How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal)

Bad news for the tech community.

Burnout at work is a major problem, and AI could add to this already overwhelmed employee problem.

The honeymoon period with AI is over. When people are asked, what, what are you afraid of? Losing my job to AI is actually second to last. What we saw rise up to the top is the expectation to do more for the same pay.

We did this Survey on how people are feeling in tech right now. Burnout is increasing significantly. Optimism is declining. It's never been crazier.

When are we going to get to the optimistic part of this of this episode? Half of the people in tech are feeling incredible, and the other half essentially told us, "My brain is rotting.

My work feels worse." Elon had this really interesting. Way of describing it. We're definitely living in a simulation if we're alive right now, when we're about to start building data centers in space and AI is going to be as smart as humans. What does this tell us we should be doing if we can do anything?

We're in the second inning of a massive shift. No one knows how it will end, but all you can do is compete.

Today, my guest is Noam Siegel. Noam and I go a long ways back. We worked together at Airbnb for many years where he was my research partner. Since then, he went on to be a research leader at Intercom, Twitter, Wealthfront, Meta, Zapier, and Figma. Noam is so amazing, and over the past couple years, I've been lucky to partner with him on a bunch of research projects, the most ambitious of which has been a tech worker sentiment survey, which we plan to run every year. This is the second time we've run it, and the results are so interesting. I believe this is the largest survey of its kind, Looking at how people in tech feel about their jobs and AI and layoffs and burnout and the future of their careers. There's so much in this. And basically this episode is a conversation about the results. At the end of the conversation, we go through a bunch of advice on what you might do if you are currently on the struggle bus and trying to figure out what to do. I am so excited for this episode. I'm so excited for this report. A big thank you to Noam, doing the work to create the survey, run the survey, analyze the survey, and write the post that we will link to. It is so good. Before we get into it, do not forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Noam Siegel. Noam, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much, Lenny. It's such an incredible experience to be here. Thanks for having me.

It's my pleasure. We've actually worked together for a long time and few people know this. We, you were the researcher on our team when I was at Airbnb, it was like 10 years ago.

Decades ago, a decade ago, Lenny. So much has changed.

So much has changed.

So much has changed.

Which is a great segue to what we're gonna be talking about today, which is we did this survey on how people are feeling in tech right now. Uh, it's never been crazier. And so we did this report on just how are people feeling. And this is the second time we've done this. We ran this a year ago. And the idea here is we're going to have this yearly tech sentiment survey that's going to track how tech people are feeling. Before we get into the takeaways, what's kind of the— give us a little context just on this survey, like how you ran it, how— What were we looking at? Anything people need to know?

Yeah, so to your point, this is the second time we're running this survey, which I really feel is unique in the tech industry. I appreciate you for giving me the opportunity and giving us an opportunity as a community to learn more about how we're all feeling in tech. I'm not aware of any survey like this at this scale, looking at these things. Last year when we ran, the similar tech sentiment, the first inaugural tech sentiment survey, the title was Burnt Out but Optimistic. We were seeing fairly high levels of burnout, but also fairly good levels of optimism about where things are going. And we actually followed up on the burnout point and we created the Armor Framework, if you remember. And I'm really glad we did that. This year, we surveyed about 6,000 people from product, engineering, design, research, pretty much any role, marketing, pretty much any role in tech. And the results were very interesting. So I'm very excited to jump into them.

Yeah, I just remember when you shared the first draft of the analysis, uh, and I was just like reading it, I was like, holy shit, this is so interesting. And it just feels like it's putting words to The way I feel, the way that I hear a lot of people feel. So I'm really excited that we're doing this. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS, and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. We're going to go through the top 10 takeaways. What's kind of the, what's like the big picture takeaway from the report overall, if someone could take one big takeaway away?

Well, first I'll say that you and I both noticed an incredible post from Elena Verna a couple of days before this pod was recorded, and she's talking about the AI confidence theater and how in conversations these days in tech, everything is dead. First of all, coding is dead, design is dead, SaaS is dead, et cetera. Obviously, that's not true. So what you're about to see in these results is the best picture we could provide and probably the best picture anyone's provided so far of how people are really feeling about AI. And to me, this also ties to the fact that if you were— if you're watching this and you work in tech, you probably answer some sort of biannual Culture Amp-style survey about how you're feeling, but the questions don't really dive any deeper than the effectiveness of your manager or leadership at the company you work at. Whereas the big picture in this survey, and I think the thing that stood out to us the most is how bifurcated the workforce is right now. And what you're going to see is that AI has an outlier-level, outsized impact on how people feel about their work, more so than Any other characteristic of their job, whether it's their role, the company they work for, the company size, their level, et cetera. Half of the people in tech are feeling incredible, energized, amplified, excited about the technology and the future of, you know, their role. And the other half, Feel like the future is unclear. They feel destabilized. They feel diminished. Um, other negative emotions around that. It's, uh, it's a very interesting picture that really cuts the tech workforce in half. And that's what we'll see in a second.

It feels so like, yes, this feels correct as we look at people in tech. Like it just, uh, it's so clear that this is happening. And what's interesting is it's 50/50. In the results. I didn't expect it to be so even. That was a really interesting takeaway.

It's 50/50. When you dive a little bit deeper into the data, there is some nuance there. So we're looking at this slide with the question that you and I both decided to add to the survey, which is, how has AI shifted your professional identity, if at all? And I'll actually call out, first of all, that only 3% of people reported that AI hasn't shifted their identity. So clearly AI has changed how we each view ourselves. That's first of all. But then to your point, the most prominent thing here is that 50% of people in tech are feeling amplified. They feel like they can do more. They feel like they can do better. It's a wholly positive emotion, and it's great. It's great. It's great for them. But the other half of tech divide into 3 distinct groups. The first group is people who feel like their role is being redefined. They don't, that group doesn't actually have that much clarity or specific positive or negative emotions around what's happening. They just don't really understand it. It's a very mixed bag type of emotion where it's very clear to me that my role is fundamentally changing, but I don't really know what it means. And that's 27% of our sample. Then as we go down the line, we have 2 groups who have clear negative emotions about what's going on. The first group, 14% of people feel destabilized. You know, the ground is shaking beneath them. They have very little clarity on what's going on. They have high anxiety. levels. They report having very negative and pessimistic views of what's to come. And then 5% of people feel diminished. They feel like the great powers of AI have taken something away from them and something that obviously is never going to come back because what's the saying? AI and AI models are the worst today. that they'll ever be. They're only getting better. So people who feel diminished now will only feel more diminished in the future, probably.

Super. So following that thread—

Sorry for the bad news. Sorry for the bad news.

There's some good news here. So following that thread, these buckets correlate super strongly with basically every other measure of how people are doing. See this kind of regression on just like every other core question you asked, and it's so interesting to see how connected these are.

Yeah. And just to put a couple of statistical terms on this to clarify how big the effect is, in tech, we are somewhat obsessed with the notion of statistical significance. But the thing about statistical significance is that if you have a large enough sample, you can sort of reach that type of significance regardless of how much the effect matters practically. A better way to look at things is using an effect size measure like Cohen's d in this case. And what effect size tells you is practically how much does this thing matter? So for example, last year, a couple of the largest effects we saw were number one, your manager, who your manager is and how effective they are matters a ton to how much you are enjoying your job and how optimistic you are and how burnt out you are or not. And we'll see some of that later on. And the second large effect we found was the founder happiness effect. Founders, at least people who are currently founders and in their journey of running a startup, are incredibly happy, probably because they have lots of agency and autonomy relatively to the typical employee. This finding, this insight around the impact of AI on your identity and on every single other variable around your job is about 3 times as large as those other effects. So this technology, this era that we're in, is having an outlier-level, outsized impact on how people are feeling about work, more so than anything else we've seen.

