> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://plantis.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two > The 2026 survey reveals a bifurcated tech workforce: one group feels empowered by AI while the other feels uncertain and burned out, with overall burn **Original**: [Lenny Rachitsky](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026) · 07/07/2026 ## Summary The 2026 survey reveals a bifurcated tech workforce: one group feels empowered by AI while the other feels uncertain and burned out, with overall burnout rising significantly. ## Key Insights > "The workforce is splitting in two." > > — Describing the division in how tech workers perceive their roles in relation to AI. > "Burnout is surging, and optimism is fading." > > — Highlighting the concerning trends in worker sentiment from the survey results. > "The defining feeling about AI is ambivalence." > > — Summarizing the mixed emotions tech workers have regarding AI's impact on their careers. ## Topics * [tech-workforce](/kb/topics/tech-workforce) * [ai-impact](/kb/topics/ai-impact) * [burnout](/kb/topics/burnout) * [career-optimism](/kb/topics/career-optimism) *** ## Full Article Hey there, Im Lenny. Each week, I share deeply researched product, growth, and career advice. For more: Lennys Podcast | Lennybot | How I AI | Become an AI-Native Builder and other favorite AI/PM coursesSubscribe nowP.S. Get a full free year of Google AI, Cursor, Lovable, Notion, Manus, Replit, Gamma, n8n, Canva, ElevenLabs, Factory, Wispr Flow, Fin, Supabase, Bolt, Linear, PostHog, Framer, Railway, Granola, Warp, Gumloop, Magic Patterns, Mobbin, ChatPRD, and Stripe Atlas, by becoming an Insider subscriber. Yes, this is for real.A year ago, we ran our first large-scale survey of how tech workers feel about their jobs and careers. We summed up what emerged in four words: burned out, but optimistic. Today were back with the results from our 2026 survey, and its a tale of two workforces.One half feels amplified by AImore capable, more confident, more excited than theyve been in their entire career. The other half feels shaken by itless sure of their value and whether theres still a place for them. Which side of that line people fall on predicts how they feel about their career more than anything else, including their current role, seniority, company size, or any other measure we collected. The workforce is bifurcating into two realities.But theres more: Burnout overall jumped 11 points in a single year, and four in 10 respondents are worried about losing their job. Even those who feel optimistic about their own career may not recommend that friends follow their path. In the AI era, everyone agrees the ground is moving. No one is sure yet if its an earthquake or a launch.We think these findings are important enough that were making this post free for everyone.Lets break it down.Our biggest takeawaysThe workforce is splitting in two. Tech workers are either amplified by AI or shaken by it, and that divide shapes their feelings about work more than any title, tenure, or company.Burnout is surging, and optimism is fading. Significant burnout rose from 44.7% to 55.7% of respondents, while career optimism fell from 54.8% to 48.7%. Those who feel destabilized by AI are feeling the least optimistic and the most burned out. A worrisome trend.Tech workers wouldnt recommend their own field. More than half (53%) would steer a newcomer away from a career in their role, even though theyre optimistic about their own future.Productivity is up, but quality is questionable. 82% say AI is making them measurably more productive, but many worry the gains are coming at the cost of the sharpness of the work and the worker.The underlying fear is of being overworked. Only 22% worry about losing my job to AI. Far more worry about being expected to do more for the same pay (51%), getting trapped in an unsustainable pace (46%), and the quality of their work going down (41%).Almost everyone is ambivalent. 77% of respondents picked at least one positive and one negative emotion about AI. The average person selected more than five emotions. The defining feeling about AI is ambivalence.Designers and researchers are the most worried. They report the most AI anxiety, the most fear of job loss, the worst-rated managers, and the lowest willingness to recommend their field. Its a continuation of a trend we flagged last year.Founders are still the happiest people in tech, and small companies are still the best places to work. Both findings replicate from 2025, and both are statistically robust.Managers are still the biggest lever for happiness. Manager quality remains the strongest driver of burnout and one of the strongest drivers of everything else.The industry, in tech workers own words, is chaotic. Asked to describe the state of tech in a sentence, the most common theme by far was chaos, though the sentiment was split almost evenly between excitement and dread.Takeaway 1: The workforce is splitting in twoTo understand AIs deeper impact on people, we asked an existential question: How has working with AI shifted how you see yourself as a professional? We gave respondents five options. Heres how they responded:Amplified (I can do more, and better): 49.0%Redefined (My role is changing shape, but I dont see that as clearly positive or negative): 27.4%Destabilized (Im less sure where I stand or whats really mine): 13.9%Diminished (I feel less essential or less valuable): 