Maril Vernon: 0:15

Welcome back to the another episode of The Cyber Queens Podcast. We are your hosts, Maril, Erika, and Nathalie. I'm Maril Vernon, everything red team and offensive.

Erika Eakins: 0:24

I'm Erika Eakins, your technical salesperson.

Nathalie Baker: 0:27

And I'm Nathalie Baker, all things blue team and defensive security.

Maril Vernon: 0:32

Yes, today we are talking about super hot topic, especially in tech right now. We're talking about mental health in tech. Mental health awareness is really big in our industry right now. ADHD awareness month is coming up, so we wanna take this opportunity to touch on a few things affecting mental health in tech and how it affects us as cyber professionals and the cyber war at large. Burnout is really big in our industry. Employee turnovers really high. We don't have enough professionals as it is, and so many professionals are leaving the industry. They're like, "Screw this. I'm over it. I'm burned out, I'm done. I'm gonna go farm in Montana for the rest of my days," and it makes me so sad. I'm like, "No, don't leave. We need you. Come back. Don't leave me here by myself." Yeah, but it's true. So mental health, big issue in our industry. I guarantee we all know someone that we've seen suffer from burnout. I recently just took before we launched this podcast, a giant, one year hiatus from social media. Everyone was like, "Where did you go? You were posting all this great content and then you disappeared for year." And I was like, "Yep. I was drinking from too many fire hoses at once. I got a little overwhelmed. I hibernated and went into my little hidey hole, and solved all my problems. Then I came back out with the podcast."

Erika Eakins: 1:46

We're glad you're back.

Maril Vernon: 1:48

Me too. Everyone's like, "Are you back for real?" I'm like, "I'm back for real." They're like, "Are you sure? I'm like, I'm sure I'm good now. That was a dark period."

Nathalie Baker: 1:53

But it gets exhausting after a while, it gets so exhausting, so fast, and I feel that people who are have neurodiverency. So people with ADHD, people with Autism, we have so many more sensors that we're acutely in tune with that it causes us more stress and it takes more of our energy away. The more you're dealing with that for a prolonged time, you can only withstand it for so long before you burn out. Three days ago, I literally just burnt out and I slept 21 out of 24 hours in a day.

Maril Vernon: 2:25

Yeah. We'll just hit a wall.

Erika Eakins: 2:28

I think I go through that sleeping for 24 hours, once a month at this point, because I'm in my burnout. I'm just gonna tell everybody I'm horrible, I don't take time off. I'm in sales, especially around month-end, quarter-end, year-end. I know better. I've actually been in the field 10 plus years and I know that I need to stop and take a break. So what's happening is my body is shutting down once every four weeks and I sleep literally from a Wednesday night, all the way till Friday morning. I didn't even get out of bed this past Thursday, and I was supposed to be working. I had to take time off. I have unlimited PTO and I've always had it in the tech companies I've worked for, but that doesn't mean that I take a whole bunch of time off. I'm not a very good example of somebody who has a work life balance because I'm a single mother. This is my only income. If a customer emails me at two in the morning and I hear my phone, which I did learn to put on Do Not Disturb, I will answer. That is not good because my body is starting to shut down. I'm getting older. I cannot handle this anymore.

Maril Vernon: 3:39

Yeah. I will say I used to have a very incorrect philosophy when it came to work life balance because I'm the kind of person who's a workaholic. I'm a classic workaholic personality. I want to eat, sleep, and breathe my work, and then I get off work and I wanna do some more extracurricular reading and some more podcasts and some more bug bounty hunting and all these things, it all feeds back into my job. So actually when I was working at Zoom my manager was like, "you're the only one on the team of eight people who hasn't put in to take the last two weeks of the year off." I'm like, "Yeah." He's like, "we have unlimited PTO." I was like,"I know." He's like, "why aren't you doing it?" I was like, "Because I don't need it. I feel bad, I'm not gonna take time off that I don't need." He's like, "I really think you should take it. No one else will be here." I was like, " Now I do." I'm gonna do it this year. That was really good for me and my family. It was so great to recharge, to step away, to come back, if they told us, "You have a week to get a red team up off the ground." We're like, "Cool! We're all for it. Fine." I always like to say I'm a workaholic in recovery. I'm constantly trying to redefine and give myself grace. There was a day, two weeks ago where I just told my team "I cleared my calendar. Mental health day, I'm walking away. I suggest you all walk away as well." They were like, "Okay, great!"

