Tech
How to court — and retain — Gen Z workers
It’s the topic on everyone’s mind: Are Gen Z workers actually different?
TechCrunch sought to find out at this year’s Disrupt 2024. We sat down with SignalFire’s Heather Doshay, Comprehensive.io’s Roger Lee, and Lauren Illovsky from Capital G to chat about how to hire and retain talent. One topic that came up was how younger workers are much different than their older counterparts.
“It was the same with millennials, right?” Illosvky asked on stage. “We remember when boomers criticized millennials, and now millennials were criticizing Gen Z. I love Gen Z, too. I think there’s an appreciation for how much they push the boundaries and force you to think.”
She said employers can either be grouchy about it or try to see the world from a different perspective and how it affects what Gen Z can bring to the table. Doshay noted that this generation has been in the workforce for at least five years, meaning they’ve faced a labor market affected by the pandemic; economic uncertainty; and mass layoffs in tech.
“So there’s a lack of loyalty amongst Gen Z in the workforce that we’re seeing in early data,” Doshay said, citing that a report by her company found that Gen Zers stay in a job for an average of 1.1 years, compared to the older generations that spent decades at a company. “That challenges you to do better,” she said. “What can you do to retain these folks and keep them there longer?”
At the same time, she said, it’s still early. Gen Z’s behavior might evolve over time as the workforce changes with them. “I think it’s really important to have that perspective in your workforce and have a really diverse set of people,” she said. “If your consumer base reflects Gen Z, you want to make sure that you have that DNA in your workforce.”
Lee said that Gen Zers value transparency a lot more than other generations. Today, young people talk openly about their salaries and will post TikToks of themselves being fired. Lee said that companies should find ways to be more transparent with their employees, which can make them stand out from the companies that aren’t.
Of course, we had to ask about that now-viral video of Keith Rabois talking about not hiring someone over 30 years old. Without naming names, we spoke about the concept of ageism and how it actually hurts companies. Illovsky said that companies need to have a workforce that is diverse in age, which results in a diverse skill set. Doshay said that older generations tend to be more engaged in the workforce, and reminded the audience that it’s illegal to discriminate based on age. In fact, not hiring anyone over 30 probably meant most of the audience wouldn’t hire themselves, she said.
“Also, since when was 30 the cutoff?” Lee added jokingly. “I’m a little insulted by that.”
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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