It shouldn't work this way.
Seniors have more experience handling pressure. Better coping strategies. Clearer boundaries. More career capital to protect themselves with. By every reasonable measure, they should be more resilient to burnout than juniors.
And yet the pattern is consistent: senior developers burn out harder, recover slower, and accumulate damage that takes longer to reverse than their junior counterparts hitting the same environmental pressure.
The reason isn't psychological. It's arithmetic.
The Debt Accumulation Gap
