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The perceived threat of being replaceable especially in IT industry could create sustained anxiety and drives employees towards overwork, presenteeism
Unlike traditional burnout which is often visible through absenteeism, irritability, or performance drop, quiet burnout is largely invisible. (Image: Canva)
What if the very AI tools that promised to liberate you from overworking ended up chaining you to your laptop for 15 hours a day? That is the quiet, corrosive question echoing across India’s tech corridors right now. On Blind, the anonymous professional network where verified IT employees share unfiltered truths, one post from a mid-level engineer at a Bengaluru unicorn captured the mood in January 2026, “AI writes my code in minutes. My manager now wants five decks by lunch. So with no sleep now I just stare at the ceiling wondering when the next layoff email lands.”
This is not dramatic exaggeration, it is the new rhythm of Indian tech in the age of generative AI which is pushing the tech workforce into ‘quiet burnout’. Medical Director, Dr. Vikram Vora told News18, “Quiet burnout is a state where employees remain outwardly functional and compliant but internally feel emotionally drained, disengaged, and cognitively exhausted; productivity may appear stable, but creativity, initiative, and wellbeing steadily decline.”
Unlike traditional burnout which is often visible through absenteeism, irritability, or performance drop, quiet burnout is largely invisible. It also differs from quiet quitting, where employees consciously limit effort to defined job roles – in quiet burnout, the individual still tries to meet expectations but operates in a depleted, survival mode.
Eventhough, global tech firms are increasingly recognising digital acceleration fatigue—constant tool upgrades, process changes, and performance pressure are exhausting employees.
“The perceived threat of being replaceable especially in high-performance industry sectors – creates sustained anxiety and drives employees towards overwork, presenteeism, and hesitancy to avail leave,” Dr. Vikram who is the Medical Director and Chief Health Officer, (Indian Subcontinent) at International SOS explains further.
Is Working Smarter Asking Employees To Overwork?
A survey by Blind, a platform that verifies IT professionals, has shed light on the pervasive issue of burnout in India’s technology sector. studied. Out of 1,450 verified Indian IT professionals surveyed, an alarming 83% reported experiencing burnout, while 72% indicated that they routinely work more than the standard 48-hour workweek with one in four clocking in 70 hours or more. Separate analysis by Rest of World in January, found that one in four tech workers now exceeds 70 hours weekly.
Achal Khanna, CEO SHRM India said, “When work can be done anytime and anywhere, it slowly creates the feeling that you should always be available. Messages come late at night. Tasks get assigned quickly because systems make it easy. No one may officially demand longer hours, but many employees feel they need to stay responsive to keep up. Over time, real rest disappears. Even off-hours feel like waiting time between tasks.”
According to the data stated by the Health Department in 2024, Karnataka India’s Silicon Valley — tech professionals account for 20% of all organ-transplant seekers, their bodies breaking down from chronic sleep deprivation and sedentary stress. A 2025 University of Hyderabad study cited in the same reporting found 84% of tech employees showing signs of liver disease.
In 2025 alone, TCS saw a net headcount reduction of nearly 20,000 amid broader AI-driven efficiency pushes. Other outsourcing giants and high-profile startups followed. The message to those who remained- produce more, faster, or be replaced by the very tools you are now required to master.
Explaining how AI has shifted workplace expectations, Sonica Aron, Founder and Managing Partner at Marching Sheep, notes, “AI has dramatically reset the benchmark for speed and productivity. Tasks that once took days now take hours, and leadership expectations are rising accordingly. The narrative has shifted from ‘Can this be done?’ to ‘Why isn’t this automated yet?’ While this improves efficiency, it also creates anxiety—employees worry about redundancy, shrinking roles, and constantly needing to prove relevance.”
Kapil Khangaonkar, echoes this from the front lines of AI tool deployment, “Yes, and this is the uncomfortable truth nobody in the AI industry wants to say out loud. Tools like Claude Cowork, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot were designed to remove friction. But what they’ve unintentionally created is an always-on output expectation. When an AI can generate a feature module in minutes, the natural leadership response is, ‘Great, what’s next?’ The breathing room between tasks which is where real thinking, creativity, and recovery happen has quietly disappeared.”
“I see this across our own team and with our 73,000 users. Developers using AI coding agents aren’t working fewer hours. They’re filling those recovered hours with more tasks. Output optimisation has become the new baseline, not the exception. The tool removes one ceiling, and management immediately builds another one higher. That cycle, repeated daily, is the engine of quiet burnout in 2025,” adds Kapil who is the Founder & CEO of Clodura.AI which is the world’s first Gen-AI powered Go-to-market platform that helps simply revenu
When Work Collapses Into Hours, What Happens To Human Merit?
This is the paradox at the heart of AI efficiency culture. Tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude, and internal enterprise LLMs can draft a client presentation in 45 minutes instead of three days. A complex data dashboard that once took a fortnight now emerges before the morning chai grows cold.
“Paradoxically, instead of reducing workload, AI often expands it. Faster turnaround times lead to more projects being assigned. Expectations scale up before roles are redefined. Employees may feel they’re in a constant state of catch-up, especially if they’re learning new tools alongside delivering business-as-usual targets,” said Sonia who runs Marching Sheeps which is a HR advisory firm.
