Microsoft Becomes Latest Tech Firm To Cut Staff (axios.com) 48
Microsoft announced layoffs across multiple divisions on Monday. From a report: Microsoft declined to say how many jobs had been cut, but a source said the layoffs numbered under 1000. The cuts occurred across a variety of levels, teams and parts of the world. Multiple laid-off workers turned to Twitter and Blind, among other online forums, to share that their job had been cut.
And yet they are still hiring contractors (Score:3)
Re:And yet they are still hiring contractors (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah cheaper as they don’t have to pay benefits.
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Or equity grants.
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They don't _have_ to pay equity grants to anyone.
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If they want to be competitive with literally any other tech company they do. Why would I go work at Microsoft for the same salary as someone else, minus the equity?
Or, to rephrase it... (Score:3)
Microsoft cuts 0.45% of it's workforce.
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Or the people they're cutting are actual underperformers, but not to the degree that their underperformance would normally be actionable. Stealth-firing through a round of layoffs to cut dead-weight.
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Isn't there a management philosophy where you should be "laying off" a percentage of your workforce every year for just this reason?
Working in the Fed Gov't I know this would be a good thing... lots of deadwood that are just hanging around until they get enough years to retire.
I can't say corporations are much better (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't there a management philosophy where you should be "laying off" a percentage of your workforce every year for just this reason?
Working in the Fed Gov't I know this would be a good thing... lots of deadwood that are just hanging around until they get enough years to retire.
I've worked for the federal gov, state gov, academia, healthcare, large banks, big tech. I noticed a lot more dead weight at the banks and big tech than the gov. At those profitable companies, I saw a lot of executive-level positions where there's 7 tiers between those who do actual work and the public leadership. I probably have 8 or more tiers between me...someone who writes actual code...and the CEO. I can justify my boss. I can even justify 2 levels above him. Beyond that? I have no clue what those folks do or the value they provide. I think it's just a jobs program for rich assholes to keep them rich.
They're constantly rotating people in those top positions and nothing changes. I never notice our programs getting better or worse...making me wonder what they do at all. They're just charismatic people with great social skills who come off as being well-off and articulate...but do they actually do anything for the company? I don't know nor do I know anyone who does.
Honestly, having worked in the public and private sector, the only difference I saw is that the useless leaders in the private sector were much better compensated. The private sectors pays a little more for white collar rank and file, but not to a huge degree. You're going from a paid of Corolla to a thoroughly financed Lexus-level luxury. However, the leadership tier goes from middle-class home in the public sector to mansions in the burbs for the private sector.
I honestly have found public sector employees more motivated than private sector ones. In my area, they typically chose the public sector for one reason or another and often take pride in their choice. I think that Patti and Selma from the Simpsons stereotype of the lazy entitled gov worker is a stereotype that has never matched my experience. I've met the Patti and Selmas of the world. I've met them at working at Bank of America, Oracle, and Google...not at my local DMV.
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Almost any big org has this problem: the right hand often has no idea the left hand even exists.
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1. If you make it past the probationary period, it's nearly impossible to get fired for underperforming. You're given warnings, second chances, third chances. All have to be documented and measured by your supervisor. And after all of that, the supervisor can begin the firing process. Which the employee can dispute to an ombud
Re:I can't say corporations are much better (Score:4, Insightful)
At those profitable companies, I saw a lot of executive-level positions where there's 7 tiers between those who do actual work and the public leadership. I probably have 8 or more tiers between me...someone who writes actual code...and the CEO.
It's strategy.
If you are a motivated manager ready to climb the ladder, what are you going to do if there are only two tiers above you? The answer is work with what you can control: you start building ladder rungs below you. In that case, it's better to slow down the people below you, because then you can justify hiring more people.
So yeah, the incentives structure of management is completely wrong.
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Yes. It's called stack-ranking and it was pioneered by Jack Welch at GE in the 1980s. The philosophy calls for an annual culling of the bottom 10% of performers in the 9-block. The idea is that your underperformers will compete with each other "not to get fired," and that will drive more productivity, at least until you fire them.
Even though he and GE abandoned the practice later on, it is still used widely to manage talent. Many tech companies like Uber, Meta, Google, and Amazon, still use it or some varia
Re:Or, to rephrase it... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've been in a company that uses it, you'll see the downside:
- People become risk averse, preferring to be "busy" doing something viewed as important, rather than doing something with any risk
- You constantly have a bunch of new people around who are soaking up time of your top performers to get trained
- High performers leave because of the stress, boredom, lack of ability to take risks and better opportunities or whatever, but nobody ends up replacing them. You have continuous mediocrity.
Sure, every so often I believe companies should cut some fat. But not as a yearly philosophy. In a perfect world, underperformers can be managed out without a bloodletting, but even in private enterprise this can be difficult.
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Interesting, thanks for the perspective.
Being old enough and having lived through the TQM and TQL days, I remember one of the principles of the TQM prophet Deming was to eliminate fear in the workplace so that employees can work effectively toward some goal. I can see if there are constant layoffs, people will become very attuned to survival and act in ways not productive toward a common goal and maybe even sabotage their workmates.
