India’s IT sector is burning out: 72% exceed legal workweek limits, survey says

India’s IT sector is working extreme hours, with 72 per cent routinely exceeding the legal 48-hour workweek limit and one in four clocking 70 hours or more per week, according to a survey by Blins, a forum-style app where employees anonymously engage in conversations. As a result, 83 per cent report experiencing burnout.

Blind surveyed 1,450 verified IT professionals in India across a week in March 2025, revealing that some companies push working hours to the extreme. 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.

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. Up to 42 per cent of employees at Cisco, Amazon, ServiceNow, Walmart, and VMware report working more than 70 hours per week.

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. The survey partially attributed this to lingering habits from pandemic-era remote work, the expectation of being always online and responsive appears deeply ingrained.

Professionals said the core reason behind these extreme hours is a pervasive pressure to overwork. 75 per cent reported 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.

Many professionals on Blind argue excessive hours do not translate to better productivity. “It’s just optics and creating an effect like hard work. Anyone who 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.