I kind of see where you are coming from, but I think this is an important question to ask. Asking someone's opinion on something is a REALLY good indicator of their opinion on that thing: do you hate your job, do you like chocolate, do you love your wife, etc.
While the question "are you burned out" might not predict attrition as well as other questions and it might not be "scientifically assailable" - it still does tell us something about the person.
At work, I frequently ask my team (individually), "do you feel burned out", but I ALSO ask other questions "do you feel like you are doing good work", "do you enjoy what your are doing", "do you like the people you work with", "am I a good manager (a notoriously BAD question)".
These and others help me keep a pulse on my team and what is going on in their head.
Besides, even "do you like chocolate" is a very bad question to ask if you want to take any actionable conclusion from your data, or even if you want to sum your anecdotes up. You can't go asking people "do you like chocolate" and expect to know how much chocolate they will decide to eat, for example.
Is there a better scientific method to quantify burnout?
Burnout has some pretty severe symptoms associated with it, several of them can be taboo in certain circles. It has strong overlap with depression for example. If 83% of developers have these symptoms, it would be shocking to me.
"burn outside work"? What does that mean?
Burnout is feeling great distress at doing your job, due to factors such as overwork, disillusionment, and depression. Sometimes that adverse feeling is so intense the employee is psychologically unable to continue.
As much some people would like to fancy themselves as coldly logical automatons, human action is actually in great part motivated by feelings. So feelings matter.
Similarly, for me, the term “burnt out” means not only that you can’t accomplish anything useful at work, but also “take that home”, and stay feeling powerless there. If you feel tired at work, but the first day of a holiday feel full of energy again, I wouldn’t call that burnout.
Wikipedia doesn’t seem to fully agree, though. It redirects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_burnout, and quotes The Who as “Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.” (https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...)
You're putting a lot of weight on the mechanics of "burning," but the physics of combustion are an analogy of convenience, not the diagnostic criteria.
One of the reasons that "burnout" applies particularly to work rather than hobbies or recreational pursuits is that people (generally speaking) can't afford to just walk away from their job and return when they feel like it.
If anything, seeing oneself as a logical, emotionless automaton is one of the reasons for burnout and depression.
My observation is that most people in tech discussing burnout do not know what burnout is. They think it means being bored with your job.
You can't shove someone into an MRI and get a 'units of burn out' score complete with confidence intervals.
Q1. To what extent, if any, do the following statements apply to you?
I feel burnt out from work.
On a four-point scale, that scores 21%, 35%, 28%, 17%.
So, they took everyone except those who said they didn’t feel burnt out at all, and got 83%.
I think asking for feelings of burnout exaggerates the issue of being burnt out by a huge factor.
For me, burnout means not only being tired of your job, but also inability to ‘burn’ outside work. I don’t even see how you can be that moderately, but over a quarter of respondents reported that.