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Study: Microsoft good, Meta bad for work-life balance

A study examined years of comments from workers at big tech companies to discover where people are unhappiest.

7/22/24 7:00AM

Between pivots to AI, layoffs, and attempted returns to the office, the landscape of tech employment has been changing rapidly. To get a picture of what it’s like to work at tech companies these days, tech bootcamp provider Fullstack Academy looked at the last two years of comments for 100 prominent tech companies on Glassdoor. The company then determined what portion mentioned keywords related to work-life balance — stress, burnout, long hours, terms related to return to office (RTO) — in the “cons” section of their reviews.

They found that tech companies varied widely in how their employees rated their work-life balance, but some were much better than others. ByteDance topped the worst-rated side by far, but companies including Stripe, Palantir, and Meta all fared poorly. NVIDIA and Apple did poorly but weren’t awful.

Cisco, Spotify, Dropbox, and Adobe were among the best, all earning a “very good” rating for work-life balance. Microsoft did pretty well, just missing the cutoff for very good but at the top of the “good” list.

A high rate of disgruntled employees is bad for business, Fullstack CMO Mark Moran told Sherwood. “You're going to get lower performance, you're going to get turnover — it ripples through every aspect of your business,” he said.

Even if companies are cutting back, poor reviews could hurt them when they try to grow again since it also hurts recruitment.

A lot of the negative sentiment Moran thinks is around return to office, layoffs, and a mismatch between what employers advertised and what employees got.

You can sort how different tech companies ranked here:

Jon Keegan12h

OpenAI’s hot Sora video app is a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen

OpenAI has generated some serious buzz surrounding its new Sora video generation app. The app is currently No. 3 on the iOS free app leaderboards, even though it’s invitation-only for the time being.

But users have been flooding social media with videos generated by Sora, and in addition to a “Skibidi Toilet” Sam Altman and the OpenAI CEO dressed as a Nazi, the app is able to create videos featuring iconic characters from Disney, Nintendo, and Paramount Skydance.

On the system card for the Sora 2 AI model (which powers the Sora app), OpenAI says it was trained on things found on the internet:

“Sora 2 was trained on diverse datasets, including information that is publicly available on the internet, information that we partner with third parties to access, and information that our users or human trainers and researchers provide or generate.”

This seems like an invitation for a big copyright lawsuit, along the lines of the one Disney, Dreamworks, and NBCUniversal recently filed against AI image generator Midjourney.

But OpenAI is trying to flip the responsibility of protecting copyrighted material to the intellectual property owners themselves. According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is allowing copyrighted material in Sora by default, unless copyright holders opt out of the service.

The courts will have to decide if this novel approach to intellectual copyright law works, but government regulators may not be that big of a problem, as Altman has made sure OpenAI is in the good graces of the Trump administration. If OpenAI has to pay up to copyright holders after a lawsuit, what’s a few billion dollars here or there when you’re raising so much capital?

OpenAI’s AI video app stirs copyright questions, pumping out videos of Mario and Pikachu

On the system card for the Sora 2 AI model (which powers the Sora app), OpenAI says it was trained on things found on the internet:

“Sora 2 was trained on diverse datasets, including information that is publicly available on the internet, information that we partner with third parties to access, and information that our users or human trainers and researchers provide or generate.”

This seems like an invitation for a big copyright lawsuit, along the lines of the one Disney, Dreamworks, and NBCUniversal recently filed against AI image generator Midjourney.

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Tension emerges between Meta’s AI teams

Discontent between Meta’s AI research teams is growing, according to a report by The Information, at a critical time for Meta’s effort to get back into the AI race.

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OpenAI beats SpaceX as most valuable private company, at $500 billion valuation

It also reached that valuation very quickly.