5.0%Unchanged: 3.2%When we lined up that question against the rest of the survey, the four identity groups differed dramatically:As you go from amplified to diminished, optimism collapses, burnout climbs, layoff fear climbs, and willingness to recommend the field falls off. The people who feel amplified by AI are thriving. Those who feel diminished by it are in distress on every measure.To make sure this wasnt an artifact, we ran the numbers a few different ways:In a regression pitting every variable against each other, AI-identity stance was the single strongest predictor of career optimism (standardized = +0.39) and of whether someone would recommend their field ( = +0.60)stronger than role, level, and company size combined.As an effect size, the gap between the amplified and diminished groups on optimism is large (Cohens d 1.55). For context, the famously strong founder effect well discuss later clocks in at d 0.56. The AI divide is roughly three times as large as that. It is, by a wide margin, the biggest effect in the dataset.The question that best predicts how a tech worker feels about their work, in 2026, is no longer What do you do? or Where do you work? Its What has AI done to your sense of who you are?Meet the four tech workers of 2026We did one more pass on this data: instead of using a single identity question, we clustered respondents based on the full pattern of emotions they reported about AI. Four types emerged, and you almost certainly recognize them.The Energized (41%). The all-in adopters. They lead with excited (91%), curious (83%), and hopeful (59%). Theyre the most optimistic group, the least burned out, and the only segment with a clearly positive read on their field. For them, AI truly seems like a superpower.Product has become fun again! You become an explorer, you play around . . . you spend long hours full of excitement. Were in an amusement park. PM, Principal ICThe Conflicted (35%). The ambivalent center of gravityand the largest group after the Amplified. Their signature emotions are conflictedholding positive and negative feelings at once (68%)and curious (64%), trailed closely by overwhelmed (56%) and tired (55%). They havent soured on AI; theyre just exhausted by the work of keeping up with it while holding two feelings at the same time.Im simultaneously having the most fun Ive had as a product builder and also feeling the most uncertainty Ive felt. Im confident Ill be able to keep my skills sharp and adapt, but Im not yet sure what it is that Ill need to adapt into. PM, Senior ICThe Disoriented (12%). Defined almost entirely by one feeling: disorientedmy role keeps shifting, layered with overwhelmed (74%) and tired (73%). These are people watching their job change shape beneath them faster than they can find their footing again. They still think AI is somewhat useful. Theyre not refusers. Theyre just losing the thread of their role in the workplace.Things are so uncertain, were like farmers on the cusp of the industrial revolution. We know going into farming is the wisest long-term career choice, but we dont see a clear path. This kind of uncertainty crowds out productivity. VP ProductThe Resentful (12%). The burned-out and checked-out. Every one of them selected resentfulI feel pressured to use AI, and they cluster with tired, conflicted, and overwhelmed. They report the lowest optimism, the lowest willingness to recommend their field, and the lowest sense that AI is helping them at all. This is AI fatigue transformed into resistance.Tech overall kind of sucks right now. We used to adopt new technology because we were excited about the cool new things we could do. Now all we hear is Use AI or you will lose your joband then people get fired anyway. I hate it. Director of ProductTakeaway 2: Burnout is surging, and optimism is fadingSignificant burnout is now the majority experience for tech workers. 55.7% of working tech professionals report significant burnoutmeaning they describe themselves as moderately, very, or completely burned out. Last year, that number was 44.7%. More than a quarter (26.2%) are now very or completely burned out.Career optimism is dropping. Fewer than half (48.7%) of respondents are optimistic about the future of their career (down from 54.8% being optimistic last year). Weve gone from burned out but optimistic in 2025 to significantly burned out, and not that optimistic a year later. Were curious (and a little scared) about how this will look in a year.That being said, job enjoyment is holding up: 42.6% enjoy their work very much or extremely; another 36.7% rate it moderately; and only about one in five (20.6%) enjoy it slightly or not at all.Why the apparent contradiction? Enjoyment, burnout, and optimism are different constructs. Enjoyment is about the work itself, and people still like the work. Burnout is about pace, and people are increasingly worn out by how much they have to do. Optimism is about where things are heading. You can love your craft, be worn out by how much of it youre doing, and feel doubt about the future all at once.How worried are you about layoffs?This year, we also added a question to the survey: How worried are you about being laid off in the next year?41.2% are at least moderately worried, including 19.9% who are very or extremely worried. 