So let's actually look at that data of just how this sort of classification connects to just optimism, burnout, things like that. Because this is— and we're going to come back to just like, what exactly is that divide? Just the question to ask that tells you which side you're on. But let's look at this first. Yeah.

So we'll dive into some of these things in a little more depth later on. But just to put it all together, what you're looking at here is the AI identity stance and then a breakdown by your AI identity around career optimism, Burnout, layoff worry, and an interesting one for me, and we'll talk about this further. Would you recommend your role to someone coming into the industry now? And what you can see is that as you move from the people who feel amplified to the people who feel diminished, career optimism goes down significantly. Burnout or reports of burnout go up significantly. Layoff worry also rises significantly. And perhaps the most significant finding of them all is that people would not recommend junior people, early career people entering into the tech workforce at this moment, given what's happening with AI. And you're seeing these very linear, clear, and organized effects, which just demonstrates to you the impact that AI is having on all of these different variables.

And what I love is you took all of this, kind of all these data points, and you've created these kind of 4 archetypes of people today. And I feel like everyone listening is going to be like, okay, that's me. So, let's go through that.

Yeah. So, we're seeing these 4 tech workers, and the way we got to this is later on in the survey, we asked people about how they're feeling and to report specific emotions, and people could choose as many emotions as they wanted, right? And by the way, fun fact, on average, people selected 5 different emotions, and I think a couple of people selected 13 emotions that they're feeling, which is a lot. So the first archetype we found is the energized tech worker, and that's 41% of our samples. These are the people who were saying that product has become fun again. I'm exploring things. I feel like I'm in the tech amusement park where— Everything is open to me and I can experiment with new approaches. I'm a builder now. I have powers that I've never had before, et cetera. These people are very energized about the technology and about their careers. The second group we called the conflicted, the ambivalent middle. These are 35% of the sample. These are people who are having, on the one hand, the most fun they've ever had as builders, as PMs, as designers, as engineers, whatever their role is. And on the other hand, they're feeling the most uncertainty that they've ever felt in their careers. They just don't understand where this is going and whether they're building the things that will ultimately lead to the end of their careers. As they know it. The third archetype are the disoriented people, the people who feel like their role keeps shifting. There's a quote that we saw from one of the respondents. We're like farmers on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, and we just don't see a clear path to what's happening. Very interesting comparison to that era. And these are people who are feeling very disoriented around what's going on in their career and where things are leading. And then finally, 12% of the sample we categorized as resentful. They're feeling pressured, they're feeling checked out, they are not enjoying their work right now. They're saying things like, I've been forced to use AI or lose my job. And even when I use AI, I'm still seeing people lose their jobs. I just hate it. You know, I hate having to leverage this technology rather than do my own thing and maybe ignore the technology, which obviously none of us can ignore at this point.

There's a lot of people clearly that are very unhappy, resentful, disoriented. I imagine that group can't imagine A lot of people are feeling extremely energized, and I think vice versa. So I think this is just like really interesting to see that many people are very different from you. There are many people that are having a really good time, a lot of people that are having a really bad time, and it's just a good way to remember that and give— and basically have empathy for the other half, especially the folks not doing as well, because not everyone is as energized. And we'll talk about like what that energized group looks like. But I think that's just an important point. Like a lot of people are having a really hard time.

I really agree with you, Lenny. And I think that given the pace of change of the technology, I really do feel that too much of our focus is being spent on mastering the technology and trying to understand what the heck we should be doing with these new releases, new models, new capabilities, loop engineering, whatever the next thing will be next week. And we're not spending enough time and focus on our relationships at work, on seeing our colleagues, on supporting our peers in also being able to, you know, work with this technology, thrive with it, succeed with it, and get along and collaborate well with people who don't belong in the same bucket as us when it comes to how the technology is being perceived. So I personally would love to see all of us, especially energized people, take some of that energy and spend it on the people around you rather than the all-in focus on whatever the next thing is with AI.

Let's go to the next takeaway. Let's talk about burnout and optimism.

Yeah. So last year, We looked at burnout and we looked at optimism, and burnout was at a worrying level enough that we published further research on it, and we introduced the ARM framework around how to deal with burnout and fight burnout. And this time around, I'm not sure what I was expecting necessarily. I think I was hoping that optimism would hold steady and that burnout wouldn't go up because supposedly with new abilities and even better models, perhaps you might think that we wouldn't have to work as hard or put as much energy into everything in a way that gets us burnt out. And yet that's not what we're seeing. When it comes to significant burnout, burnout that's higher than moderate, We've gone up from 44.7% in 2025 to 54.7% in 2026. So burnout is surging. More than half of our sample are feeling significantly burnt out at this point. And at the same time, optimism around the future of our roles and our careers is falling from 54.8% in 2025 to 48.7% in 2026. Bad news for the tech community.

I don't know what to say about this other than that sucks. I don't like this. I get it fully. Like, I can completely understand why people are feeling this. Pretty worrisome, the rise to like a massive jump, like over 10% increase in burnout in just in a year.

Yeah. And it's interesting, you've had several guests on in the past who've talked about things related to this. I loved your conversation with Jeff from Ramp.

Yeah.

And he shared that his worst burnout happened when velocity was lowest. So when you put effort into things that don't actually move, It doesn't feel good, and that leads to burnout. And I think that maps for me with certain theories around burnout where stagnation leads to burnout. I think what's going on now is the opposite. These data showcase to you that as we ship faster than ever, as we move from shipping, you know, a couple of PRs a day to 30 PRs a day, Or just doing so much more. In some ways that might be fun, but we are burning out more than we did before. And we're not working any less hard, clearly, right? We're just taking on more stuff, more stuff, more prototypes, more PRDs, more PRs, more campaigns, more agents, more ads.

More agents.

And it's leading to more burnout.

Yeah, and that's actually one of the takeaways, which we'll get to. I don't know if you have this in this deck, but a glimmer of hope that you pointed out is that enjoyment of work is actually still very high, that it's burnout, but also people still at the same levels last year actually really enjoying their work.

I think what we heard about enjoyment more than anything else, which does give me hope, is it's a couple of things, I think. First of all, people are able to bring out certain aspects of their identity and of their passions that they weren't able to before. You know, if you are currently a PM by role, but you have a designer within you, or you are a marketer, but really inside you have that engineer that's been really wanting to come out, now you can, right? Various tools that are available to us these days enable you to bring out those sides of your personality and those professional aspirations. And that's something that people are really enjoying. We're sort of escaping our classic swim lanes, and a certain percentage of our roles are transforming into something else. And then the second thing that people are saying that they're finding enjoyable is that they are able to manifest things that they've wanted to build that seemed impossible not very long ago, you know, and that's whether it's in their main job or things that they're doing on the side, et cetera. So, It is still, for many people in tech, an exciting time and an enjoyable time because we can do things that we never thought we'd be able to do because they're outside of our role, because they're outside of what felt technically feasible, or for other reasons.

And this is another data point in the, at the end of this, that you have a bunch of recommendations of what to do with all this information, and that's connects to something that you recommend later. But before we get there, one of the other really interesting takeaways was around layoffs and how layoffs impact— fear of layoffs impact burnout. Talk about that.