Erika Eakins: 4:47

Nice.

Maril Vernon: 4:47

Because in tech, if you don't make time for your wellness, you will be forced to make time for your illness. Don't let it be at the point where you're burned out and you're sitting in your burnout like Erika, or you hit your burnout wall like me and Nathalie. Then you just disappear for a year and then you have to re-emerge and rebuild your brand because it became too much.

Erika Eakins: 5:04

In cyber, if you're burned out, you're gonna make mistakes. And then guess what happens? You're gonna be in trouble at work because, whoops, you got ransomware because somebody miscalculated something or didn't configure something properly. So Gen-Z, I know you guys will work in if you love something, but I know that you will not put up with not having a work/life balance. Employers need to understand that too, because they say that they don't make you feel bad, but they do. Let's just be honest. Employers are like, "Okay. Are you sure? Do you really need it? Are you sure?" Nathalie Baker: From the blue team side of know when an attack's going to happen. You never know when a mass vulnerability is going to drop, and you never know when you need to have the reserves of the energy already there ready to pick up and go. For a year straight, I was living off of three hours of sleep a night. I had so much anxiety about, "Oh my God, what happens if we get breached? Oh my God, what happens if I don't hear my phone going off when I'm on call?"

Maril Vernon: 6:15

And there's a breach.

Nathalie Baker: 6:17

I'm just sitting there like, "Oh, I can't sleep. I can't sleep. I can't sleep." Then I fall asleep at three o'clock and I'm up by six.

Maril Vernon: 6:25

I feel like everybody listening to this episode right now, who's already working in cyber are friends and peers are having Log4J PTSD flashbacks.

Nathalie Baker: 6:32

Oh my God, yes!

Maril Vernon: 6:33

I don't think anyone slept for two weeks. I think they popped up cots in the SOC. I don't think anyone actually left the building.

Nathalie Baker: 6:41

Two months where it was horrible. I did not sleep for two months.

Maril Vernon: 6:45

If I was a blue teamer, I would constantly be in fight or flight response mode. My nervous system would just be activated all the time and I would be like, "I can't."

Nathalie Baker: 6:55

That's how it feels, and you're just paralyzed by it. Then you're stressed and at a certain point you're like, something's gotta give.

Maril Vernon: 7:04

Something's gotta give. You know what? Optimize your job, document your butt off, automate all the things you can automate, train your people to be able to back you up so you can step the frick away from the computer for a few days. Recharge your batteries and come back and be better. Because I guarantee if everyone's like, "Nathalie, did you put that rule in the firewall," she's like, "Yeah." and then they're like, "Oh, we messed up the priority. It was 250, it should have been number 5. That's why that packet got through." Erika's right, that's what mistakes happen.

Erika Eakins: 7:33

For sales people, I don't care who you are, end-of-quarter, end-of-year, end of fiscal year, you are not taking time off. You are not walking away from your phone because that PO is coming, it's coming.

Maril Vernon: 7:45

I feel like Erika constantly has a constant deadline."Oh, it's the end of the month.""It's a new month, but end of the month is in three weeks." Really it's like I have three weeks and it's end of the month, and then it's the end of the month again, and then it's end of the quarter, and then three quarters later it's the end of the year. And it's like you never get a break.

Erika Eakins: 8:03

You really have to love sales. And it's literally not on my timeline. The vendors, we wanna think it's on our timeline, but really our customers run our lives and they know that, and they take advantage of it. When you have good customers and you actually are, act like a human, that won't happen to you. You have the vendors, they're like, "We have order processing all the way through midnight on the last business day of the month. You guys get your POS in!" You're like, "I need to sleep. I'm tired."

Maril Vernon: 8:28

Why?

Erika Eakins: 8:29

Why? But that's when you have to step away..

Nathalie Baker: 8:31

Then you're making mistakes with numbers and money.

