A quarter of techies caught in Narayana Murthy work regimen: Survey

Hyderabad: Not so long-ago Infosys co-founder, N R Narayana Murthy, extolled the virtues of hard work and talked of his own regimen of over 70 hours a week - something that evoked much outrage on the exploitative nature of such work schedules. Now a small survey conducted by Blind, an anonymous community app for professionals, involving 1,450 verified IT professionals in India on March 12–19, this year, has found that one in four of them are indeed doing over 70 hours a week and 72% routinely exceeding the legal 48-hour workweek limit. The result - burnout.

In fact, 82% of those surveyed talk of burnout, with it going past 90% at several companies with long working hours. What's worse, even after logging excessive hours, the ‘right to disconnect’ remains out of reach for these professionals, with 68% saying they feel obligated to respond to work-related messages outside of office hours.

While this culture can be partially attributed to lingering habits from pandemic-era remote work, the expectation to be always online and responsive appears deeply ingrained. Professionals say the core reason behind these extreme hours is a pervasive pressure to overwork. 

Inevitably, the professionals are calling out industry leaders like Murthy and L&T Chairman, S N Subramanyan on Blind, for openly advocating working 70 to 90 hours a week. “Never understood their obsession with ‘working hours.’ Such morons,” a verified NVIDIA professional commented on Blind. Blind is an anonymous app where 12 million verified professionals worldwide engage in conversations across companies and industries. 

About 75% report either personally feeling pressured to work beyond standard hours or witnessing their coworkers face the same expectations. This pressure continues to fuel a cycle of overwork and burnout in India's IT sector.

Despite the grueling work culture, many professionals on Blind argue that excessive hours do not translate to better productivity. “It’s just optics and creating an effect like hard work. Anyone who actually works that hard for six months will burn out,” one verified Oracle professional said on Blind.

Amid widespread frustration, some professionals believe change is possible. A verified Amazon employee shared a more optimistic take on Blind, stating that “The majority of new-age leaders understand work-life balance and advocate accordingly.”

Blind conducted a survey on its platform from March 12 to 19, 2025, with the theme “Do you feel overworked?” to gather insights on the workweek and burnout experiences of the verified professionals based in India.

Respondents were presented with questions, with the first question offering three options, and the subsequent ones requiring a "yes" or "no" answer:

Over 90% of employees at Meta, Uber, PayPal, and Capital One, as well as more than 70% of Microsoft employees in India, are users of Bling. Headquartered in the Bay Area, USA, Blind has a patented system for protecting anonymity, ensuring that no personally identifiable information is stored on its servers.