We did ask people how worried they are about being laid off. And as you can see, 72% of our sample are worried to a certain extent about being laid off, and 41.2% are at least moderately Worried about being laid off. So it is clear that people are feeling that they might be cutting the branch that they're sitting on when it comes to using AI. People are reporting that their company's going all in on agents, all in on these technologies, and it does feel like they may be pushed out. At some point. So the worry level is high. And I think if you're watching this, you're starting to notice that there's a ton of ambivalence right now in the community and a ton of clashes between emotions, feeling energized and enjoying my job, and at the same time, not being very optimistic about it and feeling tired. from it and feeling worried that all of that enjoyment is going to end one day when the company I work for decides that I'm no longer needed.

I feel a lot of people listening are probably feeling all this and feeling heard. So what's interesting is so far the kind of 2 takeaways, one is this bifurcation that's happening and these kind of archetypes that break that group up a little bit further. At the same time, just broadly, Burnout is increasing significantly. Optimism is declining. Talk about just those two kind of how you think about those two side by side. This idea of many people are much happier and having the best time of their life. Many people are having a really bad time, but then broadly this optimism and burnout shift.

I think there's something addictive about this technology, and I'll speak for myself for a second and say that, you know, I've also never had as much fun in my career as when using these technologies. And I've been, Using it for too many hours a day, playing about and building. I think many of us, even those who aren't as energized about the technology, we still feel like we're in this fascinating technological playground, and it's very, very hard to disengage from that technology and touch grass, read a book, whatever you love to do in your spare time as well, Lenny. And so yes, we're enjoying using this technology because it's opened up avenues that we've never had. But on the other hand, it's tiring. It's tiring to be constantly learning this technology and constantly trying to apply it in different contexts and constantly try to take on more than what your traditional role dictated. Because again, there aren't any traditional roles anymore. We're just all builders. These days, whether that's an official thing within a company or not. And so I think that naturally this leads to these clashing emotions, these exciting feelings around what's possible and how fun it is to use AI. And on the other hand, the realization that the reason this technology is so exciting is because it's so powerful. And because it's so powerful, it might be coming for us and to take our jobs, right? Did you grow up on the Terminator movies? I keep thinking about the Terminator movies.

I don't know about growing up, but yes, I watched them early in my life.

Oh my gosh, I love those movies. And I just can't help but wonder, you know, when the robots are coming for us. So incredible technology. Might be coming for us at some point.

Skynet is being built right now as we speak.

Skynet is coming.

So there's a, there's going to be a really great takeaway around this before we get to that one, actually. Uh, it's like every single one is so interesting. I'm just like, man, this one's interesting, but they're all interesting. Let's get to the next takeaway around people's sense of their own career and whether they recommend it.

This is a wild one for me because at least within the research community, I am known as the Net Promoter Score hater. I even built a website dedicated to fighting NPS, npsistheworst.com. Kind of a fair choice. It's an actual website. Fun fact, by the way, I dislike NPS so much that I even bought the domain npsisthebest.com, and I forward people from that to npsistheworst.com. That's how committed I am To fighting NPS.

Amazing.

But, but you and I were both genuinely curious about whether people who are, you know, already a few years in and they're maybe senior or above senior in their roles, what would they say to the person entering the industry now? Or what would they say to a person considering entering the industry now? Would they recommend their role and the tech industry more broadly to a friend or relative of theirs. And the answer was shocking, absolutely shocking. So let me show you the data around this. And let me preface this with a quick explanation on NPS because it's not so easy to understand. NPS is this question around whether you would recommend a product, or in this case, your role to a friend or family member, right? And the scale goes from 0 to 10, 10 being you would absolutely recommend your role and 0 being you would absolutely not recommend your role. But then NPS as a whole, when it's calculated, goes from -100, which is absolutely terrible, to +100. 100. And the zero point represents neutrality. It represents that the sample as a whole is neutral. It's not a promoter, to use NPS speak, meaning I would promote my role to other people. I would recommend it to other people. And they're not detractors either, which means I'm not negative about my role. So that's the zero point. What you are seeing here is that no one is a promoter of their role in tech right now. Not even founders who are by far the happiest, happy-go-lucky people in tech right now. Founders would not recommend their roles. Neither would people in sales or go-to-market, PMs, operations, engineering. And the worst of all, designers and researchers, my community, are the least likely to recommend their role to other people coming into tech. It's sort of like saying, you know, I'm kind of swimming in this pool, the water's kind of okay, but you shouldn't come into these tech waters. They ain't for you.

Oh my God, what an interesting... takeaway and part of this research. So I'm just looking at this chart just as people are seeing this, just like nobody, everyone's like, nope, don't do what I do. It's interesting. Like, you know, we're going to talk about how founders are the happiest people in tech, but still it's like a very stressful, hard job. I'm surprised it's like, I'm surprised it's the least, like you would think many founders would be like, this is the craziest, gnarliest job. You should not do this. sucks. But it's interesting, they're the least unhappy, they're the least, least likely to recommend.

There's a strong narrative right now that there's never been a better time to be a founder. You're a lot less reliant on other people to build. There's a ton of conversations around the solopreneur or the duopreneur, right? So there's a ton of conversations around how this is the era To be a founder. And yet people who are currently in that role aren't very excited about recommending it to other people. There's also another layer to this, which is as you go down in seniority, you are less likely to recommend your role. So execs, VPs, maybe even directors are sort of more likely to recommend their role than people who are ICs. That's an interesting one. I've seen all sorts of explanations for that. One explanation, for example, is that at the top of the pyramid, VPs are benefiting more from AI because they're getting all of this stream of information and knowledge being processed by AI, making their jobs a lot easier. Whereas ICs are each scrambling to build all of these micro SaaS products within the companies they work for. No one knows what anyone else is doing. There's a lot of duplicative work. It's a lot easier to build products these days, but a lot harder to maintain them. And so I think a lot of ICs are feeling like, there's a saying, full gas on neutral, right? Like you're pushing the pedal to the metal in your car, but you are in neutral gear. You're not going anywhere. I think that that's the feeling that a lot of ICs are having these days with these technologies. Like, I keep building these things, but I'm not having the impact I want. Everyone else is building too. There's lots of confusion and it's just not worth it anymore.

There's like this interesting also trend, this, you know, there's this whole like meme of don't become part of the permanent underclass. And I feel like there's like a few of these threads throughout this. In here, it's like, Okay, I'm like a PM, but like, it's too late. Don't do this. Like, the door is closing for this role. Things are changing. And that's, it's not just PM, it's every role. Everyone's just like, maybe you should do something else.

Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think it's unfortunate. I feel like in the past, people were pushed to CS, to Learn to code. I know that these days for myself as a parent, you know, I don't know what to tell my kids to do anymore. I'm not sure what roles will be there for them in just a few years. These are very confusing times. And I think tech employees are feeling that as well. They don't understand what's in line for them in the future. So they certainly don't know to recommend to others like, yeah, you know, in 5 years, It's going to be great.

Yeah. Get into plastics. Like, yeah, it's like no one knows. It's just like, just like zoom out for a moment. It's just, it's so insane how much change we're living through right now. We would not have, like, this is not a result we would have seen a year or two ago. This is like so unstable and uncertain. And this is very new for people in tech, I think.

Yeah. I like to use certain metaphors or sort of examples from other areas in my life to explain these things. So I believe you spoke in the past to Scott Wu, the co-founder and CEO of Cognition.

Mm-hmm.

