How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal)
with Noam Segal
12 Jul 20265 min read38m
TL;DR
A survey of 6,000 tech workers in 2026 reveals the workforce is splitting almost exactly 50/50: half feel 'amplified' by AI, half feel destabilized, disoriented, or resentful. Burnout has surged from 44.7% to 54.7% year-over-year, optimism has fallen below 50%, and — most strikingly — no role in tech, not even founders, would recommend their career path to someone entering the industry today.
Key Moments
Noam Segal
“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.”
Noam is explaining the effect size of AI identity stance compared to previously large predictors like manager quality and founder status.
“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.”
Noam is presenting the year-over-year burnout data from the tech worker sentiment survey.
“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.”
Noam is presenting NPS data showing that every role in tech — from founders to designers — scored negatively on willingness to recommend their career path.
“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.”
Noam uses the metaphor of Devon/Cognition's capability ladder to explain why junior workers feel most threatened and least likely to recommend entering tech.
Noam Segal is a seasoned user researcher and research leader who has held roles at Intercom, Twitter, Wealthfront, Meta, Zapier, and Figma. He previously worked alongside Lenny Rachitsky at Airbnb as a research partner. Noam has collaborated with Lenny on an annual tech worker sentiment survey, widely believed to be the largest of its kind tracking how people in tech feel about their jobs, AI, layoffs, and burnout.
Takeaways
1
Burnout surged 10 points in one year Significant burnout jumped from 44.7% in 2025 to 54.7% in 2026 — a remarkable rise given that AI tools were supposed to reduce workload. The cause appears to be the opposite: workers are taking on far more output (more PRs, PRDs, prototypes, agents) without working less hard, creating a high-velocity burnout dynamic rather than the stagnation-driven burnout seen historically.
2
Nobody in tech would recommend their own career Every role category surveyed — founders, engineers, PMs, designers, researchers, sales — returned a negative NPS score for recommending their role to someone entering the industry. Designers and researchers scored worst. This is a historically unprecedented signal of career uncertainty, reflecting anxiety about AI eliminating entry-level rungs before new workers can climb them.
3
AI splits the tech workforce exactly in half 50% of tech workers feel 'amplified' by AI — more capable, energized, and excited. The other 50% divide into those whose roles feel redefined (27%), destabilized (14%), or diminished (5%). This bifurcation is the single strongest predictor of burnout, optimism, and layoff worry — three times larger an effect than manager quality or founder status.
4
Seniority predicts AI optimism more than role does Executives and VPs are more likely to recommend their roles than ICs, partly because AI gives senior leaders a powerful information-processing advantage while ICs face a fragmented landscape of duplicative micro-tools and unclear ownership. The 'full gas on neutral' feeling — shipping constantly without meaningful impact — is concentrated among individual contributors.
5
Enjoyment remains high even as burnout rises Despite surging burnout, reported enjoyment of work held steady year-over-year. Workers cite two drivers: AI lets people express professional identities outside their formal role (a PM can design, an engineer can market), and it enables them to build things that felt technically impossible before. The paradox is that the same technology making work fun is also exhausting workers and threatening their futures.
6
72% of tech workers worry about being laid off Nearly three-quarters of survey respondents expressed some degree of layoff concern, with 41.2% at least moderately worried. Workers increasingly feel they are 'cutting the branch they're sitting on' — adopting AI aggressively to stay employed while watching companies use that same AI to justify headcount reductions.
7
Energized workers should redirect focus to colleagues Noam argues that the 41% of energized tech workers are over-indexing on mastering the next model or capability at the expense of workplace relationships. He recommends that high-AI adopters intentionally invest time in supporting colleagues who are in the disoriented or resentful buckets, since collaboration across these groups is increasingly strained.