The Scoop #49: Should Glassdoor reviews matter for tech companies?

Also: a 1.5-month code freeze at Stack Overflow, early warning signs of cuts at AWS, and details on when Amazon will join the generative AI race.

The Scoop is a bonus series covering insights, patterns, and trends I observe and hear about within Big Tech and at high growth startups. Have a scoop to share? Send me a message! I treat all such messages as anonymous.

The Scoop sometimes delivers first hand, original reporting. I’m adding an ‘Exclusive’ label to news that features original reporting direct from my sources, as distinct from analysis, opinion, and reaction to events. Of course, I also analyze what’s happening in the tech industry, citing other media sources and quoting them as I dive into trends I observe. These sections do not carry the ‘Exclusive’ mark.

Today's topics are:

1. Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor, and how companies respond. Several tech companies face a fresh problem after cutting jobs: their rating on Glassdoor nosedives. But there’s a way to fix this. I show what companies are doing – and why. Exclusive

2. Should Glassdoor reviews matter to you? As an engineering leader or a job seeker, how much weight should you assign to Glassdoor reviews? I give my take from both sides, pulling in expert advice. Opinion

3. When will Amazon join the generative AI race? Among the big 3 cloud providers, Microsoft and Google are shipping generative AI solutions for customers to use. Meanwhile, Amazon has announced Bedrock, but more than a month later not even its own developers have access. What’s going on, and when will Bedrock be available? I talked with Amazon SDEs and have answers. Exclusive

4. A 1.5 month-long code freeze at Stack Overflow. With hundreds of hardcoded secrets in its repository, this became a major problem for Stack Overflow, due to the CircleCI security breach. To remedy things, the company froze all deploys for six weeks. What can we learn from this incident? Exclusive

5. Early warning of recent layoffs at AWS. It’s rare to know if you’re at risk of losing your job, before cuts are announced. In what was probably an oversight, affected AWS employees got a few days’ notice that the axe was going to fall, which helped many people prepare. Exclusive

6. The AI boom to intensify? NVIDIA’s earnings revealed a much bigger-than-expected demand for hardware to run and train AI models. Could we see the already hot AI field heat up further? Analysis.

1. Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor, and how companies respond