Noam Siegel

1. Key Themes

The Great Bifurcation: Tech's 50/50 Split

The most striking top-line finding is that AI has cleanly split the tech workforce in two. Half feel amplified and energized; the other half feel destabilized, redefined, or diminished. This split is not a soft trend — it's measured with effect sizes three times larger than any other workplace variable ever measured in this survey series.

"Half of the people in tech are feeling incredible, energized, amplified, excited about the technology and the future of their role. And the other half feel like the future is unclear. They feel destabilized. They feel diminished." 00:00:41

"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 on how people are feeling about work more so than anything else we've seen." 00:12:32

Burnout Is Surging, Optimism Is Falling — Simultaneously

Despite AI being positioned as a productivity unlock, burnout crossed the majority threshold — jumping from 44.7% to 54.7% in a single year. Career optimism simultaneously fell from 54.8% to 48.7%. The productivity gains are being immediately plowed back into higher expectations, not into relief.

"The speed AI unlocked got plowed straight back into expectations. Every gain becomes a new baseline and the people expected to hit it are running out of room to breathe." 00:55:09

"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." 00:22:23

The Real Fear Is Not Job Loss — It's Being Squeezed for the Same Pay

The dominant narrative in the press is fear of replacement by AI. The data shows something far more immediate and operational: workers' top fear is being expected to do dramatically more work for the same compensation, with the unsustainable pace of change as the second-ranked concern. Losing one's job to AI ranked second to last.

"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." 00:00:10

Productivity Gains Are Real, But Quality and Cognitive Sharpness Are Declining

97.2% of respondents say AI makes them better at their job. But when probed deeper, "better" means faster and more output, not higher quality. More troublingly, workers are self-reporting cognitive atrophy — a "brain rot" where judgment and critical thinking are being quietly eroded by over-reliance on AI outputs.

"My brain is rotting. My work feels worse... people essentially told us the deeper cost of all of this is the cost of using AI on thinking and judgment." 00:00:41

"Every time you not the AI solve a problem and get over a barrier, 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're lowering that baseline." 00:51:58

No One Would Recommend Their Role — Not Even Founders

A role-NPS question found that every single function in tech — from sales to engineering to design to founders — scored negative. No role scored positive. This is arguably the starkest single data point in the report: people enjoy their current work, but they are actively warning others away from the field.

"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." 00:31:37

"It's sort of like saying, 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." 00:32:05

Managers Matter More Than Almost Anything Else — And Most Are Rated Ineffective

Two years running, manager effectiveness shows one of the largest measured effects on worker wellbeing. Workers with highly effective managers report ~65% higher job enjoyment and dramatically lower burnout. Yet only 25% of workers rate their manager as highly effective, and 36% rate their manager as ineffective.

"If you have an extremely effective manager, for example, you're reporting around 65% higher job enjoyment and dramatically lower burnout. The problem is the supply. Only about 25% of the sample rates their manager as highly effective." 01:13:01

"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 am concerned about this." 01:14:43

Founders and Small-Company Workers Are Consistently the Happiest

For the second year running, founders top every positive metric: 71% career optimism, lowest burnout, lowest layoff worry, most AI excitement. Company size correlates linearly and without exception with burnout — the larger the company, the worse every metric gets.

"Founders are still many founders are still moderately or at least moderately burnt out — 47% of founders. And as we said earlier, even founders aren't very likely to recommend being a founder to other people right now." 01:08:25

"Whether it's optimism, whether it's burnout, layoff worry, or whether people would recommend their job — you're 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." 01:07:32

Designers and Researchers Are the Hardest Hit

Designers and researchers lead every negative metric: most likely to feel destabilized or diminished, most likely to report being tired, overwhelmed, or anxious, most worried about job loss, and least likely to recommend their role. Data analysts are the single most worried function about actual job replacement by AI.

"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 being tired, overwhelmed, or anxious, researchers and designers lead the pack in a negative way." 01:01:23

The "Smiling Exhaustion" Phenomenon — A New Form of Burnout

Classic burnout came from disengagement. The new variant is its opposite: people are genuinely excited, shipping more than ever, finding it fun — and burning out anyway because there is no off switch and the rules keep rewriting themselves daily.

"Smiling exhaustion... people almost feeling reborn on the one hand. 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. And so the tempo is absolutely brutal." 00:58:15

AI Guilt Is an Emerging Psychological Phenomenon

An entirely new data signal appeared: workers, especially early-career employees in product marketing and data analytics, feel guilty for using AI — framing it as cheating and experiencing it as a variant of impostor syndrome. This guilt declines with seniority.

"We're starting to see this AI guilt. 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 technology is a little bit like cheating in a sense. And that guilt declines with seniority." 01:32:03

2. Contrarian Perspectives

The "Best Time to Be a Founder" Narrative Is Overstated — Even Founders Don't Buy It

The widely circulated meme that this is the golden era of the solo or duo founder is not validated by the people actually living it. Founders are the happiest group in tech, yes — but they still score negative on role NPS and would not recommend founding to others. The optimism is relative, not absolute.