28% arent worried at all. So roughly four in 10 tech workers are carrying real job-security anxiety into their weeka sizable undercurrent.What makes layoff worry worth its own question is how tightly its bound to everything else. Of all the things we measured, layoff worry is the single strongest correlate of career pessimism (r = 0.47). Nothing else tracks negative outlook as closely. When people are scared of losing their jobs, their optimism goes first.Well come back to who is most worried later. Its not who you might guess.Takeaway 3: Tech workers wouldnt recommend their own fieldThis year, we asked an NPS-like question about peoples careers and roles: On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend a career in your role to a friend starting out today?More than half of working tech professionals would actively steer a newcomer away from the path they chose. That translates to an average NPS score of 39. Moreover, a third of the people who call themselves optimistic still wouldnt recommend their own field.The cleanest way to say it: The waters fine; dont come in. People have largely made peace with their own trajectory. Theyve got the skills, the relationships, and the seniority to ride it out. But theyve lost faith that the on-ramp still works for someone behind them.Im lucky Im later in my career . . . AI can augment what Ive built. I think I wont be in a position to hire and mentor new PMs, but Ill be safe. Which feels really crappy to say.Im at the point where I can just retire and choose not to, so Im not worried about my own career. But Im worried about the younger generations.The recommendation score varies enormously by role, and the spread is its own story.Founders would (just barely) still wave you in. Designers and researchers very much would not. And the score climbs steadily with seniority: senior and staff-level individual contributors are the least likely to recommend their field (both at NPS 49), while VPs (23) and founders (5) are the most. The further up youve climbed, the more the ladder still looks worth it; the people on the rungs below are the ones telling others not to start the climb.Takeaway 4: Productivity is up, but quality is questionableGiven the rising burnout, the layoff anxiety, the doom in the discourse, youd expect tech workers to be rather sour on AI. Theyre not.At the individual level, the AI numbers are among the most positive in the survey. 82% say AI is already making them at least moderately better at their job, and nearly half (49.4%) say very much or extremely. 60% feel confident or ahead of their peers in AI skills, compared with just 22.5% who feel anxious or behind.But then we looked closer at what better at my job means. When we asked people to describe in their own words how AI had changed their work, better turned out to mean producing more and faster, but not higher quality. The productivity gains are coupled with deep unease about the costs of leveraging AI.I can do more, faster, but not better.Amplified and destabilized at the same time. We just set a new denominator for the job. And it moves higher and higher every month.And the cost isnt only in the quality of outputs. A striking number of people described their focus, their judgment, and their thinking as suffering:Im amplified, but my brain is rotting, and my work feels worse.I feel like I dont think hard enough anymoreI just follow Claude. I dont fully understand what I merge.I miss feeling smart and having aha moments. I miss talking \[to] and brainstorming \[with] humans instead of machines.The productivity gains are real, but the quality of the work and the sharpness of the person producing it are taking a hit. The bar keeps rising to match what AI makes possible, and a growing share of people feel that neither the output nor their own mind is keeping up.Takeaway 5: The underlying fear is of being overworkedRespondents number-one worry about AIs impact on their career is the squeezeAI raised the bar for output, and the reward was . . . more output expected, for the same paycheck.Theyre scared that the work will get harder, faster, and cheaper, and that theyll be expected to keep smiling through it.It feels like the dominant narrative about AI and work has been about replacement: the robots are coming for your job. Clearly, thats not what tech workers are most afraid of. Losing my job to AI came in near the bottom of the list, at 22%.Remember the AI is replacing parts of my job question? Half of the respondents say its happening to at least a moderate extent. Youd expect that feeling to drive layoff anxiety, but it doesnt. The correlation between AI is taking over parts of my job and Im worried about being laid off is essentially zero (r = +0.05).What people are actually worried about is being asked to do more for the same pay, and watching the quality of their work slip.It shows up vividly in the open-ended answers:More and more work is being handed off to me because I can use AI to get it done. But that makes it impossible to keep up with quality standards and not burn out.AI helps with the toil, but then its also an enabler to do even more toil.When we automate intellectual tasks, well have to do high-value creative or strategic work onlydoing that eight hours a day is not realistic. I used to take rest during repetitive tasks.This might sound like it contradicts the layoff worry from earlier. It doesnt. People fear layoffs, but they mostly dont blame AI for them. What they fear from AI is being buried in more work.Add this all up, and you get a workforce thats more productive than ever but quietly dreading what