Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal)
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- Band news for the tech community. - Burnout at work is a major problem. And AI could add to this already overwhelmed employee problem. - The honeymoon period where they eye 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. - 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. - When we 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. - 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? - We're in the second inning of a massive shift. No one knows how it will end, but all you can do is. - Today, my guest is Noam Siegel. 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.
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