Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:19:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:19:36] S1: Let's go to the next takeaway. Let's talk about burnout and optimism. [00:19:40] S0: 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 Armor 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. [00:21:11] S1: I don't know what to say about this other than that sucks. I don't like this. I get it fully. I can completely understand why people are feeling this. Pretty worrisome, the rise to a massive jump, over 10% increase in burnout, just in a year.
00:21:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:21:11] S1: I don't know what to say about this other than that sucks. I don't like this. I get it fully. I can completely understand why people are feeling this. Pretty worrisome, the rise to a massive jump, over 10% increase in burnout, just in a year. [00:21:28] S0: 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 Geoff from Ramp, 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 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. We're just taking on more stuff, more stuff, more prototypes, more PRDs, more PRs, more campaigns, more agents, more ads, and it's leading to more burnout. [00:22:54] S1: 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.
00:23:10 · Noam Segal
[00:23:10] S0: 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. 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. 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. And that's whether it's in their main job or things that they're doing on the site, 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 though 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.
00:24:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:24:55] S1: And this is another data point at the end of this, that you have a bunch of recommendations of what to do with all this information, and that connects to something that you recommend later. ... what to do with all this information, and that 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. [00:25:14] S0: 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.
00:25:14 · Noam Segal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:25:14] S0: 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. [00:26:30] S1: I feel a lot of people listening are probably feeling all this and feeling heard. So what's interesting is so far the two takeaways. One is this bifurcation that's happening, and these 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, 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. My people are having a really bad time, but then broadly, this optimism and burnout shift.
00:27:03 · Noam Segal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:27:03] S0: I think there's something addictive about this technology, and I'll speak for myself for a second and say that 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 with time- [00:28:49] S1: I don't know about growing up, but yes, I watched them early in my life.