First, the bad news: half of all companies represented in a new survey experienced either a layoff or a hiring freeze in the past 12 months.
Now, the good: that’s an improvement over the 67% that said the same a year ago, according to the new study by LeadDev.
More survey participants said their organization’s IT headcount is increasing (36%) than said it is decreasing (30%).
For managers, though, the situation is less promising. In the 2025 report, 22% said their organizations had added managerial roles — while a higher share, 28%, reported a decrease.
“The LeadDev Engineering Leadership Report 2025” was conducted in March, with results based on 617 engineering professionals. Fifty percent of respondents were from Europe, while 34% were from the United States. Forty percent of respondents work at organizations with at least 1,000 employees.
Nearly Half of Those Surveyed Facing Burnout
Developers and their managers are also under increasing pressure on the job, according to the new study.
- Fifty-two percent of the engineering managers surveyed have taken on more direct reports in the last year.
- Forty-eight percent of tech leads with no management responsibility report working more hours as compared to a year ago.
This situation may be having an impact on morale: Forty percent of respondents overall said they believe their team members are less motivated to come to work than they were 12 months ago, a warning sign of burnout.
In fact, 46% of respondents reported conditions that indicated critical to moderate levels of burnout. Only 21% — just over one in five survey participants — could be categorized as “healthy” based on the symptoms they reported.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that 60% of managers said they are considering transitioning back to an individual contributor role.
AI’s Impact: Overrated?
The report dug into the impact of AI on headcount and productivity — and found that, at least so far, both the anxieties about AI as a job killer and as a development superpower are more based on speculation than reality.
For instance: Only 9% of participants in this year’s survey reported that headcount at their organization is being reduced in 2025 because of generative AI. And only 4% said they see an increase in jobs that they can attribute to GenAI.
And at least so far, that’s unlikely to change. Fifty-four percent of respondents said they do not think generative AI will impact headcount in 2025; another 36% didn’t know what the impact would be.
However, respondents are concerned about AI’s impact on junior developers trying to enter and grow in the industry. In 2025, 54% were concerned about this issue, up from 43% in last year’s survey.
Meanwhile, the survey results indicated that the hype driving the AI boom — that it significantly speeds up productivity — isn’t being matched by real-world results. In the new report,
Sixty percent said they do not believe AI has significantly boosted their team’s productivity. And only 6% said they have seen a game-changing leap in productivity because of GenAI tools.
Lawrence Hecht, The New Stack’s research director, contributed to this article and also assisted LeadDev in preparing its survey.
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Neither fears about AI replacing developers nor AI-fueled productivity hopes are coming true thus far, according to LeadDev’s new engineering leadership survey.