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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 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:

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5