Erika Eakins: 8:35

Yes.

Maril Vernon: 8:35

You're like, "Oh, you didn't order 12 of these?""No, we ordered one.""Oops. I fat fingered that in there."

Erika Eakins: 8:40

Especially if there's people selling hardware. I sell software right now. If you're selling hardware, everything is like backlogged, six months. So if you only order one and you're supposed to get 12, that's another problem in itself. So burnout is a thing in sales.

Maril Vernon: 8:55

Everywhere.

Erika Eakins: 8:56

It's a burnout everywhere and Gen-Zers have to, You guys stick to your ground and get your work life balance. Because us millennials, I'm just gonna say it, we're stupid. We just work and work, and then we just wanna fall off a cliff because we can't take it anymore or disappear for a year like Maril said. Employers, this is not gonna happen because this generation, they're here and the generation behind them, they're here too. They're just gonna shut off all their technology and go to sleep or go run in the mountains or something like that. And that's why the millennials, that's why they abused us because we allow it.

Nathalie Baker: 9:32

I find it so interesting that now there's a hashtag of#QuietQuitting and it's like literally that's just somebody prioritizing their mental health over work. And there's nothing wrong with that. Why is that? Like the fact that there's a hashtag built around it. To me that feels like there should be a hashtag about like toxic leadership or toxic culture because that sounds like toxicity of not prioritizing somebody's mental health because if they're not mentally well, they can't do their best work for you.

Maril Vernon: 10:04

Yeah. For those of you who aren't aware,#QuietQuitting is this new trend that's been given a hashtag where people are scaling back and doing basically the bare minimum of their job. They're showing up every day, their butts in a chair, they're typing on the keyboard, they're sending emails or whatever, but they're not really doing anything innovative or new or above and beyond. They're just doing the bare minimum. And this has been called quiet quitting because it's like when people give up and they can't really quit cause they need a paycheck, so they. Do the minimum to earn their paycheck. But Nathalie's right. When I see an employee doing that, my first thought isn't that employee's slacking off. My first thought is, "what is going on with you that like you don't have the energy that you're suddenly like you used to be up here. Now you're down here. Don't get me wrong, I don't want you to think this up here is the baseline for your work performance. I don't expect this from you all the time, but is something up? Is something okay? Is it at home stuff? Do you need a week off? Do you, what can we do to support you? Do you need stuff taken off your plate because you've been doing too much for too long and burning the candle at both ends?" Like I took a very different mindset when I saw quiet quitting and I was like, I'm just gonna sit over here and watch because I don't wanna anger the masses and they'll get out there pitch forks at me because I'm a red teamer and I don't get to speak about work/life balance.

Erika Eakins: 11:12

I feel like we're moving backwards though. Like companies are moving backwards. Mental health became a thing. I'm gonna say it was a thing that comes- Maril Vernon: -it was a trend. It was like a trend. And now you are not allowed to have emotions. You're not allowed to have mental health days. As cyber professionals, we need to fight back. I'm not saying, fight as in like protest and scream and quit our jobs, but we need to understand. Don't get your pitch forks out. We need to take a stance because the gen Zers, the ones that we want to come into cyber, you guys and ladies will not take, deal with this. I feel like the companies are just giving. They don't give a crap anymore. We're going backwards when we should be moving forward. And that's why this quiet quitting thing exists because, okay, you give me my employee assistance programs a part of my benefits, but yet I can't take a mental health day because you say I'm weak if I do that.

