Why Is Burnout Rising in Tech Right Now?

Lenny Rachitsky says 44% of people in his tech survey felt burned out in 2025, and 55% said they feel burned out this year. He calls that a huge jump. The picture he describes is being asked to do more, with AI already on the desk, while other teams look faster and the company talks as if it will go out of business if it does not move.

Molly Graham reads the jump as exhaustion. Emotions are tiring, and so is trying to understand a rate of change that covers the tools and the story about the tools. One month one thing matters, and the next month it is something else. A friend at OpenAI told her it took six months to go from using AI everywhere to asking whether it was making a difference, because it is very expensive. Another leader described the same flip, from how to get people to use AI to how to get them to stop using it badly. Grief is tiring on its own. So is the survey finding that people expect to do more for the same pay. At bigger companies that can feel adversarial: the benefit to the company is clearer than the benefit to the person doing the work.

The same survey says half of the people who filled it out are the happiest they have ever felt at work. That happiness sits more with smaller teams, with people who have more authority, and with people who say AI has amplified them. Designers were the least happy group in that cut.