Managers, under their own pressure to show quarterly growth to investors, do not respond by reducing headcount or deadlines. They respond by increasing expectations. The presentation that once earned praise for a week’s effort must now land by end of day and be followed by two more. The code review that used to take a day is now expected before lunch because “AI already did 80 per cent of it.”
Observing this change firsthand, Achal Khanna who CEO SHRM India, the Asia Pacific, and MENA region, “When AI tools first came in, most people expected work to become lighter. In reality, tasks are definitely faster now, but instead of fewer hours, many employees are simply handling more work in the same time. People aren’t resting more, they’re just producing more.”
On platform Blind, feeds are filled with such confessions. One product manager at a global firm posted in late 2025, “I used to deliver one solid strategy deck per week. Last month I shipped seven. My performance rating went up. My psychiatrist bill went up more.”
Sonia explains and shares with News18 correspondent, “Strong leaders are openly acknowledging job security concerns and creating transparent conversations about role redesign. They are prioritising managerial capability-building helping middle managers coach teams through rapid change rather than simply demanding higher output. Psychological safety is becoming a strategic asset; teams that feel safe to question AI outputs and admit skill gaps adapt faster.”
The compression of time creates an illusion of abundance for the company. For the individual, it creates an endless conveyor belt of deliverables with no natural stopping point. The workday no longer ends; it merely pauses when the body refuses to continue.
Kapil Khangaonkar highlights the fractured skill demands this creates, “The skillset required hasn’t shrunk, it’s fractured. A developer using Claude Code or Cursor today is no longer just a coder. They’re an AI supervisor, a code reviewer, a prompt engineer, and a maintainer of logic they didn’t write. That’s four roles compressed into one salary and one person.
The most underreported challenge, as per AI-based startup founder Kapil is, “What I call ‘inherited codebase syndrome.’ Agent-written code is often syntactically clean but architecturally opaque. Developers struggle to modify it months later because the reasoning behind decisions isn’t documented the way a human naturally documents their own thinking. Making changes to bot-written code is disproportionately difficult.”
So the expectation has quietly shifted, deliver faster using AI, but also maintain rigorously without it. Kapil explains, “Companies are celebrating the speed gains while completely overlooking the cognitive burden of managing what the agent left behind. That gap in expectation versus reality is where burnout silently begins.”
Is Quiet Burnout Putting Employees Into A Bigger Mental Health Crisis?
Between 2017 and 2025, Rest of World reports, there were 227 reported suicides among Indian tech workers through local news reports. While no government database tracks occupation-specific suicides with precision, mental-health experts describe the situation as “very alarming.”
The stories are hauntingly similar. In May 2025, 24-year-old Nikhil Somwanshi, a machine-learning engineer at Krutrim, took his own life after months of 15-hour days. His final WhatsApp message to his mother spoke of unbearable stress. In Chennai, a 38-year-old software engineer electrocuted himself after repeated complaints about work pressure. A 23-year-old in Kerala jumped from his apartment, leaving a video for his mother about job-related despair.
Anchal adds, “This blurred boundary is one of the main drivers of quiet burnout. It doesn’t show up as sudden exhaustion — it grows slowly through constant connectivity and pressure to keep performing.”
“No one may officially demand longer hours, but many employees feel they need to stay responsive to keep up. Over time, real rest disappears. Even off-hours feel like waiting time between tasks”, emphasises Anchal.
None of these deaths can be attributed solely to AI. Yet the broader pattern is unmistakable: an industry that once symbolised aspiration for millions of middle-class families is now producing a quiet despair that professionals on Blind call “the slow fade” — showing up every day, delivering every metric, while something essential inside slowly extinguishes.
Why Does Quiet Burnout Feel More Dangerous?
Quiet burnout is not the dramatic breakdown that forces sick leave. It is the steady erosion: the engineer who answers Slack at 2 a.m. without complaint, the analyst who skips family dinners for the fourth straight quarter, the father who cannot remember the last time he played with his children because “deadlines don’t wait.”
We asked SHRM Anchal on how can employees report difficulty in work or if they are experiencing burnout.
- In healthy organisations, support shouldn’t depend only on one manager. Employees need options — HR partners who listen without judgement, counselling services, wellbeing helplines, or trained peer mentors.
- What matters most is trust. People must feel safe raising concerns without fear of being seen as weak or affecting career growth. When systems exist but feel risky to use, employees stay silent.
- Some workplaces are now creating confidential support channels and encouraging open conversations around stress and mental health. That helps break stigma.
- As pressure increases with faster work cycles, having real support structures is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s essential for keeping people healthy and engaged.
According to the same Blind survey, responses to toxic culture skew heavily toward quiet disengagement, doing the bare minimum while emotionally checking out. Women report even higher rates 87% burnout in some Blind threads, as they juggle the same crushing workloads with disproportionate domestic responsibilities.