Maril Vernon: 12:10

You know what? They won't even do that. And it, to me, this is like quiet shaming. The quiet quitting thing is management subtly shaming you. Because they won't say things like, "Oh, you're a piece of crap if you don't stay late." What they'll do is like, "Can't you just stay and help the team? Can't you just catch us up?" Like when they want you to do the work of two people, they'll like, "Oh, so and so is out. Do you think you could just help us pick up the slack just a little?" Before you know it, you've given them an inch. You're like, "Sure. I'm willing to do the work of two people while he's gone." He's back now, but he's so inundated. Do you think you could just help us out a little longer? Do it for the team. Help us reach the bottom line. Help us, help the team. And you, us millennials, because we watched our boomer and Gen-X parents kill themselves for their job. We'll fall in the sword. Like I'll say that we're the glue in the middle. Like we're not doing what our parents did. Where my mom will sign off of work and work for three more hours. And I'm like, "What are you doing?" And she's like, "I clocked out, but like I have three more hours of work I didn't get done." I'm like, "Then it didn't get done in the work day. And your job responsibilities are no longer realistic to the constraints of your time, which is a resource. Sign off, put it away." We don't do that, but we will fall on that sword and we'll give you inches and inches until we've given you a mile and we don't even realize it. And then we hit a wall. But Gen Z will not. Gen Z is like, "ah, you pay me to do this job and if you want me to do this person's responsibilities as well, that's two people. So I should be earning two salaries or hire another person." When it's five, they close the laptop and they get up and they leave.

Erika Eakins: 13:41

Paying the cell phone bill. Giving us a laptop and a computer. Working from home is great. I've worked from home since 2011. I love it. That's another topic, but I feel like they're like, "Here you go. Here's your phone and your laptop and you are expected to be reachable outside of business hours."

Maril Vernon: 14:00

24/ 7.

Erika Eakins: 14:00

Cause they don't exist. I have customers that have called me in the past, not now, but in the past they have called me when they had an outage. I used to sell network security. I'm on the software side of things now, cloud. They would call me at like two in the morning if they had an outage. I'm not your tech support, you call.

Maril Vernon: 14:18

I'm not the outage person!

Erika Eakins: 14:20

You pay for premium support, why are you calling me? Oh, because your tech people , your support people are not answering.

Maril Vernon: 14:29

Because you're my point of contact and I didn't read the documentation. I don't know who to call.

Erika Eakins: 14:33

And I tell them, Call me no matter what. I don't care. I'm there for you.

Maril Vernon: 14:37

But we shouldn't do that.

Erika Eakins: 14:38

But we shouldn't because my customers wouldn't want me to do that to them. I love ya customers. You guys are great. But it's the mindset. And somebody told me this a long time ago, this was somebody in my family who's older, a boomer"you have a laptop and a phone. What's to stop them from thinking that, you don't have to work till 10:00 PM? They'll call you all hours of the night." And I'm like, "Nah, I just won't answer." Wrong! I do answer. I get calls late at night and here we are.

Maril Vernon: 15:07

And let's talk about the SLAs, like the SLAs people put on you for answering their text or their call or their email. When people send me an email, you have just told me that is a passive, like I can get back to you in my time when my cycles permit. Because you emailed me. It's not like you pinged me on slack or you texted me or you called me. And when people text you, when your friends and family text you they are like, "why don't you respond to my text?""Cause it's a text. You sent it to me, which means I can read and respond in my own time." But people today expect instant gratification. They expect you to get back to them immediately. Because they sent it to you and they want an answer now. And I'm like, Ooh, no. That's not good for my mental health. Let's talk about some signs of burnout. How do you guys recognize in yourself when you're starting to burnout?

Nathalie Baker: 15:59

I've found that I recognize it in other people before I'll recognize it in myself. And honestly, I, when I was manager, running a team, I kept very good eye on my team to make sure that they weren't burning out and they weren't working upteen hours, after work, like I had to. I stood up second shift for our SOC. So I was working 16 hour days, but nobody else was working those 16 hour days because I didn't want anybody else burning out. But then I had to take that look at myself and say, "Okay, now I'm burning out and what kind of example am I setting for my people if I'm burnt out and can't recognize burnout in myself?"

Maril Vernon: 16:40

This is the standard, this is what I expect of you because it's what I do to myself, which if I saw my manager doing that when I was marketing and I quit.

Erika Eakins: 16:49

Wow.

Nathalie Baker: 16:50

Yeah, so lack of energy and extremes of activity. So some days I'm super overproductive and other days I'm like, "what did I do today? Did I do anything other than look at emails all day?" When I start to notice that, I think, Okay, maybe it's time to take a PTO day. Maybe it's time to take a day off and recoup and get a little bit of extra sleep or something.