comes next. The speed AI unlocked got plowed straight back into expectations. Every gain becomes the new baseline, and the people expected to hit it are running out of room to breathe.Takeaway 6: Almost everyone is ambivalentIf theres one feeling that defines tech workers relationship with AI in 2026, it isnt excitement, and it isnt fear. Its both, at the same time.We asked people to check off every emotion that described how they feel about AI in their work. Heres the full list, in order:The two leaders are unambiguously positive (curious, excited). But the next cluster (if we ignore conflicted) is made up of people who are overwhelmed and tired. People are curious and overwhelmed. Excited and tired. Only 33% feel hopeful, even though 64% feel excited. Excitement about the present is running well ahead of hope about where this all goes.Nikhyl Singhal named this phenomenon smiling exhaustion. The burnout of a few years ago was grimall overhead and no agency. Todays is different. People are shipping again, compensation has climbed, and many roles seem reborn. The catch is that theres no off-switch: the tempo is brutal, and the rules rewrite themselves every month. Its relentless, but it can also be exhilarating.You see this in that 51% explicitly selected holding positive and negative feelings at once. But that undercounts the real ambivalence. When we looked at who picked at least one positive and at least one negative emotion, the number jumped to 77%. The average respondent selected five or more emotions (one person selected 13). Its a workforce in which three out of four individuals are carrying a complex set of emotions about work.Takeaway 7: Designers and researchers are the most worriedIf AI is dividing the workforce, the obvious question is: along what lines? Whos getting amplified, and whos getting left behind?The clearest pattern is by role: designers and researchers are at the epicenter of AI anxiety across the board, while founders and executives are feeling the best. We measured the share of each role that landed in negative identity or emotional buckets, and the spread is stark:Among researchers, 51% are anxious about my job security, versus 15% of founders. Among designers, 63% feel overwhelmed by the pace of change and 61% feel tired, the highest of any role. Researchers are among the most likely to fear losing my job to AI (36%, just behind Data/Analytics at 38%), and designers are the most likely to feel the comp squeeze (61% selected expected to do more for the same compensation). Both report the lowest willingness to recommend their field of any role, and designers, as well see, report the worst-rated managers in the survey.Last year, designers and researchers showed the largest negative sentiment shift of any group. A year later, theyre the most negative on nearly every measure we have.As a researcher, Im acutely aware of the years of insecurities plaguing the research community. The biggest discussions for us have always been about getting a seat at the table and democratizing research across other functions. Many now feel the seat is being pulled from under us, and the work is being democratized, not to other roles but to AI.By level, the most identity-destabilized group is early-career ICs (27%). (This is a wrinkle well untangle in a moment, because those same early-career folks are, paradoxically, among the more optimistic.)And the bigger the company, the more likely its people are to feel adrift in the AI transition: 23% feel destabilized at 10,000-plus-person companies, versus 15% at companies of 1 to 10.AI is hardest on people in creative and research roles, on the most junior people, and on people working at the largest companies.Takeaway 8: Founders are the happiest people in tech, and small companies are the best places to workFor all the AI upheaval, some of last years biggest findings came back almost unchanged, and their persistence through such a turbulent year makes them all the more convincing. Founders are still the happiest people in tech, and smaller companies are still better places to work than big ones. Before you read those as good news, its worth saying what best means here. The whole industry is sitting on a high baseline of burnout and a rather negative career view, and the winners of this section are the people who feel a little less of it.Founders arent just the happiest people in techon most measures, theyre genuinely happy.Founders and executives top nearly every measure in the survey: the highest optimism, the highest job enjoyment, the lowest burnout, the lowest layoff worry, and the most excitement about AI. That gap between founders and execs versus everyone else holds up statistically. On career optimism, it measures d 0.56, a medium-size effect and the second-largest in the entire dataset, behind only the AI divide.As we wrote last year, the likeliest explanation is ownership: founders have the most control over their own destiny, and control turns out to be one of the best buffers against everything else. 71% are optimistic about their careers, they enjoy their work more than any other role, and theyre the least worried about layoffs of any group.Ownership has limits, though. Nearly half of founders (47%) are still at least moderately burned out, with 18% very or completely burned out, even with the most control and the most upside of anyone in tech. And when we asked whether theyd recommend their path to a newcomer, founders