This great article, entitled “The care and feeding of software engineers“, does a pretty good job talking about us software engineers and why we do the things we do.
The article quotes a tweet by Mark Berry, which does a good job of summing up burn-out:
I can’t state this enough: Programmers don’t burn out on hard work, they burn out on change-with-the-wind directives and not ‘shipping’. — @markab
It is a long read, but worth it if you interface with software engineers for your career (or even if you have one as a partner).