Tech Worker Sentiment Survey

“The worst rated managers cluster in Data slash analytics and design.”

“And I am happy to report, as you can see here, that the top two emotions are positive emotions, curiosity, and excitement.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What you're 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, in tech right now. Founders would not recommend their roles. Neither would people in sales or go to …”

“And then finally, 12% of the sample we categorized as resentful.”

“This finding, this insight around the impact of AI on your identity and on every single other variable around your job is about three times as large as those other effects. So this technology, this era that we're in is having an outlier level outsized impact o…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The second group we called the conflicted, the ambivalent middle. These are 35% of the sample.”

“The data, data analysts basically are the most worried about losing their job.”

“Optimism around the future of our roles and our careers is falling from 54.8% in 2025 To 48.7% in 2026.”

“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 the psychology is a little bit like cheating in a sense. And that guilt declines wit…”

“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 one to 10 person startup and working for a 5000 or 10,000 person enterprise company.”

“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.”

“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 the first archetype we found is the energized tech worker, and that's 41% of our samples.”

“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 the slide is that when it comes to AI identity shifts, designers and researchers are the highest in feeling either destabilized or …”

“So if you have an extremely effective manager, for example, you're reporting around 65% higher Job enjoyment and dramatically lower burnout.”