Here’s What a Survey of 30,903 Professionals Reveals About Work and Burnout: ‘I Don’t Know Who I Am’

The AI boom is pushing ahead as the software developers behind it are wearing down. 

Stack Overflow’s 2026 Developer Survey, released earlier this week, polled 30,903 developers across 169 countries. Nearly half said they were complacent in their jobs. A third were unhappy, and 22% were happy.

Among complacent developers, burnout or tech fatigue topped the list of reasons for complacency, cited by 21%.

The findings arrive as AI rewrites what the software engineering profession means. Some developers describe being reduced to button-pushers, passing along AI output instead of solving problems themselves. 

For others, the shift to AI has triggered an identity crisis. Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das wrote in an X post last month that anxiety among tech workers is “off the charts.”

As developers lose enthusiasm for their jobs, AI is taking up more of their workday. Stack Overflow found that nearly two-thirds of respondents use AI coding assistants or agents, and 62% use general-purpose AI chatbots. 

For many, that daily use is intensive: 31% of daily AI users spend at least four hours a day using the tools. 

The findings play into what a therapist sees in her clients. Annie Wright, a Bay Area psychotherapist and executive coach, mainly works with tech employees. She told Business Insider in August that her clients had moved beyond burnout to deeper fears about identity and job security. 

“I don’t know who I am if my work gets automated,” she said, describing what clients now tell her. “I don’t know if I’m next.” 

Her clients are questioning what the next 20 years of their working lives will look like with AI in the picture. 

AI leads to less fulfilling work, says one software engineer

For Marc Backes, a senior software engineer at Directus, AI has drained some of the satisfaction from coding. He once relished building a feature or getting to the bottom of a technical problem. Now, he spends more time asking AI agents to tackle the work he used to enjoy doing himself, he recently told Business Insider.

“It’s definitely less fulfilling,” Backes told the outlet. 

His manager isn’t pushing him to use AI, he said. The pressure comes from the industry itself, where the race to move faster has turned writing code, and even reading it, into “the old way.”

“If I don’t keep up, I will be left behind,” Backes said. “And keeping up with AI is virtually impossible.”

Another software engineer disagrees

Simon Willison, founder of the Datasette open-source project, had a different perspective. For Willison, AI coding tools have made his job “a lot more fulfilling” by enabling him to complete projects on his own instead of turning to a small team for help, he told Business Insider. 

Willison is his own manager. This dynamic allows him to sidestep many of the demands other developers face, he said. But he acknowledged that even without a boss, keeping up with the relentless rollout of AI tools can be exhausting.