Maril Vernon: 17:13

It's like reading a book when you realize you've read the same line five times and you haven't moved on and you don't remember what that lines, you're like time to close the book and take a break. What about you Erika?

Erika Eakins: 17:23

I notice that I'm starting to get burnt out when I get really irritable. Cause typically I'm a happy person. I'm, chipper. Outside of work, that's a different story. But I, when I'm irritable and I just, everything is annoying me, that's when I know I'm burnt out. Like right now, I'm just irritable. Then the problem where I realize it is because I start taking it out on my kids and that is not something I should do. Because everything they will do, annoys me. And that's how I know that it's work is affecting me. So that's when I take a step back and sleep for 48 hours.. Maril Vernon: Yeah, I've been there. For me, it's that I notice that I stop, taking on the collaborations and reaching out for new things and like I stop holding as many meetings. I start to kind of retreat into my hidey hole. I am very low on energy. I don't even have the energy to attend this standup, or I don't even have to speak, like, I'll be listening to a meeting and not taking anything in. When I can't remember what we just discussed or where my projects are at and I have to go back and reference notes six times, I'm like, I've got too much going on. I'm this close to burning out if I don't stop. So, fatigue, irritability, low energy, overwhelmed, scatterbrainedness, these are all signs that maybe you need a day or two off. If you have unlimited PTO, I know the unlimited PTO debate is a hot one. We're gonna do that in its own episode. I'm personally a fan. I've always had managers encourage me to use it. I've seen my teammates use it, which makes me feel comfortable using it. We all use it pretty frequently and no one gets on each other like,"Oh wow, didn't you just take PTO? Why are you taking more?" As long as our job is getting done, no one really cares. I know it's not the case everywhere but I'm a fan because it enables me to not need to rack up my mental health days before I can take them. I can take them in the moment if I need to. I can plan out my vacation at the end of the year with my family. So I'm a pretty big fan. For some of you. I know unlimited PTO adds to your stress. Sorry. Sorry if that's anyone listening or anyone here, but so some signs. All right, let's get into the strategies. So how do you guys, whether you are able to proactively recognize you're about to burn out or whether you just realized I must be burnt out. I've hit that wall, I've hit that low point. I'm in the pit of despair. What are some strategies for coping when you're in it and for coping to avoid it? Let's do both.

Nathalie Baker: 19:45

To avoid it, I personally just made all of my apps that have like my work email, my work messages between our teams and all that, and made it super hard to find them. I would hide them on my phone just so I couldn't find those apps right away. I would actually have to manually go and search for them. Because then I wasn't always looking at my email and I wasn't using my native email apps either.

Maril Vernon: 20:08

Stress checking.

Nathalie Baker: 20:09

Exactly. So it was just a matter of I actually had to go and make that extra step. Usually another good coping technique before I burn out is I like to, if I get a good exercise and solid sleep. Once I'm burnt out, I have to reregulate my sleep schedule, which means that I'm sleeping for almost an entire day, and then I have to start to reregulate it to where I'm sleeping during the evenings and not staying up too late at night, not being two o'clock in the morning, falling asleep and waking back up at five. That's personally what I do is I try to keep my sleep schedule regulated and then exercising regularly along with just hiding the apps so that I actually have to manually go and find them.

Maril Vernon: 20:55

That's a great strategy. I do the same thing. I put all my work apps in a folder and if I'm on PTO, I turn off the notification badge for that folder. I don't wanna see any of the little numbers racking up. Cause if I see 'em, I'll freak out and check 'em. I won't even respond, I'm just gonna read it like leave you on read. I'm so rude. Erika, you're next?

Erika Eakins: 21:13

Hey, I leave people on read all the time. It's some people that read receipt is off, but I'm just saying. So how do I identify it and how do I avoid it? When I see it coming for me burnout, I will typically up my workouts, whether it's weight training, cardio, I'll get out of the house more and I'll just become more active than normal. And then how do I recover from it? So for me, I stop taking my ADHD medication and this is not a good strategy for people, but for me I stop taking my ADHD medicine and I force myself to get refocused. And then once I'm able to get refocused it, sometimes it takes days, sometimes it's hours, sometimes it's a week. It forces me to work on one thing at a time. So I'll get back on my ADHD medication and then I'm refocused. Does that make sense?