Devin. And they are the makers of Devin. And I recall that when he described the product, he talked about this ladder that the product progressed on. It went from a high school CS student to a college intern, to a junior engineer, and at this point, probably a senior or a staff-level engineer. I would say that we are all watching this technology Climb the rungs of this ladder and advance, and we feel like the technology is pulling those rungs from under us. And so the further we've gone up the ladder, the better we feel about our careers and the more stability we have. But the lower we are on that ladder, those rungs getting pulled under our feet. And so, it makes lots of sense that we wouldn't recommend, you know, being on that ladder to anyone else because the rungs are disappearing.

Man, there's so much to talk about with all these, but let me point out a couple things as I look at this and then we can move on to the next takeaway. One is just like, you know, it's interesting that sales and PM are the least bad at don't get into this role. Like, that's interesting. I did not, I wouldn't have expected that. Salespeople, not as scared, scared about the future of their role. PM, interesting. That's a big audience here. Not as scared. As you said, research design, the most don't do this. As a researcher, you touched on this a little bit, but I'm just curious, how does it feel seeing this, seeing this result?

It's tough. I think the research community has lived with a lot of concerns and trauma and anxiety over the years around having a seat at the table, around finding meaning in our work, around topics like the democratization of research and, you know, other people taking on our roles and eventually replacing us. It definitely hurts a lot to see this. I think there's a very important role that research needs to play in the future of building products. I think that as this technology progresses, we should become even more thoughtful about what we build rather than less thoughtful. I've heard the narratives around, you know, it's so cheap to build, just build 1,000 prototypes and see what works. I think you've heard this in a recent conversation. As well. I would suggest that we're just going to get even more burnt out that way. I would not recommend that approach personally. I think research has a very, and design has a very important part to play in raising the ceiling of what's possible. Whereas AI has mostly lowered the bar, but it hasn't raised the ceiling. And I can also tell you that PMs being somewhat more likely to recommend their roles, even though they're not likely to recommend their roles, does actually make sense to me. It's more of a generalist role, I would claim, than some of these other roles. And this is the era of the generalist, if you would ask me, the AI era. I'm the most surprised by sales and go-to-market because if we are indeed in some sort of SaaS-pocalypse, which I don't personally believe we are, but, you know, it's been said, then I don't think sales and go-to-market people should be feeling too great about recommending their roles. But maybe they believe that, you know, sales at this point cannot be done by AI.

Yeah, there's just like so much I wanna talk about here. It's important to note, this is a very important note that I'm gonna say here. This doesn't mean design is going away or research is going away. This is just saying people in that role right now, the narrative in their head is don't do this. Does not mean this is over because it could just be all this hype that we keep hearing. Like, you know, I'm guilty of adding to it from various guests, but you know, this is just how people feel. Doesn't mean this is what's happening.

100%. This entire unique project in tech is all about how people feel. It's not about the realities of working in tech. It's about people's emotions, about how people feel. I really do think no one other than us has really captured these emotions in the way that we have. But yeah, that's a great reminder. This is not an image of reality. This is an image of how people are feeling in tech right now.

Another quick data point that we wanna make sure to communicate here. You touched on this, but I don't know if you actually made this as clear to people as it should be is, so this is looking at, would you get in, would you recommend people get into my role? We also asked just how are you feeling about your role? Like, are you happy being in this role? And the result there was, I'm actually doing okay. I'm happy. I'm a PM. I'm happy to design a researcher. So as you said, it's this kind of like the water's fine, but don't get in. Talk a little bit about that just to make sure that point is clear.

When we asked people things like, Are they enjoying their job? As we talked about earlier, most people said that overall, yes, you know, they're having fun in their role. I think what's going on here is that, again, people are lacking optimism compared to what they were, right? Optimism has gone down. So there's a big difference between how people are feeling now about their role, given what they've achieved in their careers and where they are on the ladder compared to what they're extrapolating might happen in a year, in 3 years, in 5 years. And what people are extrapolating might happen is clearly more negative than their current experiences. So yeah, I mean, all in all, we're doing okay as an industry. We're enjoying, we're trying new things, we're experiencing a complete paradigm shift in how we work. And that's fun for a while, but it seems like people feel like this is not going in the best of directions. And of course, I hope we're all wrong. I hope we're all wrong.

Me too. As a natural optimist, I'm like, it's going to be all right. So we'll see.

I'll see. I'm a natural optimist too. And I'm realizing like so far we haven't been in too much of optimism mode. So I hope we manage to Get to some of that as well.

This episode is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs, and now with Command. I've been a customer of Mercury's for over 6 years. I have never once thought about leaving. Mercury is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by bankers. They make it so easy, dare I say fun, to send invoices, move money around, set up virtual cards for folks on my team. Does your bank have an API, a terminal-native CLI, or an AI-ready MCP server? I don't think so. And just recently they launched Command, a conversational interface built directly into Mercury, which acts as your financial operator. I've been using Command to transfer money around, to figure out what categories I've been spending the most money in, analyze my cash flows. And just today I used it to find out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year. I just ask, how much have I made from X over the past year? 10 seconds later, I have an answer. It is so freaking cool. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC. Let's talk about takeaway 4. Looked at productivity, looked at quality Look at just the kind of the upside of AI.

This was a very interesting one to me. In last year's survey that we did on the impact of AI specifically on productivity and quality, people were rather bullish about the technology and how much better it makes them, not just more efficient, but better. And this time around, we saw some interesting Findings. Let me start with, with this, and this is sort of the initial view, but it leads to something very different than I thought would happen. When we simply asked the question, how much better are you at your job thanks to AI? Unequivocally, the answer was yes. You can see here that 97.2% of people are saying that AI is making them better at their job, and close to 50% of people are saying that AI is making them Very much or extremely better at their job. So it's very clear that high level, however you interpret better, which we'll get to in a second, people feel like AI has had an impact. But when you dive deeper into what that means and you go below the surface level, as you can see here, we're doing better. Actually means something rather different than what you might think. So when I heard people say they're doing better, I thought they meant that literally. I thought the quality of their work was better, that AI was contributing to better quality of work. In fact, it's the exact opposite. What we heard from people were 2 concerning things. The first is that I can do more. Faster, but not better. So again, AI has sort of lowered the floor of what's possible and enabled people to put out a lot more work than they ever have before, whatever that work is, whether it's PRs, PRDs, research projects, prototypes, but they're not, the output isn't of higher quality. And perhaps the even more concerning effect, which we heard about, the deeper cost of all of this is the cost of using AI on thinking and judgment. People essentially told us, my brain is rotting, my work feels worse. And this is related to phenomenon I've heard about recently, like, is it cognitive rot? I think is what I've heard. Basically this phenomenon where you sort of see the initial output of an AI model and you sort of just accept it. You don't apply your judgment to it. You don't apply your thinking to it. And you slowly Let your, your mind, your involvement in your work, your agency sort of collapse into this rotting state, so to speak.

This, yeah, this is such an interesting takeaway. Just, uh, like this is a positive, there's a positive note to this. As you said, I'm looking at the numbers here. 82% of people say AI is making them at least moderately better at their job, and nearly 50% say very much or extremely better. better, which may correlate with that original, just this bifurcation, like the people that feel like AI is making them better at their job, probably the people feel like most energized. So whether it's true or not, so I think there's a couple of happy points. That's one, people feel AI is making them better. They like, they feel that. So that's, you know, that's real, even if it may not be. And at the same time, I think they're self-aware the quality is an issue. And also I'm just maybe my, I'm atrophying in my ability to say code.

Yeah.

