some unfortunate byproduct of hard work. It’s not. Burnout is baked into the job description — the inevitable outcome of being asked to solve unsolvable problems while navigating underfunded teams, dysfunctional org charts, vague compliance rules, and nonexistent career paths. And it’s getting worse.
Security professionals don’t just fight threats. They fight inertia. Every day, we operate in an environment where attack surfaces expand faster than we can patch them, adversaries innovate more quickly than we can respond, and the pressure to “just keep things secure” never lets up. But the real kicker? We’re expected to do all this in systems that aren’t built to support it — and often actively get in the way.
The market incentivizes insecurity
The foundational issue is structural: security doesn’t generate revenue. And in a competitive market, anything that doesn’t directly drive growth is often viewed as a drag on performance. In theory, boards know security matters — they read the headlines too — but when everyone else is skating by with just enough to pass an audit, going beyond that can feel like a strategic risk.
So teams get stretched thin. Budgets get cut. And CISOs are left managing risk with less visibility, fewer tools, and mounting expectations. According to the __ISACA State of Cybersecurity 2024__report, 57% of respondents consider their cybersecurity teams understaffed, while 45% believe that hiring and retention challenges have worsened over the past five years.
Responsibility without power
Still, underfunding is just one part of the story. Security teams are routinely held responsible for outcomes they don’t control. They’re expected to enforce policies — MFA, access control, patching, secure coding practices — but often lack the authority to compel compliance from other departments. Developers push back, marketing doesn’t want friction, sales needs that questionable integration to close the deal. Even at places like Google,
And when something breaks? The blame lands squarely on security’s shoulders. That mismatch — between accountability and control — creates a uniquely frustrating experience. It’s one thing to fail because you made a bad call. It’s another to be set up to fail because the org won’t let you succeed.
Regulatory race that runs in circles
Then there’s compliance: the security-adjacent treadmill that never stops. For those in governance or regulatory roles, burnout doesn’t come from incident response or adversarial pressure — it comes from playing a game where the rules change constantly and the win conditions are vague.
Security teams often spend more energy chasing paperwork than improving their actual security posture. Regulatory requirements shift, and implementation guidance lags behind. Teams scramble to meet new rules, often at the expense of meaningful controls. The result is what one colleague once called “checkbox engineering” — the illusion of progress with none of the payoff.
And unlike a technical vulnerability, you can’t patch regulatory ambiguity. You just keep grinding.
Nowhere to go but out
Even for those who still love the craft, burnout creeps in from another angle: stagnation. Cybersecurity attracts smart, motivated people — tinkerers, problem-solvers, perpetual learners. But career paths in the industry often don’t keep up.
CISO is still perceived as the peak, but too often it’s a lonely, politically fraught position — more liability sponge than strategic leader. It’s no accident that some in the field joke that CISO stands for Career Is Surely Over. And for those who don’t make it to that tier, the options narrow quickly. You specialize, you plateau, and before long, you’re fighting modern threats with tools from five years ago because procurement won’t approve the new ones.
When you pair high ambition with low mobility, burnout isn’t just likely — it’s guaranteed.
Burnout isn’t a personal problem — it’s a design flaw
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about individual resilience. It’s not about better breathing exercises or “wellness” Slack channels. Burnout in cybersecurity is a systemic issue rooted in how organizations fund, structure, and value security work. It reflects the broader failure to integrate security into business strategy instead of treating it as a reactive cost.
If we want to retain top talent — or, frankly, just keep the lights on — we need to start addressing the structural contradictions that create burnout in the first place. That means giving security teams real authority, investing in long-term capability building, and aligning incentives so that security isn’t the first thing cut when margins tighten.
Until then, we’ll keep losing smart people to an industry that asks too much, gives too little, and