> Getting on a video call was eye opening in many ways. Seeing the exhaustion on his whole body.

This describes a non trivial number of my colleagues. What's more concerning is witnessing the cognitive decline, for example struggling to debug straight forward problems[1] and mindlessly copy/pasting stack traces into a chat box. While I'm definitely guilty of the latter I usually resort to that when I'm tired, or just hoping to avoid actually thinking through a problem because I have N other tasks to complete, which really ties back to the whole exhaustion thing.

Anyway thank you for putting this into words and congratulations on your recent fledglings. (I had to Google that one. Bird analogies aren't my strong suit.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582782

Some of my coworkers have straight up ceased being human and have just become proxies to chatbots. I don’t even bother talking to them or reading their messages anymore because it’s all entirely AI.