Or write strategy docs. So at least people are self-aware that this is happening, not just, I'm killing it, all my stuff is higher quality and it's much better than ever.

They are self-aware, but among other things, I'm a certified coach and I would suggest that beyond being self-aware, we need to act on this. There are several explanations I could give to this phenomenon. One of them might be that the honeymoon period with AI is over. We thought it was perfect and the best thing that ever happened to us since sliced bread or whatever typical Americans say. But we've realized it's not quite there yet. And yes, the models are the worst they're ever going to be. They're only getting better, but there's still so much they need to get better before we can really say, yeah, my work is just so much better and I don't need to be as involved.

With it.

You had Simon Willison on this show talking about how people are worried about skill atrophy, that they're not learning enough, and that we need to be consciously resistant to this and not let ourselves cognitively rot. And I think this data suggests that we're losing that fight a little bit. We need to put to put a little bit more energy into it, into fighting this cognitive rot that we're feeling, and to make sure that as the bar continues to rise and this technology continues to evolve, that we're meeting that with deliberate practice, deliberate thinking, deliberate judgment.

People are just so bad at that. Just like if I have an easy button, I will press it. I know I shouldn't, but I'm just going to eat those Doritos. So that's the challenge I think for people is just like, because you could do it the easy way, it's so hard to resist. And that connects again to this ladder that's being raised, that people are just getting into this stuff. It's just, they have to make themselves do it the hard way to learn how to do it for real. And I'm really curious how that plays out with junior folks in the market learning how to actually code, how to do PR writing, how to write a PRD from scratch with your fingers versus talking to Claude about it.

Yeah, there's so much to say here. I think people miss feeling smart sometimes. I think I thought once upon a time about myself that I'm smart, and then you encounter these models, most recently Fable 5 that just came out for the second time, and you don't feel that smart anymore, and you sort of lose the sense of self-efficacy that That you used to have. And the second thing to say about this is that every time you, you, not the AI, solve a problem and get over a barrier, it increases, it raises your baseline of self-efficacy, of self-confidence, of self-belief. And every time you offload that to your favorite AI model, you are lowering that baseline. And your thinking and your judgment is rotting, and that's a serious problem.

So maybe just wrap up this takeaway, the sentence used in this report I love, I'll just read. The productivity gains are real, but the quality of the work and the sharpness of the person producing it are taking a hit.

Absolutely. And, or maybe we'll get to this in the end, but we should keep a close eye on this and really try to work on our own self-efficacy.

We need like evals for people, like are humans becoming—

Eval for people. Oh, I get it. Let's do that.

Measure your smartness. Okay, let's talk about takeaway number 5, which I also thought was extremely interesting. My God, so much, so much interesting in this. Let's talk about the 5th takeaway.

Yeah, so I think the dominant narrative right now in our community is the fear of being replaced. And as we talked about, a lot of people in tech do fear and are worried that they're going to be replaced, that they're going to be laid off. And so it would make sense that if we had a question and one of the options to respond to that question were, I'm worried about losing my job to AI, that it would rank fairly high. But when we look at this slide and when we look at when people are asked, you know, what are your concerns and what's bothering you right now? What are you afraid of? in tech, losing my job to AI is actually second to last on that list. And instead, what we saw rise up to the top is the expectation to do more for the same pay. It's almost as if we're all feeling like we're being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed some more to accomplish more things in less time for the same pay. And so that fear of being overworked is by far the dominant fear alongside the second item in this list, which is that the pace is becoming unsustainable. And by pace, I mean both the pace of the work and the expectation of work velocity, just how much you have to put out a day, every single day. And the pace of change of the technology, which requires you to invest a significant amount of time in learning the new model, the new framework, the new way to use the technology, which of course takes away from your core focused working time. So it's sort of an evil downward spiral that really prevents you from feeling like you're able to accomplish anything of meaning. You just feel very overworked, very tired.

I'm confident everybody listening understands exactly what you're describing here. Obviously connects to that burnout point we made earlier. I'll close this takeaway with another quick read from your post. You're such an amazing writer, Noam.

Thank you.

I love reading your summaries of of which you learned. So I'll just read this. The speed AI unlocked got plowed straight back into expectations. Every gain becomes the new baseline, and the people expected to hit it are running out of room to breathe.

When are we going to get to the optimistic parts of this, uh, of this episode?

Maybe we'll find something. Okay. Let's talk about 2.6, which has a little bit of optimism.

Oh yeah. Okay.

A lot of ambivalence.

Yeah.

Is that the way you put it?

Yeah, I mentioned this earlier. The industry is definitely in a state of ambivalence. We tried to capture all of the emotions that people are feeling at work right now. And I am happy to report, as you can see here, that the top 2 emotions are positive emotions, curiosity and excitement. And that's wonderful. That is optimistic. I'm glad that's the case. People are sharing that they're excited about the technology, about the capabilities, about what they're able to achieve. They're feeling curious about what the future might bring and what else they could do as these models and systems continue to evolve. So that's wonderful. But as you go down this list, you can see that there's this very interesting mix of positive, negative, and neutral emotions. People are also feeling overwhelmed. People are feeling conflicted. People are feeling relieved in certain ways about, you know, what AI has taken from them in a good sense, you know, what they've been able to offload to AI. And then people are feeling tired, burnt out, just working hard and hard, as we said, uneasy, anxious, and then hopeful. So as you can see, there is a wide variety of emotions here, and it's really tough to figure out what exactly is going on. But one thing I definitely wanted to mention, which Nikhil Singhal mentioned in an episode with you, I know he's a friend of the pod and such an incredible leader in product and in general in the tech community. He talked about smiling exhaustion. And I just love that term because I think it captures this ambivalence. The old type of emotion, the old type of burnout was just completely grim. You know, it was all about these negative emotions that come from disengagement and exhaustion. Whereas now, when Kiel talks about finding exhaustion, it's about people almost feeling reborn on the one hand. You know, I'm shipping again, I'm building, I'm creating these incredible things with AI. There's never been a more exciting time, but there's no off switch. There's no off switch. And so the tempo is absolutely brutal. The rules keep rewriting themselves every single day. It's a very relentless pace. And so we're smiling through that exhaustion that we're feeling. And I think that captures the ambivalence more than— Than anything, really.

I think it's also good to kind of come back to one of the core points you made earlier, that half of people are actually feeling very like they are working very hard, probably exhausted at times, but they're also just like really into— they're going all in, feeling good, energized about where things are going. So I think it's important to always remember, like, kind of come back to that as we share all these negative elements. There's actually a large group of people that are actually loving This time and doing super well.

There are. I think more than anything, what I would like to highlight here is that, you know, we tend to think of things way too often in black and white terms. We see people as either people who are just full of hype or people who are, is it doomers? Would that be the right?

Yeah.

You know, or haters or whatever you want to call it. What we're seeing here is that, as always in life, if you ask me, things aren't as simple. Behind that facade, behind the theatrics that Elena Verner discussed, we all have both the hype person within us and the doomer to a certain extent. And the only difference between us is that we have different amounts of each. But we're not just one or the other, and there really is a ton of ambivalence. And I just want people to know that it's okay. You know, it's okay to be excited and curious, but also feel overwhelmed. It's okay to feel relieved and tired. It's okay to feel resentful, even if all in all you feel positive about the technology. Those emotions can coexist within us. It's very natural. Don't let this narrative that you're either or to dominate and to convince you that anything's wrong with how you feel because really all of these emotions are very understandable given the times we're in.

