One in every fourth IT professional in India clocks in 70 hours or more per week, faces burnout: Survey

Hyderabad: A survey of India's IT sector found severe burnout epidemic among the professionals as one in four clock 70+ hours a week.

India’s IT sector is working extreme hours, with 72 per cent routinely exceeding the legal 48-hour workweek limit and one in four (25 per cent) clocking 70 hours or more per week. As a result, 83 per cent report experiencing burnout.

Blind, an anonymous community app for professionals, conducted a survey of 1,450 verified IT professionals in India between March 12–19, 2025.

The findings reveal that some companies push working hours to the extreme. Longer working hours are closely tied to higher burnout. While 83 per cent of IT professionals report experiencing burnout, the rate climbs above 90 per cent at several companies with the longest working hours. Even after logging excessive hours, the ‘right to disconnect’ remains out of reach for these professionals, with 68 per cent saying they feel obligated to respond to work-related messages outside of office hours.

While this 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. Professionals are also calling out industry leaders like Infosys co founder NR Narayana Murthy and L &T Chairman, SN Subramanyan on Blind who have openly advocated for 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.

Professionals say the core reason behind these extreme hours is a pervasive pressure to overwork. 75 per cent 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 with the theme “Do you feel overworked?” to gather insights on the workweek and burnout experiences of 1,450 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:

Blind is an anonymous app where 12 million verified professionals worldwide engage in honest conversations across companies and industries. 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 the platform. 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.