Engineer's cynicism is a symptom, not a personality

I’m almost certain that you know the following engineer I’m depicting.

Two years ago, they were the one pushing for better practices. They mentored juniors. They wrote documentation nobody asked for. In design reviews, they asked the annoying-but-useful questions.

Now they roll their eyes in meetings. Every new initiative gets “we’ve tried this before”, code reviews have become terse. They skip the team events. When you ask how they’re doing, you get “fine” in a tone that means anything but.

The team has started working around them. Someone described them as “negative” in a skip-level. There’s talk about culture fit.

Here’s what I’ve learned: what you’re seeing isn’t a personality trait. It’s a symptom. And if you don’t recognize it, you’ll lose them. Or worse, you’ll manage them out for a problem that was never theirs to begin with.

These explanations are convenient. They locate the problem within the person, which means the solution is also within the person: coach them on attitude, give feedback on positivity, or eventually manage them out. The organization remains blameless.

But guess what: people don’t become cynical in a vacuum. Cynicism is an adaptation. It’s what happens when someone who cared deeply learns, through repeated experience, that caring hurts.

The engineer who’s dismissive about the new roadmap? They’ve probably watched three previous roadmaps get abandoned. Who shoots down the reorg proposal? They’ve lived through four reorgs that solved nothing. The one who stopped mentoring? They watched their mentees get laid off.

Most people think burnout means exhaustion. You work too hard, you get tired, you burn out. Simple.

Christina Maslach, the researcher who literally wrote the inventory we use to measure burnout, found something different. Burnout has three components, and they don’t arrive all at once:

The order matters. Cynicism typically appears before exhaustion, not after. By the time someone is visibly tired and struggling, they’ve often been burning out for months. The cynicism you noticed? That was the early warning you missed.

This is why “functional but empty” is such an accurate description of mid-stage burnout. The person is still shipping. They’re hitting their metrics. From the outside, everything looks fine, maybe just a bit of an attitude problem. But inside, they’ve already started disconnecting. They’re doing the job without being present in it.

And here’s the cruel part: this tends to hit high performers first. Not because they’re weak, but because they cared the most. They invested emotionally in outcomes. They took ownership beyond their job description. When that investment stops paying dividends (when they push and nothing changes, when they care and it doesn’t matter), they learn to stop investing.

They used to share knowledge freely. Now getting information from them is like pulling teeth. Why invest in making others better when nothing you do seems to matter?

None of these are personality traits. They’re behaviors that emerge when someone has decided (consciously or not) that protecting themselves is more important than engaging fully. And that decision usually isn’t wrong, given what they’ve experienced.

This is the worst version: expecting genuine enthusiasm in a genuinely dysfunctional environment. When the roadmap changes every quarter, when decisions get made without input, and when promotions go to the loudest rather than the best. Asking someone to be happy about it is gaslighting. You’re telling them their accurate perception of reality is a personal failing.

I’ve watched the manager’s performance. They try to manage burned-out engineers for “attitude”. I’ve seen PIPs that read like “be less accurate about how broken things are.” The engineer leaves or gets pushed out. The manager congratulates themselves on removing a cultural problem. And then, six months later, another high performer starts getting “negative”.

The common thread wasn’t the people. It was the environment they were responding to.

When you see cynicism, the question isn’t “how do I fix their attitude”?

The question is: what broke their belief that caring was worth it?

Maslach identified six organizational factors that drive burnout: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. When someone becomes cynical, at least one of these is misfiring. Often several.

In my experience, control and values are the most common culprits with senior engineers. They got to where they are by caring about quality and having opinions about how to build things. When they’re told to execute without input or pushed to ship stuff they’re not proud of, the mismatch becomes corrosive.

The cynicism is diagnostic. It’s telling you which factors have broken down. Your job (if you want to keep this person and prevent the next person from burning out the same way) is to investigate what the cynicism is pointing to.

Not to silence it. Not to coach it away. To understand it.

This whole post has been about recognizing cynicism in others. But there’s a harder version: recognizing it in yourself.

It’s harder because you have context. You know why you’re frustrated. You’re not being negative; you’re being realistic. You’re not cynical; you’re experienced. You’ve seen how these things play out.

All of which might be true. But here’s the test: has your frustration become protective? Are you dismissing ideas before they’re fully formed? Do you dread your own calendar? When was the last time you were genuinely excited about a work project?

You’re defending your cynicism as realism. “I’m not pessimistic, I’m accurate.” Maybe. But accuracy about problems isn’t the same as being able to see solutions. If your worldview has room for everything going wrong but nothing going right, that’s not realism; that’s a coping mechanism.

You’ve stopped imagining things being better. Not because you’ve analyzed the options and concluded they won’t work, but because imagining better has become painful. Hope has started to feel like a setup for disappointment.

Your frustration feels righteous. The anger makes sense. The problems are real. But when righteous anger becomes your default state, it’s worth asking: Is this serving me? Or is it a way of staying engaged without risking anything?

If you see yourself in this, the prescription isn’t to force positivity. It’s to take the symptoms seriously. Something about your work situation is misfiring, probably badly. Figuring out what, and deciding what to do about it, is the actual work.

Cynicism is not a personality trait. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not something to be coached out of people.

It’s information.

When an engineer becomes cynical, they’re telling you something about their experience. They’re telling you that the investment-to-return ratio has broken down. They’re telling you that caring has become too expensive. They’re telling you that something in the environment has made it safer to disengage than to engage.

You can treat this as their problem. Label them negative, coach them on attitude, and eventually manage them out. The cynicism will stop, because they’ll be gone. But the conditions that created it will remain, ready to grind down the next person who cares enough to burn out.

Or you can treat it as a signal. Listen to what they’re actually frustrated about. Investigate whether the frustration is valid (it usually is). Fix what you can. Advocate for what you can’t. Make it possible for someone to care again without that caring costing them too much.

The engineer who seems checked out might be the one who cared the most. The cynicism you’re seeing might be the last stage before they leave, or the last stage before they become someone who just collects a paycheck and waits for retirement.

Neither outcome is inevitable. But which one you get depends on whether you can see cynicism for what it is: not a personality, but a symptom. Not a problem to manage, but a signal to heed.