Such an important point. I love that you said that. Okay. So, the next takeaway, what we did here is when we were looking at this bifurcation that you found, we looked at just which functions are having the best time and worst time. And we had a hint at this earlier, and it turns out there's a couple that are just overall having the worst time right now and feeling the least happy. So let's get into that.

Yeah, so definitely, definitely. And we saw this last year, by the way, as well. We are seeing that designers and researchers are the most negative. And just to clarify what I mean by that, what you can see in this slide is that When it comes to AI identity shifts, designers and researchers are the highest in feeling either destabilized or diminished. When it comes to emotions like feeling tired, overwhelmed, or anxious, researchers and designers lead the pack in a negative way, of course. When it comes to worries about losing one's job to AI, again, researchers and designers are pretty much as high as one can be. And then finally, when it comes to these NPS-like scores of whether people would recommend their role to a friend or to a colleague, researchers and designers are the least likely to recommend entering their role at this point.

We talked about this earlier. I don't know how much more there's to add here. Basically, it's, again, it's not that this function is in big trouble necessarily. It's this is how people in that function are feeling right now.

You know, I'm not objective because I'm part of the research community and the design community. If I may, I just want to tell people that in this community that I truly and honestly believe that there's never been a more important time for our roles to manifest in the products that we build. You've talked about this with many people, Lenny, in previous interviews. about concepts like taste, about concepts like craft, about concepts like quality. I'm thinking of people like Kari, Linjer's CEO, who talked so beautifully about the importance of quality and how you build products. I'm thinking about people like—

Katie Dill comes to mind. We had a whole conversation around taste and beauty and the value.

Katie Dill, recently Jenny Wen, who leads design for Claude at Anthropic, and so many other people who talk about the importance of taste, of judgment, of design. So I honestly hope that designers and researchers make a comeback when it comes to how they feel about this industry, because the industry needs them. The industry needs us. And so I hope we see a change next year. And this is the call to all designers and researchers to get in there and do our thing because it's incredibly valuable at this era.

Yeah, I've been, I've had a few conversations recently about just design and in particular, just why, why is design not a huge value add and differentiator today, knowing AI is just so bad at it? We just had the head of the Codex app on talking about why AI, like AI is not good at design. And you could clearly tell AI designed this thing. And you would think this was the moment for design to become such a value add and differentiator for companies seeing all this AI slop that's being produced. So I'm optimistic that'll emerge as people are like, I'm so sick and tired of all these generic things. I want to actually build something great. Yeah.

And moreover, if I recall correctly, you, you in that conversation talked about how some of the issues around AI doing design are perhaps tractable. problems, but some of them are even intractable, I would say, or definitely much, much harder to solve for. It's still the case that creating incredible novel creative experiences, not something that this technology is quite capable of. So we'll see what happens, but I really do hope that the design and research community turn around and change their minds about the industry next year.

Yeah, man, I can't wait to do next year already. What's it gonna be? But if you actually look at the losing my job to AI bucket, there's actually a role that is even more worried about losing their job, and I believe that is data analytics. Our shades are kind of very similar to keep it, to keep the message clear, but that's really interesting. The data analysts basically are the most worried about losing their job.

I think we're seeing Incredible capabilities coming out.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, with the different models out there to run data analysis. I'm seeing this in the research realm as well. I would suggest that we're also seeing incredible advancements in coding. So I was expecting engineering to be higher in certain places here, and it's not. But again, this isn't about the objective reality of how far AI has come in terms of its capabilities doing each of these roles. This is about how people are feeling in these roles, and there isn't a one-to-one correlation between those things.

Speaking of that, let's talk about who the happiest people are. Who's doing great? Who's doing best?

So the happiest people in tech, this is something that did not change. between last year's survey and this year's, it's still founders and people who are working in smaller companies. And I do feel the need to say that when it comes to founders, to your point earlier, being, not that I know, but being a founder is an incredibly challenging, all-encompassing job. And there is a certain selection bias here in the sense that these are people who are currently in the active role of a founder in a startup that is still running rather than founders who had to shut down their startup or whatever it might be. So I just want to make that clear around who we're looking at. But yes, when we look at founders and when we look at, in this case, you're looking at company size as well, you can see that Whether it's optimism, whether it's burnout, layoff worry, or whether people would recommend their job, you're just seeing these increases or decreases depending on the question. It's very clear that founders are top of nearly every measure. They're 71% optimistic. They're enjoying their jobs. The most, they have the lowest burnout, the lowest layoff worry, the most AI excitement. It's a medium-sized effect compared to other effects we saw, but very significant. And that said, you know, if we talk about founders, even having that ownership and even having that agency has its limits. Founders are still, You know, many founders are still moderately or at least moderately burnt out, 47% of founders that would be. And as we said earlier, even founders aren't very likely to recommend being a founder to other people right now, which is very interesting.

I think it's also important to note there's definitely this, as you said, this kind of meme of there's never been a better time to build. People may see this and be like, I gotta start a company. It's the best place to be. It may be this moment currently where people are feeling most excited about it. And then as the bubble, you know, I don't know if it's a bubble, but as things start to get harder, there may be a shift away from that. So this, so far interesting that we've seen 2 years in a row founders are the happiest, but I wonder if that changes, if the market changes, if something, you know, that kind of thing. So this isn't saying you're gonna be happy if you become a founder. But it is really interesting that 2 years in a row of all of the, like the most clear, one of the clearest takeaways is just founders seem to be happiest across every dimension. Yeah.

And then company size as well. Again, optimism goes down if you're working for a larger company. You get more burnt out if you're working for a larger company. You're more worried about layoffs if you're working for a larger company and you're less likely to recommend your role. If you're working for a larger company. So that also remained consistent. And if we look just at burnout specifically, then you can see very clearly here that burnout climbs in very significant ways in between working for a small 1 to 10 person startup and working for a 5,000 or 10,000 person Enterprise company.

It's so wild. It's wild how linear this is. Like, there's no bump. And then those 2 at the end, they're, as you point out here in the chart, they're statistically—

Within margin of error. Yeah.

But it's like wild here, just like only goes up. There's not like a sweet spot and then it comes down again. And then if you go back to the previous chart, exactly the same thing. It's just like very linear. Everything goes up and gets worse. As your company size grows. That's wild.

Absolutely. I would say one thing to highlight here, like if you look at burnout, for example, is that even the lowest is still fairly high, right? So I would say people are feeling somewhat less burnt out, somewhat healthier working for a startup, but I would view these levels of burnout, of worry, as as worrisome. I'm worried about the level of worry right now in tech. It is not a good vibe. You know, you mentioned how we met a decade ago at Airbnb. I do feel like the vibe was very different then in tech. So I am a bit concerned about the numbers that we're seeing here. But yes, from a relative sense, a relative point of view, Perhaps one should consider doing a shift and starting your own thing or working for a smaller company.

Yeah, exactly. And that'll be one of the takeaways. You know what would be awesome is if we do one of these for non-tech. I'm really curious, just like you think people are scared and worried in tech. I'm so curious how that would compare to, you know, like say the blue-collar folks or other functions. Like, I don't know if we have the audience to do that, but that'd be really interesting.

I mean, I think my HVAC technician is feeling pretty great about his career right now. Burning hot in Florida, everyone needs air conditioning. That's not going to change anytime soon.

So yeah, we should get into HVAC. Yeah, to start a company.

We should do that.

Start a plumbing business. Oh man. So what I love about this, doing the survey again, is we're starting to find things that are consistently true and The next takeaway is another really good example that we saw last year too around managers. Let's get into that.