landed at an NPS of 5. That is far healthier than the fields 39, but its still bad. Even the happiest people in tech come out slightly net-negative on telling someone to follow their path.One caveat: we only surveyed people who are founders today. The ones whose startups failed arent represented, and most startups dont make it. Keep that in mind before you quit to go start something!Smaller companies are still better places to work than big ones.Company size predicts sentiment with almost eerie consistency. Walk from the smallest companies to the largest, and every measure of well-being gets steadily worse as the company grows:People at small companies are more optimistic, less burned out, less worried about layoffs, and even feel AI is helping them more, likely because they have more freedom to actually use it. The big-company blues we described last year have settled in.Look at the absolute numbers, though, not just the slope. Even at the smallest companies, 42% of people are at least moderately burned out, and the would-recommend score never climbs out of the red, sitting at 28 at 1-to-10-person shops. Small companies are winning a race to the least bad.Two smaller echoes of 2025:Where you physically work still hardly matters. There are barely any differences between how fully remote, hybrid, and in-office workers feel. Hybrid workers come out marginally the happiest (and in-office workers rate their managers the worst), but the gaps are small, just as we found last year. Employment type tells a familiar story with one twist. Founders and the self-employed are the happiest and least burned out, while contractors and freelancers are an interesting splitthey are among the least burned out (less of the grind) but the most worried about layoffs (no job security).One wrinkle you may have noticed: the largest companies (10,000+) tick up slightly in optimism and down in burnout compared with the 5,00110,000 tier, breaking the smooth gradient. But neither difference is statistically significant (5,00110,000 is our smallest sample), so the line flattens at the top rather than reversing. The one measure that does keep climbing to the very top is layoff worry. Workers at 10,000-plus-person companies are the most worried of anyone in the survey.Takeaway 9: Managers are still the biggest lever for happinessOne more finding held firm from last year, and it may be the most actionable of all. Manager effectiveness remains the strongest driver of burnout in the entire dataset (it beats role, company size, and AI sentiment), and one of the strongest drivers of everything else. The gradient is dramatic:Workers with an extremely effective manager report roughly 65% higher job enjoyment and dramatically lower burnout than those with an ineffective one. Yet only 25.5% of tech workers rate their manager as highly effective, while 36.5% rate theirs as ineffective, numbers that have barely budged since last year. The most powerful retention lever in tech is also the most neglected. (Notably, the worst-rated managers cluster in Data/Analytics and Design. The latter is a double blow, since designers are also among the most AI-anxious.)Takeaway 10: The industry is chaoticWe asked, In a sentence, how would you describe the state of the tech industry right now? About 70% of respondents answered, and the single most common theme, by a wide margin, was chaos: roughly three in 10 explicitly used words like change, chaotic, uncertain, unstable, and in flux. Another one in six described an industry moving too fast to keep up withtreadmills, hamster wheels, hurricanes, drinking from a firehose. After that came AI hype and bubble talk (12%) and then, finally, a note of excitement and opportunity (11%).A few responses capture the sentiment better than any percentage can:Were in the 2nd inning of a massive shift, and no one knows how it will end, but all you can do is keep taking at-bats.It feels like working on pure software is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.The industry feels like it has lost its center of gravityreplacing curiosity about customers with an obsession over AI, automation, and efficiency.The chaos plus hype is well-described in this quote from a senior PM:Manic. Half are out of touch, clinging to the bandwagon, making the problem worse by pouring into the overhype. The other half are exhausted by the first half. Senior IC PMWhen we ran sentiment analysis on the chaos-related quotes, the split was nearly even: 37% positive, 37% negative, and 26% neutral. The dominant theme is disorientation, but the emotional charge is truly bimodal. The same churn reads as thrilling to one person and terrifying to the next.We confirmed this by splitting the responses by who wrote them. Career optimists and career pessimists describe the same industry in opposite terms. Optimists reach for exciting, transforming, opportunity, fast-moving. Pessimists reach for chaos, layoffs, greed, dystopia. Same disruption, opposite forecasts: half the room is anxiously bracing for AIs impact; the other half is eagerly leaning into the AI era.Where do we go from here?The 2026 workforce is more burned out and less optimistic than a year ago, splitting along the fault line of AI into those who are thriving and those who are struggling, and a large, ambivalent middle caught between. Tech workers are mostly afraid of being squeezed by their jobs and increasing productivity expectations, privately convinced the field is