Nathalie Baker: 22:11

It's actually called taking a vacation from your medication, which there's actually a term for it. And it's very widely recommended for people who are medicated for ADHD to do that because of the different side effects of your medication.

Erika Eakins: 22:28

Like I said, that's not a strategy for everybody, but I actually didn't identify the taking a vacation from your medication until, five months ago. I realized it helps me, if I come off of my Adderall, it allows me to just be scatterbrained. Try to get it in check on my own, and then I'll go back on it and by the time I'm back on, I'm focused at that point.

Maril Vernon: 22:55

It's kinda like a refi, like Erika and I both train. It's like a refi for your body, right? Deplete, reset, reset to your body's natural chemistry and then get back on the train. I get that. For me personally it's very hard to see burnout coming. I can almost never anticipate it before I'm in it. Because I have a workaholic personality, but because I know that I try naturally, I'm like, Nathalie, I'll oscillate between periods of extreme productivity and then periods of Extreme non, like there are morning, I like to say there are days I wake up and rearrange my entire apartment and do my whole

weekend's worth of cleaning by 10: 23:24

00 AM and there are weekends where I do nothing but binge watch TV and fold not one single piece of laundry. There is no in between. I try to regulate myself. If I could do 12 things in a day, I try to force myself to like only do three productive things every few days and give myself, and then I'm like,"Yeah, but I could be doing more today. I'm like, Yeah, then use that time to relax." If you got the three priorities done then you can relax. Everything else is just bonus, it's just gravy. So if you've got your three value added items done at work, and you have two hours to answer emails or just catch up on slacks or whatever, then do that. I give myself the grace to not feel like I need to be highly productive all the time because everyone else's baseline is here and mine for myself is up here and that's when I'll burn out. So I do try to regulate, give myself a baseline to adhere to, even though I could be doing more. And if there are days that I do less, I give myself that grace because I'm normally a highly productive person. I don't mentally guilt myself that like, you could be doing more and you're not earning your paycheck. I'm like, I'm earning my paycheck. Everything is fine. When I'm in it, gosh, it is so hard. I'm one of those people who's not very naturally EQ inclined either. So when I'm having an extreme emotion, I don't always know how to deal with it because I prefer to just not be emotional. But you can't avoid it as a human , sadly. So they tell me. So when I'm in extreme burnout, it's the same thing. It's so hard for me to pull myself out of it. Like it takes a long time. I have to like literally do what Nathalie said, like sleep for four straight days. Just eat foods I enjoy, not eat my healthy food. I have to do things that literally physically up my serotonin and like my my happy hormone levels to try and fake it till I make it. Once I have enough energy, I can fake it. Like put on a good attitude today, even if the day sucks just try and get through the day with on a positive note. I'll recognize that I've come out of it when I kind of wanna start creating again. Like all of my creativity goes away. I couldn't brand a thing if I wanted to. I couldn't create a reel if I wanted to. I couldn't create a blog post if I wanted to. When I'm burned out and when I'm not, I recognize that like all the ideas start flowing again and I wanna turn out stuff. Definitely better to avoid, than to find yourself in the depth.

Erika Eakins: 25:26

It is hard though.

Nathalie Baker: 25:27

I think that we all experience the exhaustion of it because it's just so exhausting and that's why you don't have the ability, mental ability, cognitive ability to create and to make new things, and create new ideas and to innovate because you're so exhausted and it's just completely depleting and you're just like,"Oh my God, can I go to sleep yet? I just woke up, but can I go back to bed now?"

Erika Eakins: 25:53

I've done that.

Maril Vernon: 25:54

I don't even have the energy to put on pants today. As info sec pros, like Erika's working her butt off and she's gonna start studying for Sec+ in her spare time. As info sec pros to try and stay on top of our industry it's not enough to make it here. You have to work to stay here just like a pop artist. You have to constantly be learning something new, studying something new, furthering yourself, developing yourself in some way, like contributing to the community, contributing to open source, contributing to something. So like we'll finish our jobs and then open a book about our job and then do some bug bounty about our job, and then write a blog post about all the work we just did about our job. We kinda tend to eat, sleep, and breathe our jobs. No, we do as Info sec pros, we tend to eat, sleep, and breathe our jobs, literally. We shouldn't do that. Give yourself a Friday or give yourself a day of the week where like absolutely nothing in InfoSec related gets done.