Yeah, so I mean, perhaps people are aware of this. Managers matter a ton. Who your manager is probably matters more than most other characteristics of your role. And we found this very explicitly last year and this year. Again, manager effectiveness. So we basically ask people, how effective is your manager? How would you rate your manager? And what you can see here is that the more effective your manager is, the less burnt out you feel and the more you enjoy your job. And this is a massive, massive effect that we're seeing. So if you have an extremely effective manager, for example, you are reporting around 65% higher job enjoyment and dramatically lower burnout. The problem is the supply. Only about 25% of the sample rate their manager as highly effective. And 36% of the sample rated their managers as ineffective, which by the way is a very small change from last year. So we're seeing managers be rated not so well, and at the same time, we're seeing that when managers are effective, which is clearly not often enough, the impact that has on people's enjoyment, burnout, and other aspects as well is incredible.

That's wild. Like, I think we're adding new insight into the world here and just finding this. Like, I've never seen this before, just how impactful a manager is. That we always hear anecdotes, we always hear like, you know, people only leave, they don't leave jobs, they leave their manager. But this is wild just how much that impacts you. And clearly one of the takeaways might be go, if you're having a bad time, find a better manager. As you said, easier said than done.

Yeah, but there's a couple of things here I want to also note before we move on. First of all, we are in the era of the great flattening. We're in the era of founder mode. People have more direct reports now than ever before. We're trying to keep things as flat as possible and remove hierarchy. I'm concerned about this. I think obviously there are good arguments for flatness and lack of hierarchy, but I am curious to see where this goes given the importance of who your manager is on your wellbeing. And then the second thing is we talked earlier about being overworked, about this squeeze that AI has on us. Who's the person more than anyone else who kind of manages that squeeze? It's your manager, right? It's your manager who protects you. It's your manager who in many ways almost dictates how much you may be overworked or not. And so, yeah, this matters more than ever before. And I'm definitely concerned that some of the negative phenomenon we're seeing are a function of what we're doing to managers in tech and How we're building out our organizations.

Such an interesting point. We, whether we do it now or next time, just looking at these metrics for managers, like how much more burned out are they? How much less happy and optimistic are they? Would be really interesting. There's a couple of notes here in the actual post that I want to highlight that I thought are really interesting. One is just core takeaway here is the biggest lever you have to increase retention in your company is improve your managers. Put people on with, connect with people with better managers, basically. So interesting. That's like a thing you can do. Obviously easier said than done, but that's the biggest lever of things you can change. And then the other thing you noted is the worst rated managers cluster in data/analytics and design, poor design.

Yeah. So, and I'm not sure there's a clear explanation for that. I think one possible explanation is that, again, you know, managers are just people too. And so design managers and data and analytic managers are in design and in analytics. They are suffering clearly based on what we saw. And I think it's hard to separate how you feel in tech from your job as a manager. It's hard not to put some of your negative energy onto your team and the people you work with. And so, I have a lot of empathy for design managers, research managers, data and analytics managers, and other managers in tech who are having a hard time right now, and they're not feeling energized. And unfortunately, some of that is being pushed onto their direct reports. Such a good point. And then I very much appreciate in some of the companies I've worked for, having the opportunity to go through manager training, which is something that's still all too rare, I feel, within organizations. If you are listening to this and you are a leader in an organization, if you are C-suite at a company, Please invest more in your managers. And if you're looking for a job right now, consider carefully who your manager might be, because probably nothing will have more impact on your wellbeing than who that person ends up being.

And to build on how difficult things are for companies right now, the level of poaching and offers throwing out— thrown out at the best people. Just imagine how sucky it is to find a great manager, train people to become awesome managers, and then they get, you know, only to lose them, only to lose them to, you know, the labs, people with infinite money. So it's just extra hard, which is a good segue to our final takeaway, which is a really good summary of just what is, what people are feeling right now.

Yeah, it is the wildest it's ever been. We asked people to describe the state of the tech industry right now. We got thousands of responses. These were essentially open-ended responses, and we just sort of clustered those descriptions into this word cloud. I still love word clouds. Some researchers are sort of anti-word cloud. I love— I'm not gonna apologize for the word cloud. No, this is amazing.

It's like such a clear— look at this. Just look at this. This is exactly what it feels like.

Yeah, we're seeing change. We're seeing chaos. We're seeing speed. We're seeing excitement, flux, hype, a lack of stability, a potential bubble, but also crazy opportunities. Everything's evolving. Everything's unstable. It comes with costs. It's better. It's worse. It's huge. It's confusing. All smushed together. into a more chaotic industry than it's ever been. I don't understand anything about baseball, or maybe it's cricket, but we got this quote. Do you understand baseball? Does— hopefully if you're watching, you understand these things, but we got this quote. We're in the second inning of a massive shift. No one knows how it will end, but all you can do is keep taking at-bats. Is that a cricket thing? A baseball?

No, that's baseball. I think it's, I don't know how many innings. I don't know if there's innings in cricket, but it's definitely baseball. It works for baseball at least. Yeah. Basically it's just saying, keep trying, just keep taking shots, shots on goal. A lot of metaphors.

Yeah. So many good quotes. Another one I see here, which was a good one. Tech is manic, half out of touch, clinging to the bandwagon, pouring into the overhype. The other half are exhausted by the first half. That came from a senior PM. Yeah, fascinating stuff. When we look at this overall, it's crazy how we see again this bifurcation that 37% of the words used when we ran sentiment analysis were positive, 37% were negative. And the remaining 26% or so were neutral, basically an even split. We're all seeing the same thing, but half of us find it thrilling. The other half find it terrifying. I was rather taken aback when I saw these data. It's pretty wild how equally divided we are.

Yeah, man. And I think you used this quote earlier that this is the most normal it's ever going to be.

I mean, I don't know. The prophecy was given to the fools, so I'm not going to try and be a prophet. But yes, I doubt it's going to get, you know, more normal and normalized statistically than this. So we'll wait and see, I guess.

Yeah. Like if we zoom out, we're living through history right now. The amount of change and like, this is unprecedented. You know, the industrial revolution is always the metaphor people use, which is accurate, maybe crazier, maybe not. But it's, that's the interesting part. Like what an interesting time to be living through. Elon had this really interesting way of describing it. Like we're definitely living in a simulation if we're alive right now, when we're about to start building data centers in space. And AI is going to be as smart as human brains. Like, what are the chances you are alive at that moment? Which is probably okay. Maybe some higher intelligence is simulating the most interesting time in history. I don't know if that's good or bad, but—

Listen, listen, I have a lot of respect for Elon. People like Elon have chosen to focus on the universe and what's out there and the laws that govern the universe. And that's their focus. I became a psychologist by academic training, at least, because my focus has always been on people. And if I had to share a closing thought to wrap up all of this research, I would say that having the most advanced AI and the access to the best models in the world Won't determine whether your organization succeeds. We have to remember that underlying all of this stuff are people. People, we as people are going through the most massive shift and changes that we ever have in our lives. And it's people who are feeling excited and exhausted and hopeful and scared, often all at once. And we're all taking part in crafting and building this future that we hope still has a place for us in a few years. And so I keep that in mind all the time. It's people driving these innovations. It's incredible people building these technologies. My focus will always be on the people. And I hope that if you're out there watching this, you take care of yourself, you touch grass, you take a moment to reflect on what you want for yourself in your career. And you remember again that it's fine to feel all of the emotions and you should just Do whatever works for you to get through this wild period in the tech industry.