no longer worth recommending to newcomers, while individually still finding real power and even joy in the tools. Its a complicated moment. Its also not a hopeless one.So heres what the data suggests you can actually do about it.If youre an employee:Find something impactful to do with AIthen go deep. The amplified are the people who found the two or three tasks where AI measurably changed their output and got very good at those. Trying to use AI for everything is how you end up overwhelmed and conflicted, not empowered.Watch the squeeze. The biggest career risk is silently absorbing a higher and higher bar for the same pay until youre burned out. Take our burnout test here, and if your output has doubled this year, talk to your manager about scope and compensation.Your manager matters more than almost anything. A great manager is associated with about 65% higher job enjoyment and far less burnout. If you have one, protect that relationship. If you dont, getting closer to a better one may be the highest-leverage career move available to you.Consider a smaller companyor your own. Every well-being measure in this survey improves as company size shrinks, and founders are the happiest group in tech. More autonomy and control is, year after year, the most reliable buffer against burnout and pessimism we find.If youre early-career, find mentors. The rungs are disappearing, but strong mentorship remains highly effective. Seek the teams and managers who still invest in developing people. That investment is rarer and more valuable than its ever been.If you lead a team or company:Invest in managersits still the best money youll spend. Only a quarter of tech workers rate their manager as highly effective, and nothing else in the data moves burnout, enjoyment, and retention as much. This was our top recommendation last year. Its our top recommendation again.Manage the squeeze. Your people can feel AI raising the bar, and theyre watching to see whether you turn productivity gains into impossible expectations or actual relief. The fastest way to end up with resentment on your team is to pocket the productivity and turn saved time into more work for them.Dont let the bottom rung rot. If AI is doing the entry-level work that juniors used to learn on, youre optimizing this years output by starving next years senior talent. Be deliberate about how early-career people develop when the old apprenticeship tasks are gone.Pay special attention to design and research. For two years running, people in these roles report the worst sentiment, the highest AI anxiety, and some of the worst-rated managers. Thats a retention problem and a signal worth understanding before it becomes an exodus.Treat AI adoption as a sorting risk rather than a productivity win. The same technology is lifting one part of your workforce while destabilizing another. The companies that come out of this ahead will help support the destabilized group instead of leaving them behind.The throughline, if there is one, is the same as last years: Having the most advanced AI or the fanciest offices wont determine which organizations succeed. Remembering that there are people underneath all this change willpeople who, right now, are excited and exhausted, hopeful and scared, often all at once. Those people are watching closely to see whether the future theyre helping to build will still have a place for them.Huge thanks to the 5,920 tech professionals who shared how theyre really feeling. Your candor is what makes this possible, and itll help us keep tracking where the industry is headed. Have a fulfilling and productive week.Noam (and Lenny) Appendix: Who took this survey?This years survey reached 5,920 tech professionals, of whom 5,332 are currently working. All analyses are based on currently employed tech workers.Role. As with last year, this is a product-centric audience: Product Management 46.9%, Engineering 12.6%, Founder/Executive 9.1%, Design 7.9%, Operations 4.3%, Product Marketing 4.0%, Research 3.2%, Data/Analytics 2.9%, Sales/GTM 2.8%, with a long tail of other functions.Seniority. A senior crowd: ICSenior 28.9%, ICStaff/Principal 19.9%, Director 15.4%, Manager 12.1%, Founder/Exec 10.8%, VP+ 7.4%, and ICEarly career 5.5%. Roughly 54% individual contributors and 46% managers and above.Company size. A fairly even spread, from 110-person startups (11.1%) up through 10,000-plus-person enterprises (18.0%), with the middle bands well represented.Work setup. Fully remote 47.0%, hybrid 43.0%, fully in-office just 10.0%.A methodological note for the careful reader: We made year-over-year comparisons only for questions whose wording matched across years. We redesigned much of the survey this year to focus on AI, which means a few 2025 themes (engagement, belonging, quitting intentions, career clarity) arent measured here, while others (layoff worry, the AI block, the career-recommendation score) are new. We also didnt collect age, tenure, or geography this year, so when we discuss career stage, were using job level as a proxy.If youre finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you havent already. There are group discounts, gift options, and referral bonuses available.Subscribe nowSincerely,Lenny *** ## Related Articles Lenny Rachitsky · reference · 83% similar Lenny Rachitsky · how-to · 72% similar Lenny Rachitsky · explanation · 70% similar *** Originally published at [https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026).