Getty Images

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 8:00AM

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:

Rani Molla

Meta posts an earnings and revenue beat — and a huge capex bill

The social media giant reported earnings after the bell Wednesday.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg visits U.S. Capitol for Senate meetings

Rani Molla, Nate Becker

Alphabet jumps as Q1 earnings and revenue blow past expectations

The search giant also boosted its capex forecast for the year and said it expects 2027 capex to be “significantly” higher than 2026.

Rani Molla13h

SpaceX filings reportedly show no one can fire Elon Musk except Elon Musk

The only thing stopping Elon Musk from being chairman and CEO of SpaceX is Elon Musk, according to Reuters, which viewed an excerpt of the company’s IPO filing.

The document outlines a dual-class share structure giving Musk control via super-voting stock. The filing says he “can only be removed from our board or these positions by the vote of Class B holders” — shares he’ll control after the listing. It adds that if he keeps those shares, he could “continue to control the election and removal of a majority of our board.”

At a typical public company — even founder-led ones with dual-class structures — a CEO can be fired by the board of directors, which represents shareholders and can vote to remove them over issues such as corporate performance, strategy, or misconduct.

The unusual SpaceX setup means Musk is unlikely to face the kind of CEO succession pressure he’s dealt with at Tesla. Musk, of course, is not a typical CEO, and the value of his companies has long been closely tied to his presence.

To be sure, SpaceX’s confidential IPO filing isn’t in its final form yet — while the filing is still in the confidential phase, the company will be going back and forth with the SEC, which will review it and suggest or require changes.

Exclusive: Only Elon Musk can fire Elon Musk from SpaceX, filing shows

Rani Molla4/28/26

OpenAI’s models are officially coming to Amazon

Amazon is finally getting in on the hottest ticket in tech.

After Microsoft announced yesterday that it has agreed to give up its exclusive rights to sell OpenAI’s models, Amazon, as expected, will start offering them to customers — something Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman says users have been asking for “for a really long time.” Some models are available now in preview, and the most powerful GPT versions will show up “in the coming weeks.”

This is a big shift in the AI cloud wars. Microsoft’s early bet on OpenAI gave Azure an edge by locking up the most in-demand models. Now that exclusivity is gone, Amazon and other competitors can finally offer them too, closing a key gap and competing more directly for AI customers.

Amazon Set to Sell OpenAI Tech After Microsoft Cedes Exclusivity

Claire Yubin Oh4/28/26

Ship-tracking app surges as Iran war continues

As Middle East peace talks stretch on, with Tehran reportedly offering to reopen the Strait of Hormuz if the US lifts its blockade and the war ends, the owner of shipping intelligence platform MarineTraffic revealed that the app has gained millions of new users since the conflict began.

MarineTraffic’s user count jumped to 8.5 million this April, up from 3.5 million a year ago, the cofounder of its parent company, Kpler, said in an interview with the Financial Times. Paid subscribers, often workers within companies and governments looking for more data on supply chains and commodities trading, rose 11,000 in the same period.

Kpler, which also owns shipping intelligence platform FleetMon, draws its data from a range of sources, including the Automatic Identification System, satellites, and more than 500 people on-site, like port terminal operators.

Per Appfigures data, MarineTraffic is estimated to have raked in almost $1 million across March and April in app revenue (through April 27), more than double the ~$346,500 from the same months last year. Across the full year, Kpler expects to earn between $300 million and $400 million in annual recurring revenues.