So kind of building on that, you spend a lot of time thinking through the results and what people can actually do with this data, because it's one thing to just report, here's what people are feeling. Okay, cool. What should people do? So there's a really important section at the end of the report that we should spend a little time on, which is just what Where do we go from here? What does this tell us we should be doing if we could do anything to kind of move ourselves basically into a happier place?

So starting with, if you are an employee, you know, especially if you are an IC working at a company, one thing we saw people who feel amplified and energized reporting is that they actually went deep on specific tasks and specific jobs to be done. Rather than trying to be the generalist who does everything. I think it's the people who try to be or lean too much into being a generalist who end up getting severely burnt out, right? And so I just want to caution people a little bit away from the narratives that you need to be a generalist at this point and just do all of the things and completely ignore the core parts of your role. I think that's a bad Bad idea. And based on what people are reporting, it's not going to end up with you at least feeling good, right? I also would love for people to watch out for this squeeze, being overworked for the same pay. We deserve better. We've linked in the article to a burnout test. Take the test. See where you are at on the burnout scale. And then, you know, based on that, Reflect on where you are, talk to your manager, scope out your work again, recalibrate, realign with your manager on your work and make sure that you're not being squeezed out of being positive about your role and being successful in your role.

As you're going through this list, let me just make sure people fully understand the frame that we're— because you made these 2 buckets basically. Things you can do based on this result. One is just, if you're an employee, I think you have 5 pieces of advice. If you're a company, you have 5-ish pieces of advice. So just to be super clear, the first one is just, uh, pick a couple things you want AI to be useful for and just go deep on those couple things versus trying to spread it all around and AI has to be doing everything for you. Pick a couple things that you're most excited about and then just go really deep there. The other is this, what you said, just watch the squeeze. Watch you being squeezed and talk to your manager about, hey, my scope's increased, nothing's changed comp-wise, that kind of thing.

Absolutely. And then speak of managers again, the third point is that your manager clearly matters more than pretty much anything else when it comes to how you feel about work. Protect that relationship, invest in that relationship, build up good communication lines with your manager, learn to manage up. better, that investment in that relationship will pay off greatly in terms of how you feel. And then beyond that, first of all, if you want to try out working for a smaller company or starting your own company, clearly there are some advantages to that. And so it might be worth considering. And then if you are earlier in your career and you feel like the rungs of the ladder are slowly disappearing, and it's becoming harder to climb that ladder. I'm a huge believer in mentorship and the value of mentorship. Strong mentorship is still an incredibly effective thing. Seek the teams, seek the managers, seek the people who are willing to invest in developing you. It's incredibly valuable, especially in this era. So that's what we have for employees. And then if you are leading a team, if you are leading a company, then again, as we mentioned before, invest in your managers. It's probably some of the best money you'll ever spend. It's sad to me that only a quarter of our sample and perhaps tech workers in general rate their managers as highly effective. That to me is a major, major red flag. It's a major issue in tech. And so if you want to improve burnout, if you want to elevate enjoyment, if you want to improve retention with these crazy job offers flying around from AI labs, you have to invest in your managers. And then otherwise, manage that squeeze. People are feeling how AI is raising bars in ways that aren't sustainable. So you have to figure out the right level of expectations and the right level of productivity. Don't let that bottom rung of the ladder rot. Make sure that you're doing what you need to for entry-level people to advance because those early career people are also probably some of the most AI-native people you can find, right? They find it very natural to use these technologies in some ways more so than people who have been You know, too used to previous paradigms. So, and then selfishly, I hope that leaders pay a little bit more attention to design and research and other roles who are feeling more negative than other roles. And keep in mind that this technology AI is lifting some people and destabilizing others. And you really have to pay attention to that. We are clearly not experiencing this technology in the same way.

Amazing takeaways. I want to double down on that burnout survey that you mentioned. I want to make, we're going to link to it in the show notes, but it actually, people have said like, it sounds like dumb and why am I going to do that? I've like, I've definitely gone through periods of burnout and wasn't aware that that was, was happening. And it's so helpful to like, oh wow, this is not normal what I'm feeling right now. And knowing this, that you are okay, you're extremely burnt out right now, you, you, then you can decide what you wanna do with that information. Often it's, you know, talk to a coach, talk to your manager, take some time off if you can. But just knowing that is actually really powerful. And you made this really great, uh, quiz based on actual science and research that, that, uh, that we'll link to.

100%.

Awesome. Uh, now, um, is there anything else that we haven't talked about? Anything else you want to leave folks with? We've covered a lot, so I don't know if there's anything left. We'll obviously link them to the report where they can go deeper. We're also going to do a follow-up based on what comes out of this conversation, what we see in the comments, because this is a lot of information and a lot of scary stuff, some optimistic stuff. We can't, you know, we're not gonna have answers to everything, but we're planning to do a follow-up of just, here's what came up. Let's see if we can find any answers. But other than that, is there anything else that you wanna share?

There's one interesting phenomenon that I wanted to mention. We're starting to see this AI guilt, and in particular amongst people who are early in their career in the sense that People who are early in their career feel like leveraging this technology is a little bit like cheating in a sense. And that guilt declines with seniority. And in particular, we're seeing people in actually product marketing and data and analytics, which showed up previously in a couple of places, feeling the most guilt. This is related to the well-known and well-established imposter phenomenon, right? Like, I'm not good enough. Competent people feeling like their success isn't really theirs, it's someone else's. Except this time we're putting that on AI, on a technology rather than other people. I would say to all of you who might be feeling that guilt, AI is an incredible technology. Leverage it, learn how to leverage it. I doubt it's going away. It's the worst it's ever going to be today. It's only getting better. So there's no reason to feel guilty about leveraging it. On the contrary, I think inevitably we all are all the time.

Well, to close note, I just want to appreciate you. It's incredible the work that you've done here and the work that we've done together over the many surveys. It's just like a side thing you do with me, running like, I don't know, one of the biggest surveys out there around this stuff, maybe the biggest, analyzing it, writing it so beautifully. So I think this is a really unique and special report, and I appreciate you for doing this with me. I'm really happy about where this all goes and And just what we're doing for folks.

Thank you so, so much.

Well, with that, Noam, where can people find you online if they want to reach out, maybe follow up questions, and how can listeners be useful to you?

Yeah, so the best places to find me are on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with anyone who wants to connect on LinkedIn or within Lenny's community within your Slack. I hang out there and always happy to talk to people within the community. So Please catch me on LinkedIn or on Slack. That would be best.

How can listeners be useful to you, Noam?

If you are watching this, what I would like to convey is that, um, I hope this research has been helpful to you. And more than anything, I hope that you consider participating in future research projects of ours. Um, I'm really, really glad that we get to do these things, Lenny, and, and I want to give all of you watching the opportunity to learn more about what's going on in tech. How you can be better at your job, you know, how you can feel better about your job and all things in between. We plan to continue conducting both quick polls of the community, in-depth, longer-form surveys, interviews, all sorts of things. And so if you get a message, an email, a Slack about a research project, please participate. Would love to hear your voices, hear your perspectives, and then share that back with the community. And hopefully it makes us all better at our jobs and also feel better about our jobs. Because I do hope that even though much of this was a little bit tough and perhaps negative, I too, Lenny, am an eternal optimist. I'm a techno optimist. I believe this is going in good directions. And I want to make sure we capture that accurately. So yeah, please participate. We'd love to see you in our next research project.

Excellent ask. With that, Noam, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks a bunch.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.