"There's a strong narrative right now that there's never been a better time to be a founder... And yet people who are currently in that role aren't very excited about recommending it to other people." 00:33:07

AI Lowers the Floor But Does Not Raise the Ceiling — And Quality Is Suffering

Contrary to the dominant narrative that AI makes everyone's work better, workers themselves report that speed increased but quality did not. AI enables more output, not better output. And the cognitive side-effect — atrophied judgment — makes the person producing that output less sharp over time.

"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. But the output isn't of higher quality... AI has mostly lowered the bar, but it hasn't raised the ceiling." 00:47:03 and 00:39:46

Flatness and "Founder Mode" May Be Actively Harming Workers

The organizational trend toward flat hierarchies and fewer managers — celebrated across the industry — is directly in tension with the finding that manager quality is the single largest lever on employee wellbeing. Fewer, more stretched managers means more ineffective management and, by extension, worse outcomes for workers.

"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... I am curious to see where this goes, given the importance of who your manager is on your well-being." 01:14:43

The "Build a Thousand Prototypes" Approach Will Make Burnout Worse, Not Better

A popular piece of advice circulating in product circles is that because building is now cheap, you should just ship constantly and iterate. Noam argues this is precisely the mechanism producing the surge in burnout — more shipping without more meaning is not a solution; it's the problem.

"I've heard the narratives around it's so cheap to build, just build a thousand prototypes and see what works... I would suggest that we're just going to get even more burnt out that way. I would not recommend that approach personally." 00:39:17

Junior Workers May Be the Best AI Adopters — And Companies Are Undervaluing Them

The dominant concern is that junior workers are the most threatened by AI. The contrarian read from the data is that early-career people are the most AI-native and that letting the bottom rungs of the career ladder disappear destroys a talent pipeline that companies will desperately need.

"Don't let that bottom rung of the ladder rot... those early career people are also probably some of the most AI-native people you can find. They find it very natural to use these technologies in some ways, more so than people who have been too used to previous paradigms." 01:29:23

3. Companies Identified

Cognition / Devin

AI coding agent company. Scott Wu, co-founder, is cited for describing Devin's capability progression as climbing a ladder from high school CS student to junior engineer to now senior or staff-level engineer — a vivid metaphor for why lower-seniority workers feel their career rungs are being pulled away.

"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." 00:37:12

Anthropic

AI lab, makers of Claude. Jenny Wen, who leads design for Claude at Anthropic, is cited as an example of a leader championing the importance of taste and design in AI products.

"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." 01:03:24

Linear

Product and project management software. CEO Karri Saarinen is cited as someone who articulates the importance of craft and quality in building products.

"People like Karri, Linear's CEO, who talked so beautifully about the importance of quality and how you build products." 01:02:55

Ramp

Finance automation platform. Co-founder/CEO Jeff Raider is cited for the insight that burnout is worst when velocity is lowest — i.e., when effort doesn't move things forward.

"Jeff from Ramp... 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." 00:21:28

Airbnb

Travel marketplace. Referenced as the shared professional origin of both Lenny and Noam, and as a proxy for the very different cultural vibe in tech a decade ago versus today.

"You and I both noticed... we worked together at Airbnb for many years... the vibe was very different then in tech." 00:06:13 and 00:11:08

WorkOS

Enterprise authentication and compliance platform. Described as the infrastructure layer for enterprise readiness — "essentially Stripe for enterprise features" — used by OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, and Clay.

"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." 00:04:40

Mercury

Business banking fintech. Their new "Command" conversational interface lets users query financial data conversationally, used by Lenny to analyze sponsor revenue.

"They launched Command, a conversational interface built directly into Mercury, which acts as your financial operator." 00:44:30

4. People Identified

Research leader and certified coach with tenures at Airbnb, Intercom, Twitter, Wealthfront, Meta, Zapier, and Figma. Co-creator of the annual tech worker sentiment survey. Identified as a rigorous research practitioner who also built NPSistheworst.com (and bought NPSisthebest.com just to redirect it) and developed the ARM burnout framework.

"Over the past couple of 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." 00:01:13

Nikhil Singhal

Described as an incredible product leader and "friend of the pod." Coined the term "smiling exhaustion" to capture the new form of AI-era burnout — simultaneously exhilarated and drained.

"Nikhil Singhal mentioned in an episode with you... he talks about smiling exhaustion. And I just love that term because I think it captures this ambivalence." 00:57:22

Karri Saarinen

CEO of Linear. Cited for articulating a strong philosophy around quality and craft in product building — positioned as a counterweight to the "just ship faster" AI-era ethos.