Erika Eakins: 26:45

As we wrap up, we're coming to the end of this, our time here, but companies need to start giving mental health days and encouraging it. I cannot stand the fact that I see companies just shaming you like we talked about a little bit. But I think, for the Gen Zers that are coming into the industry, talk about that in your interviews. Vet that out, see if it's important, and don't just ask the question. Make sure that they can give you how they are able to support your mental health.

Maril Vernon: 27:16

I literally was very upfront, I said I'm a single mom. The most important thing to me is that if I had to go to a dentist appointment, if I have to pick a kid up early, because she's sick from school, if I have to pivot during my day that I have the grace to do that without feeling bad or feeling like I'm gonna lose my job. Like Amber's reel, I'm getting fired. I'm getting fired. I'm definitely getting fired. I was like, I don't wanna have that sort of damn please hanging over me the whole time. I can't. And they're like, Absolutely not. Even our co-founder, our founder, will take the day off and go to his son's soccer game two hours away. Like, you're absolutely free to do that. And I was like, Beautiful. It's one of those things where it feels scary to be honest, but it's like a relationship. Like just be honest with what you want. You're 10 times more likely to get it.

Erika Eakins: 27:59

And in tech, you will find those companies. If it's not the one, the person you're sitting in front of, the company you're interviewing with, there's gonna be somebody else who, allows those mental health days. We're the innovators, tech, it's where you wanna be, you'll find it. So keep looking. Yeah. Don't give.. Maril Vernon: That might I might ask you to go again. So final takeaways, ladies, mental health, burnout in tech, recovery strategies. If there's anything you want to leave the audience with today, what would it be?

Nathalie Baker: 28:30

Don't work your life away. You only have so much of your life to live. So while you wanna be productive during the hours that you are actually dedicating to work. But after work, step away from it. Go do something for you and enjoy the rest of your day.

Maril Vernon: 28:46

Louder. Oh my God. Louder.

Nathalie Baker: 28:48

That's it.

Erika Eakins: 28:50

My final takeaway is what I've mentioned, throughout the episode, if you are sitting in front of somebody interviewing and they cannot give you examples or something to back up that they support mental health, keep looking. Tech is innovative. You're coming to this industry because it's gonna, suit your needs. Just keep looking.

Maril Vernon: 29:12

Yeah. And I know it can be hard, like that can be a burnout of its own that the job search burn out and wanting to give up the fight. But don't, That's a great one. Mine is going to be don't shame others. You never know what someone else is going through. Just because someone is usually highly productive and they're not, don't suddenly think that they're a slacker. Don't silently shame people for establishing their boundaries and sticking to them. That's like trending backwards like Erika said. And just the same if you recognize in yourself that you're tailoring way back, or like you notice a change in yourself and your motivations and your work performance, try to identify why and be honest about why and see what you could do to proactively get yourself out of it before you're like stuck there. If you realize you're stuck there often, ask yourself why. Maybe tech is not right for you. Maybe a different function of tech is what you need. Maybe you've burned out on your job and you just need a new role, a fresh landscape, a fresh function to revitalize, your passion for it. There are so many places to go. We literally have people switching from, hacking into GRC from privacy into other things. Out of hacking into film production, if you're Alyssa Knight. It's absolutely okay to take on new things and reinvent yourself. And that's all part of your mental health too. But put the tech down, walk away from it. The tech will still be there on Monday. Absolutely try to professionally develop yourself and do the projects that fire you up. But if they're not firing you up, figure out why and do something that does. All right. Thank you so much for hanging out with us this week that has been mental health and burnout in tech. We, The Cyber Queens, love you. We hope you go out and succeed. If there's any questions, comments, or concerns we can address, please send them to us. We're super open. We respond to each one personally. Never forget that we love you. Never forget that we're here and we're on your side and we can't wait to see you here with us.