The First Signs of Burnout Are Coming From the People Who Embrace AI the Most
6 61An anonymous reader shares a report: The most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn't that AI will take your job. It's that AI will save you from it. That's the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs will disappear. But for most other roles, the argument goes, AI is a force multiplier. You become a more capable, more indispensable lawyer, consultant, writer, coder, financial analyst -- and so on. The tools work for you, you work less hard, everybody wins.
But a new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what it finds there isn't a productivity revolution. It finds companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines.
As part of what they describe as "in-progress research," UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months inside a 200-person tech company watching what happened when workers genuinely embraced AI. What they found across more than 40 "in-depth" interviews was that nobody was pressured at this company. Nobody was told to hit new targets. People just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees' to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.
6 comments
Workload increase [Re:Initial implementations...] (Score: 5, Informative)
by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @11:03AM (#65982436)
Dunno about the article, but I've seen the "tools" and it is as if they are hand-coded by imbeciles who have never done more than hobbyist coding. The so-called "agentic architecture" is just moronic, as if a drunk freshman vibe-vomited right after the final exams
The actual article [hbr.org] is a bit more detailed than the summary. Here, for example, is one of their findings about how AI increases, rather than decreases, workload:
The most interesting thing I can do with copilot (Score: 5, Informative)
by piojo ( 995934 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @01:16AM (#65981660)
I just found out the most interesting thing I can do with copilot at work: turn it off. In VS code, the bottom right copilot button has a "snooze" option. I use it because inserted garbage comments break my train of thought.
I don't say it's not useful. But it does drive me nuts sometimes.
Duh (Score: 5, Interesting)
by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @01:21AM (#65981666)
Fields medal winner June Huh is right, you can only do about 4 hours of real work a day before your neurons get filled with detritus and you need some sleep to wash it out. Stop killing your brain for a company you don't even own cause it sounds cool and go take a 2 hour lunch ya dumb nerds.
The American work culture (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @01:22AM (#65981668)
has been utter shit for decades. It glorifies overtime over everything else - including over metrics that could be improved with less overtime, such as quality and efficiency.
AI is just more of the same: turbocharged shit.
I'm saying this as an American expat living in Europe and actually having a quality of life and work/life balance I never had stateside.
Yeah, pretty much this. (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Qbertino ( 265505 ) on <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @04:35AM (#65981854)
Disclaimer: former US American citizen turned European here
The system and culture in the US is pretty broken in key parts, that's for sure. Europe is aging and has a demographic bomb coming up, but by and large quality of living is higher by default these days. Healthcare, safety nets and a (somewhat) sane system of taxation are all part of this. I hope any US revolution that might be upcoming will be peaceful and that some basics will be factory-reset to some saner defaults.
I embrace it as it comes and experience ... (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Qbertino ( 265505 ) on <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @03:52AM (#65981806)
... Chillout time. No joke. My productivity has gone 5x in the last 6 months, especially with the newest models and them spitting out boring but maintainable boilerplate code for me and explaining the details of what they're doing, but overall my life has become more chill. I've started taking naps at noon when I'm in homeoffice.
Then again, I'm an experienced senior webdev, the new product we're building has is architecture 100% designed and maintained by me alone and with AI I basically have a team 5 juniors around me doing the gruntwork at a whim, just as I have 8-10 API and PL experts in one single chat ready to answer highly specialized questions on some detail of the app I'm building.
Projecting this 3 years out I am sooooo out of a job. But I'm just a websoft nerd no one cares about. Just wait until the bots start driving cars and trucks, doing delivery and cleaning. That's when the real party starts.
We are certainly not prepared for what is coming for society as a whole. I myself am trying to enjoy the ride as much as I can. Couldn't say that I mind robots doing my work, as long as I get some sort of cut from the productivity gains, even if that means chasing software-bots around most of the day for -20k of my last salary, as is the state of things right now.