Hail and well met, fellow travelers. This is Matt Weinberger, deputy editor of Insider's tech analysis team, filling in once again for your regular captain Diamond Naga Siu.
Stop me if you've heard this one: Amazon walks into a bar... But seriously folks, my colleague Eugene Kim reports on a big, meaningful change in the online retail giant's hiring process.
From early in its history, Amazon asked some employees to have a say in all hiring decisions, calling them "bar raisers" intended to make sure every new employee met the company's high expectations for quality. But some recent hires got to skip the bar-raiser test, particularly for entry-level roles, Eugene reports — and now some inside Amazon say that it resulted in an influx of questionable hires, in turn leading to the company's ongoing push towards cutting jobs.
It's yet another example of how the early-pandemic hiring boom is now coming back to bite the tech giants. In their rush to meet the demands of the moment, they hired like mad; now, employees are paying the price in the form of layoffs.
There's much to go over, so let's rock.
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1. Did Amazon lower the bar? Some employees think so, Insider's Eugene Kim reports. Some entry-level employees got to skip the retail giant's famed "bar raiser" interviews, which some Amazon insiders tell Eugene led to a wave of less-than-stellar hires — which they fear ultimately contributed to the need to cut thousands of jobs.
- Eugene tells me that skipping the bar raiser was a way of streamlining hiring, at the cost of "a key part of its culture." He says that "current and former bar raisers I talked to were not too happy about this decision and were concerned about its potential to drag down Amazon's hiring bar."
- "It's also another sign of Amazon further straying from its roots," Eugene says. As Amazon grows, it's struggled to keep up with change without abandoning what made it so successful in the first place, he says. "It's possibly the biggest challenge Andy Jassy is faced with in his new CEO role."
- Amazon isn't the only tech giant whose culture is under the microscope: Meta and Apple have officially fallen out of Glassdoor's list of best places to work, for the first time in over a decade. Some tech firms like Google and Microsoft made the top 20, though.
Read more about Amazon's interview process challenges here.
2. Layoffs come to Google's Other Bets. Verily, Google's life-science technology spinoff, is laying off over 200 workers — marking the first significant job cuts in the larger Google empire this year, but potentially not the last.
3. Exit, pursued by a bird. Elon Musk's Twitter is closing up its physical offices in at least 12 countries, Insider's Kali Hays reports. In many cases, it was part of a plan to cut costs. In a few locations, however, Twitter was evicted due to nonpayment of rent. Read the full story here.
4. FTX's founder is stuck at home. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, says that he's been passing the time by hanging out with his parents and playing video games like Storybrook Brawl alone while awaiting trial under house arrest.
5. Apple needs a new ad sales head. Insider reports that Apple is on the hunt for a new ad sales chief for its ever-growing TV and sports ambitions. It might mean that an ad-supported tier of Apple TV+ is on the way, too. Read more about Apple's ad plans here.
6. Microsoft employees get unlimited time off. Count Microsoft as the latest — and likely the largest — tech giant to follow in Netflix's footsteps and offer its employees unlimited time off. In a memo reported by Insider, the company says it's a reflection of how hybrid work made the company rethink what vacation time means.
7. Carta sues its former CTO. Jerry Talton raised the alarm over "problems with the culture" at hot $7 billion startup Carta, where he had been its chief technology officer. Now, Carta is suing Talton over accusations of corporate espionage and inappropriate sexting. Read more about the messy situation here.
8. ChatGPT is ready to go to work. OpenAI, the creators of the red-hot ChatGPT chatbot, has opened up the waitlist for ChatGPT Professional — a premium version that's faster and includes the ability to do more searches in a day. Read more here.
Odds and ends:
9. Get ready to reach out and touch a Mac. Apple is reportedly prepping a MacBook Pro laptop with a touchscreen, which could release as soon as 2025. If Apple follows through, it would mark a big turnaround for the company, which has held since the days of Steve Jobs that touchscreens only belong on iPhones and iPads.
10. All in the Dell family. Michael Dell led his namesake PC company from a dorm room to one of tech's biggest companies. Now, much of his family has followed his lead into the tech industry as both investors and operators. Here's Insider's look at Dell and his so-called nepo babies.
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