Big Tech pivots from the carrot to the stick
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
Big Tech firms like Microsoft, Meta and Google are using stricter performance reviews to bring up productivity and weed out low performing workers. It’s a noticeable pivot away from the perks that defined Silicon Valley work culture a decade ago. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Alistair Barr, author of the Business Insider Tech Memo Newsletter, about their recent coverage of this latest shift.
Transcript
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| 0:53.6 | It's about keeping |
| 0:54.4 | everything secure. It sure seems like the old system of rank and yank is back in the tech world. |
| 1:03.0 | From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. After a decade-plus, when it seemed like tech companies couldn't hire fast enough, |
| 1:22.4 | many have been getting leaner in recent years, and you could say meaner. |
| 1:27.1 | As firms like Microsoft, Meta, and Google |
| 1:29.3 | pivot resources to AI, they've made cuts in other areas. And according to a series of recent |
| 1:35.4 | reports from Business Insider, they've instituted stricter performance reviews. So workers |
| 1:41.5 | ranked lower could be at risk of getting yanked, according to Alistair Barr, |
| 1:46.9 | author of the Business Insider Tech Memo newsletter. |
| 1:50.2 | Performance reviews are pretty common in the tech industry, but they've gotten a lot tougher |
| 1:55.2 | recently. So Microsoft has basically toughen that whole process, especially when you compare it to a company like Amazon, which has always had a reputation for being pretty tough. |
| 2:06.8 | Microsoft has kind of been borrowing some tools and some approaches that Amazon has been using for quite a few years. |
| 2:15.5 | Amazon has this rather infamous program called Pivot, and it's a performance improvement |
| 2:21.5 | program. |
| 2:22.1 | And if they deem you to be a low performer, they put you into this program, and it's a |
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