"People like Karri, Linear's CEO, who talked so beautifully about the importance of quality and how you build products." 01:02:55

Katie Dill

Design leader. Cited alongside Karri Saarinen as someone who has made a compelling public case for the enduring importance of taste and beauty in product design.

"Katie Dill comes to mind. She had a whole conversation around taste and beauty." 01:02:55

Jenny Wen

Head of Design for Claude at Anthropic. Cited as a leader championing taste and judgment inside one of the most consequential AI labs.

"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." 01:03:24

Scott Wu

Co-founder of Cognition, makers of the Devin AI coding agent. Cited for his vivid "ladder" framing of AI capability progression, which Noam extends into a metaphor for workers feeling their career rungs disappearing.

"I believe you spoke in the past to Scott Wu, the co-founder of Cognition, Devin. And I recall that when he described the product, he talked about this ladder." 00:36:45

Simon Willis

Appeared on Lenny's podcast previously. Cited for discussing the risk of skill atrophy and the need for conscious resistance to cognitive offloading.

"You had Simon Willis 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." 00:49:56

Elena Werner

Tech writer/commentator. Her piece on "AI confidence theater" — the performative certainty people display about AI's impact ("coding is dead, design is dead") masking real ambivalence — is cited as a framing device for the entire survey's findings.

"Elena Werner... talking about the AI confidence theater and how in conversations these days in tech, everything is dead. Coding is dead. Design is dead. SaaS is dead." 00:06:13

5. Operating Insights

The Biggest Retention Lever You Have Is Manager Quality — Not Comp, Not Perks

The data shows manager effectiveness produces ~65% higher job enjoyment and is the single largest controllable variable in worker wellbeing. With only 25% of managers rated highly effective, there is massive room for improvement — and given poaching by AI labs, retention is existential.

"The biggest lever you have to increase retention in your company is improve your managers... invest in your managers. It's probably some of the best money you'll ever, ever spend." 01:16:01 and 00:28:54

Org Flattening Is Backfiring — More Direct Reports Means More Ineffective Management

"Founder mode" and flattening are cultural trends that directly conflict with what the data says drives employee wellbeing. Leaders should audit span of control and invest in manager training before cutting management layers further.

"We are in the era of the great flattening... People have more direct reports now than ever before... I am concerned about this, given the importance of who your manager is on your well-being." 01:14:43

Scope Creep Is the New Comp Problem — And Employees Notice

Workers are acutely aware they are being squeezed to do dramatically more for the same pay. Companies that fail to either adjust compensation, scope, or both will face resentment and burnout. Managers need to explicitly recalibrate workload expectations rather than passively letting AI productivity gains become new baselines.

"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." 01:29:23

Protect Junior Talent Pipeline — Early-Career Workers Are Actually Your Best AI Adopters

The industry narrative says AI threatens junior roles. The operational implication is the inverse: if the bottom rungs of the ladder disappear, companies lose the people most naturally fluent with AI tools. Early-career workers need deliberate investment in mentorship and development, not benign neglect.

"Don't let that bottom rung of the ladder rot... those early career people are also probably some of the most AI-native people you can find." 01:29:23

Encourage Depth Over Breadth in AI Adoption — Generalism Accelerates Burnout

Workers who focused deeply on specific AI use cases reported feeling more amplified. Workers who tried to use AI for everything reported worse burnout. As a manager or leader, guide teams toward picking two or three high-leverage AI applications and going deep, rather than mandating universal adoption across all workflows.

"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 lean too much into being a generalist who end up getting severely burnt out." 01:25:19

6. Overlooked Insights

Data Analysts Are the Single Most Worried Function About AI Job Replacement — and Nobody Is Talking About It

Design and research get all the attention as the "most threatened" roles. But buried in the data is that data analysts are actually the most worried about outright job replacement. This has enormous implications: data teams are central to every company's decision-making infrastructure, and if they are the most at-risk and most anxious, companies may be quietly hollowing out their capacity to make evidence-based decisions precisely when the AI transition demands more rigorous measurement, not less.

"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... The data analysts basically are the most worried about losing their job." 01:05:20

AI Guilt Is Causing Imposter Syndrome at Scale — Particularly in Functions That Underpin Strategic Decisions

The emergence of "AI guilt" — the feeling that using AI is cheating — was mentioned only briefly but has serious downstream implications. It is concentrated in product marketing (who sets positioning and messaging) and data analytics (who drive decisions), and it is highest among early-career workers. This means the people most likely to feel guilty are also the people least likely to push back when AI output is wrong, creating a hidden quality-control failure layer inside organizations. The self-attenuation of critical judgment, combined with guilt-driven reluctance to interrogate AI outputs, is a compounding risk that almost no one in the conversation flagged explicitly.

"We're starting to see this AI guilt... people who are early in their career feel like leveraging the technology is a little bit like cheating in a sense... In particular, we're seeing people in actually product marketing and data and analytics feeling the most guilt." 01:32:03