Dr. Vikram emphasises, “Employees should ideally have access to multiple escalation pathways beyond their reporting manager, such as HR teams, occupational health physicians, employee assistance programs (EAPs), designated wellbeing champions, ethics or ombuds offices, and in some cases, trusted senior leaders or colleagues. The key determinant of safety is confidentiality, assurance of no repercussions, and psychological trust – organizations must formally communicate and normalize these channels for them to be effective.”
Dr. Vora highlights another hidden trigger, “The perceived threat of being replaceable creates sustained anxiety and drives employees towards overwork, presenteeism, and hesitancy to avail leave. This insecurity impacts psychological safety and amplifies burnout risk.”
Kapil Khangaonkar warns of subtler cultural erosion, “Both, but the subtle changes are far more damaging. The visible changes are easy to celebrate: faster shipping cycles, leaner teams, higher output. Leadership loves that story.
There’s also a culture of performance anxiety emerging. When AI makes everyone look equally productive on paper, the human differentiators creativity, judgment, institutional knowledge get undervalued. Developers feel replaceable even when they’re performing well.
How is AI Changing Skill Expectations and Health For Employees?
Specialists are being asked to become generalists. AI handles a lot of implementation now, so the value of one narrow skill is dropping fast. Jayanth Neelakanta at Founder and CEO of Equip remarks, “What matters is whether you understand the business, the customer, the context. Can you talk to a customer and translate that into a product decision? Can you work across functions without hand-holding? There’s also something subtler.”
“AI can implement the same thing twenty different ways. How you direct it, what you choose, what you reject, that reflects taste. And taste comes from experience, opinions, and caring about the outcome. In our team at Equip, the people who’ve grown fastest are the ones who understand why we’re building something, not just how.”
Dr Vikram Vora notes and adds, “Chronic cognitive overload arising from constant multi-tasking, digital interruptions, and sustained decision-making pressure leads to activation of prolonged stress pathways with increase in cortisol (the stress hormone) and sympathetic nervous system activity. Over time, this contributes to sleep disturbance, metabolic risk, hypertension, impaired immunity, anxiety disorders, and even increased cardiovascular risk. From the standpoint of workforce health, persistent mental strain behaves much like other non-communicable disease risk factors, gradually increasing long-term morbidity.”
Can India’s Tech Dream Endure If Employees Cannot?
India’s $280-billion IT industry employs more than five million people and remains the country’s largest private-sector employer. Yet the very efficiency gains that investors celebrate are hollowing out the workforce that delivers them.
Jayanth’s Equip helps recruiters spend less time filtering resumes, points out that this escalation is structural, “When a tool does in minutes what used to take hours, the baseline shifts immediately… The real risk is that people mistake speed for quality and stop thinking critically about what the AI just produced.”
He also warns that skill expectations are transforming rapidly, with specialists now required to operate as cross-functional generalists capable of strategic judgment rather than execution alone.
Sonica Aron adds that leadership maturity will determine how organisations navigate this transition. Strong leaders, she notes, are prioritising transparency around job redesign and investing in managerial capability-building to support teams through uncertainty.
Kapil Khangaonkar describes the widening preparedness gap, “The capability curve is a rocket. The preparedness curve is a bicycle. That gap is widening every quarter and organisations are largely pretending it isn’t there.
Here’s what was observed on the ground, tools like Claude Cowork are automating multi-step workflows that previously required coordination across teams. Claude Code is writing production-level modules in minutes. But nobody is training developers on how to manage, audit, or confidently modify agent-generated code at scale. There’s no curriculum for it. There’s barely even an acknowledgement that it’s a problem.
How Does The Fear Of Replaceability Impact Employees?
Dr Vora tells further, “The perceived threat of being replaceable – especially in high-performance industry sectors – creates sustained anxiety and drives employees towards overwork, presenteeism, and hesitancy to avail leave. This insecurity impacts psychological safety and amplifies burnout risk. Over time, the constant need to prove one’s worth can undermine self-esteem, disrupt work–life boundaries, and contribute to chronic stress-related health conditions which could have serious implications.”
The deeper gap is psychological to which Kapil adds, “Developers won’t raise their hand in a standup and say ‘I don’t understand this AI-generated code’ because it feels like admitting incompetence. That silence is dangerous. Organisations need structured time for comprehension, not just deployment. Until workforce preparedness catches up with capability growth, we’re essentially handing someone a Formula 1 car without teaching them to drive above 60.”
Some companies are beginning to experiment with “right to disconnect” policies. A few progressive leaders have started measuring output, not hours. Mental-health days are slowly losing their stigma in certain pockets.
Achal Khanna believes real change must include stronger support structures. He notes employees need safe escalation channels such as HR partners, counselling services and wellbeing helplines. “As pressure increases with faster work cycles, having real support structures is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s essential,” he says.
Dr. Vora reinforces that most corporate health screenings remain focused on physical metrics and rarely detect cognitive fatigue or emotional exhaustion early, allowing silent burnout to escalate unnoticed.
“How do I keep going without losing myself in the process?” The AI tools will only get faster. The real test is whether the humans using them and the companies deploying them can finally learn to slow down before the quiet burnout becomes something louder, and irreversible.
February 18, 2026, 07:00 IST
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