Burnout Epidemic in India’s IT Sector: One in Four Clock 70+ Hours a Week
India’s IT sector is working extreme hours, with 72% routinely exceeding the legal 48-hour workweek limit and one in four (25%) clocking 70 hours or more per week. As a result, 83% report experiencing burnout. Blind, an anonymous community app for professionals, conducted a survey of 1,450 verified IT professionals in India on March 12–19, 2025.
The findings reveal that some companies push working hours to the extreme. The top 20 companies with the most extreme workweeks include Confluent, Intuit, UiPath, Adobe, Uber, InMobi, Salesforce, Walmart, Sprinklr, Oracle, Cohesity, Amazon, ServiceNow, VMware, Cisco, Atlassian, PayPal, Flipkart, Freshworks, and Microsoft—where a large majority of employees exceed the legal 48-hour limit. Worse still, up to 42% of employees at Cisco, Amazon, ServiceNow, Walmart, and VMware report working more than 70 hours per week.
Longer working hours are closely tied to higher burnout. While 83% of IT professionals report experiencing burnout, the rate climbs above 90% 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% 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. 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.
Professionals are also calling out industry leaders like Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy and L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyan 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.
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.”
Methodology
Blind conducted a survey on its platform from March 12–19, 2025, 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 the following questions, with the first question offering three options, and the subsequent ones requiring a "yes" or "no" answer:
- How many hours do you work per week on average?
- Less than 48 hours
- 48–70 hours
- More than 70 hours
- Have you ever experienced burnout?
- Do you or your colleagues feel obligated to respond to after-hours work messages to avoid consequences?
- Have you felt pressured, or seen coworkers pressured, to work beyond standard hours?
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. To date, there has been no known instance of a user's identity being disclosed.