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Isn't there a management philosophy where you should be "laying off" a percentage of your workforce every year for just this reason?
In the military, kind of; back when I was in, the Navy had a policy for officers that if they were passed over for a promotion to rank and/or command three times, you were forcibly retired. Pretty sure the other services had this "Up or Out" policy for officers as well. The Air Force had a reputation for enforcing the policy with gusto (of course, which contributed to the joke that USAF was "a corporation with missiles"). Enlisted men also had some version of up-or-out for non-com ranks, but IIRC, it wasn't
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I've read that the military is trying to modify this to some degree because they realize its costing them some degree of expertise and experience.
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It may be, but at the same time successful senior officers were once fresh-faced junior officers, and if in the middle-rankings the ratios of a given rank to the next rank up are something like 10:1, that means there's a lot of officers whose careers at some point will no longer advance. At some point it becomes necessary for that major who hasn't managed to make Lt. Colonel to retire so that an up and coming captain that shows promise has a position to slot into, and on down the line.
Waiting to hear from IBM (Score:2)
who have never let a good opportunity to fire people go to waste yet.
We're engineering a recession (Score:4, Interesting)
The upper crust don't like that much. They're putting together a recession in order to yank our chains. Bring us to heel.
They're having a hard time doing it because there's so much money to be made right now they haven't wanted to slash staff. But now they're coming together.
It's like OPEC. If they all play ball they make a ton of money was wages drop, workers sell property cheaply to survive and unions die.
But if one of them breaks ranks then the one who does gets a ton of market share and gets to hire a ton of useful workers. Imagine you're AMD and you hire up all the engineers Intel's about to fire. In 3 years Intel's tech is stale and yours is kicking ass.
But like OPEC sooner or later they get together in a room and hash things out, and anyone who works for a living suffers for it.
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Wow, the bottom 10% performers! That'll really help them dominate! Unless they're bringing in the knowledge to replicate processes, you'r not really winning in that scenario.
As always, if you have valuable skills and are good at your job, you will not get let go...and if by some chance your company is stupid and lets you go, you'll find a new job as quick as you want.
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You’re assuming everyone is under performing. Could be the people asking for more money.
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Or some other bullshit like "we are done with remote work, so either get to an office forthwith or get thee hence" when you were hired as a remote worker, and there isn't an office within 500+ miles of where you've lived the entire time you worked there.
They're firing 20,000 people (Score:3)
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But if one of them breaks ranks then the one who does gets a ton of market share and gets to hire a ton of useful workers. Imagine you're AMD and you hire up all the engineers Intel's about to fire. In 3 years Intel's tech is stale and yours is kicking ass.
This isn't how companies can profit from this situation. Those workers being let go are not Intel's best and brightest. But layoffs are not the only way employers are fighting against this shift in favor of workers. The two primary ways I see are refusing to increase wages sufficiently and fighting against hybrid/remote work. Employees who become disengaged because of these two actions will be a mix of high, average, and low performers, providing opportunities for employers who do raise wages and offer flex
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there's been a shift in favor of workers. Better pay, better hours, unionization efforts, etc, etc.
The upper crust don't like that much. They're putting together a recession in order to yank our chains. Bring us to heel.
So let me just make sure I am following here. You are stating that you believe that this is an "engineered recession" by business's in hopes to eventually drive down labor costs and influences. Just one more question....what is the color of the sky in your world?
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
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It's been reported that something like 3 million Americans left the workforce during COVID and have not come back. Many of them older, who just decided to retire. Many supposedly due to "long COVID".
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/0... [nytimes.com]
And of course there's the growing problem of millions of young people who stay in their parents basements playing video games in perpetual childhood rather than getting a job and becoming adults.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
In other words, a recession will not "cure" the labo
But they won't fire (Score:3)
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The team that come with ways to force you to use Edge and MS accounts.
That's because those were directives from upper management with the direct intent of locking you into Microsoft further. The original Edge browser (which was actually pretty good) was deliberately withheld from Windows 7 in an attempt to force business into upgrading to Win10. All it did was hand the Windows browser market to Google, which MS had previously dominated with IE. So biz users called Redmond's bluff.
To summarize: no one would get fired for your two items because they were features, not bugs.
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MS products are increasingly becoming Spam Engines. In MS-Office, doing file operations now goes to an intermediate panel instead of File Explorer, with all kinds of "Use Our Wonderful Cloud!" buttons. It's an annoying extra step, gimme f$cking direct File Explorer back, Nedulla!
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They should fire the Outlook team. That is a stinking pile. It's the worst calendar software I've ever used. It's also the worst email software I've ever used. The team should be fired and they should start over with no one allowed to work on it that used, worked on, or knew anything about Outlook. I don't recommend they acquire another email/calendar product and rebrand it because they would surely ruin that as well.
here comes the recession (Score:3)
Makes no sense except as shock value (Score:2)
> a source said the layoffs numbered under 1000
At MS's size, why bother? It just creates panic (unless MS wants to create panic). They could instead quietly put them to work fixing software bugs; MS has buttloads of bugs. Or put them on their under-staffed help-desks.
Did they sack the guy fixing File Explorer? (Score:2)
Oh no, he left years ago.