How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal)

**Noam Segal** (0:00)
Bad news for the tech community.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
Burnout at work is a major problem, and AI could add to this already overwhelmed employee problem.

**Noam Segal** (0:10)
The honeymoon period with AI is over. When people are asked, what are you afraid of? Losing my job to AI is actually second to last. What we saw rise up to the top is the expectation to do more for the same pay.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:25)
We did this survey on how people are feeling in tech right now. Burnout is increasing significantly. Optimism is declining. It's never been crazier.

**Noam Segal** (0:37)
When are we going to get to the optimistic part of this episode? Half of the people in tech are feeling incredible. And the other half, then she told us, my brain is rotting, my work feels worse.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:52)
Elon had this really interesting way of describing it. We're definitely living in a simulation if we're alive right now. When we're about to start building data centers in space, and AI is going to be the smartest human, what does this tell us we should be doing if we can do anything?

**Noam Segal** (1:04)
We're in the second inning of a massive shift. No one knows how it will end, but all you can do is...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:13)
Today my guest is Noam Segal. Noam and I go a long ways back. We worked together at Airbnb for many years where he was my research partner. Since then, he went on to be a research leader at Intercom, Twitter, Wealthfront, Meta, Zapier, and Figma. Noam is so amazing, and 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, which we plan to run every year. This is the second time we run it, and the results are so interesting. I believe this is the largest survey of its kind, looking at how people in tech feel about their jobs, and AI, and layoffs, and burnout, and the future of their careers. There's so much in this, and basically this episode is a conversation about the results. At the end of the conversation, we go through a bunch of advice on what you might do if you are currently on the struggle bus and trying to figure out what to do. I'm so excited for this episode. I'm so excited for this report. A big thank you to Noam for doing the work to create the survey, run the survey, analyze the survey, and write the post that we will link to. It is so good. Before we get into it, do not forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Noam Segal.
Noam, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Noam Segal** (2:40)
Thank you so much, Lenny. It's such an incredible experience to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:46)
It's my pleasure. We've actually worked together for a long time and few people know this. You were the researcher on our team when I was at Airbnb. It was like 10 years ago.

**Noam Segal** (2:54)
Decades ago, a decade ago, Lenny. So much has changed.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:58)
So much has changed.

**Noam Segal** (2:59)
So much has changed.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:01)
Which is a great segue to what we're going to be talking about today, which is we did this survey on how people are feeling in tech right now.
It's never been crazier. And so we did this report on just how are people feeling. And this is the second time we've done this. We ran this a year ago. And the idea here is we're going to have this yearly tech sentiment survey that's going to track how tech people are feeling. Before we get into the takeaways, what's kind of the...
Give us a little context just on this survey. Like how you ran it, how... What are we looking at, anything people need to know?

**Noam Segal** (3:34)
Yes, it's your point. This is the second time we're running this survey, which I really feel is unique in the tech industry. I appreciate you for giving me the opportunity and giving us an opportunity as a community to learn more about how we're all feeling in tech. I'm not aware of any survey like this at this scale, looking at these things. 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. We actually followed up on the burnout point, and we created the Armour Framework, if you remember, and I'm really glad we did that. This year, we surveyed about 6,000 people from product, engineering, design, research, pretty much any role, marketing, pretty much any role in tech, and the results were very interesting. So I'm very excited to jump into them.