Microsoft Cuts Jobs in HoloLens, Surface, Xbox as Layoffs Continue (bloomberg.com) 51
Microsoft, implementing the layoff of 10,000 workers announced last month, on Thursday cut jobs in units including Surface devices, HoloLens mixed reality hardware and Xbox, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Cuts to much of the HoloLens hardware team throw into question whether the company will produce a third iteration of the goggles outside of a planned version for the US Army, said the people, who declined to be named discussing confidential matters. At the Xbox gaming unit, reductions came in marketing and the Xbox Gaming Ecosystem, one of the people said.
Xbox Chief Phil Spencer emailed employees Thursday to let them know about the cuts without detailing what parts of his business were impacted. "I encourage everyone to take the time and space necessary to process these changes and support your colleagues," Spencer wrote in the email, which was seen by Bloomberg.
Xbox Chief Phil Spencer emailed employees Thursday to let them know about the cuts without detailing what parts of his business were impacted. "I encourage everyone to take the time and space necessary to process these changes and support your colleagues," Spencer wrote in the email, which was seen by Bloomberg.
Beating will continue until moral improves (Score:2, Troll)
Fire one million. [youtube.com]
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--BUG REPORT--
Description: the rsilvergun bot keeps responding with the same dialog tree.
Repro Steps:
1) post a story on slashdot
2) wait for rsilvergun to respond
3) observe the generated text
Expected: the bot responds with text that is relevant to the story
Actual: the bot only responds with text from conspiracy theory websites in its training data
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But I'm sure you're independently wealthy so you don't need to worry about having a job like the rest of us suckers right?
And I literally linked to an article where Jerome Powell talks about the need for layoffs. That's not a conspiracy theory he's saying it right out in the open.
What is wrong with you that you keep denying reality? Is going points on the internet real
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I'd like to know why he's really pushing this policy because it doesn't seem to make sense for companies making profits sometimes high profits to use these popular excuses they need to fire people. It's like something else is behind it beyond what they are saying-- even if what they are saying seems surprisingly blunt.
Unions (Score:2)
It's possible he's not personally thinking that, and that it's just the people who have his ear feeding this to him. I doubt it though, I don't think he's that stupid. I think he knows exactly what he's doing and why.
But his motives don't matter in the slightest. In practice his actions mean mass layoffs which will significantly reduce employee bargaining power. That hurts me and you personal
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The complete lack of anti-trust law enforcement (Score:2)
This isn't something we can solve with market solutions alone. We need Unions and we need gov't laws to protect them. We don't have the bargaining power, and without that power capitalism breaks down into feudalism.
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What do you think we should do about it? Storm the capitol on Jan 6?
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I'm genuinely impressed. I didn't think you'd take on my advice and stop spreading the "attempting to engineer a recession" bullshit, but here we are and you've really toned back your argument to the sensible underlying economic basis of limiting growth as a mechanism to control inflation.
I'm proud of how far you've come.
Re: Beating will continue until moral improves (Score:1)
I am sure he is sad (Score:4, Insightful)
These tech companies are cutting jobs to pad the C-Levels and Investors pockets at the expense of everyone else. Fuck anyone who defends a profitable company doing this. You are all assholes.
Re:I am sure he is sad (Score:4)
How much Phil makes is only interesting from an emotional triggering reaction. It's not important to the question at hand, which is, "Do the 10,000 cuts make sense?"
I wasn't able to find his compensation with decent clarity, but hints to it put it somewhere amount $2M - let's double that and say $4M. Based on $150,000 / head (salary + benefits + overhead), if he worked for free or was fired, you could have lowered the cuts to... 9,975.
Outrage is fine. But ultimately it's mostly a non sequitur.
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"Do the 10,000 cuts make sense?"
So $150,000*10,000 is $1.5B. Microsoft 2022 operating income is $83B. It doesn't seem to make any sense. I hope they didn't tell their employees they were part of the family.
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I assume you live like you preach, and subscribe to every service you don't actually need, because it's just 5-50 bucks each, peanuts to your four digit monthly salary.
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I also see a lot of hate toward tech workers especially among melon musk subjec
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You seem to confuse PR with policy.
"Corporate family" is PR. Not keeping useless people on payroll is policy.
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You think that there's something private about widely used public relations talking points?
Why?
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That's another emotional argument. Comparing the size of the cuts to the operating income isn't useful. If that was as far as the decision making process went, the stockholders would rightly demand that heads would roll.
One starting point could be whether or not you think the organization can achieve similar results with the reduced labour.
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That's another emotional argument. One starting point could be whether or not you think the organization can achieve similar results with the reduced labour.
No, you want to have the optimal number of employees at the right time. The game industry is famous for this: hire employees, release the game, fire employees as soon as possible (keeping small teams to start next product) while you make profit from sales then repeat. It's a good model for companies. Is it good for a society?
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Is it good for society? Not a question I intend to address.
My point is strictly about what to compare. Position cuts to operating income? Not applicable.
Lol it works exactly the opposite way around (Score:3)
You're almost on the right track, but just got it backwards. Bigger companies like Microsoft actually make MORE money for the investors than do small companies, like your local convenience store. *GROWING* your business is how you pad your pockets.
Going out of business, or partially going out of business (shutting down departments etc) is how you make less.
You make more money by selling more products.
The greedy fuckers (like people who want to retire eventually) really want to hire MORE people at $150K who
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Well, I'm sure the UK Xbox division would be hurting from the recent decision. They were playing the rejection of the merger as something that would hurt the UK competitiveness, so they could attribute those job losses to that.
And probably do it with a thing to Sony saying they better hire them all.
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These tech companies are cutting jobs to pad the C-Levels and Investors pockets at the expense of everyone else. Fuck anyone who defends a profitable company doing this. You are all assholes.
You sound like an addicted gambler complaining when people tell you to cut your losses sure that you're going to win the next payday.
After these layoffs Microsoft will still be larger than it was last year. They along with many tech companies hired well beyond their means, a stupid knee jerk reaction during COVID.
Microsoft literally hired 40000 additional staff. Let me add some formatting Microsoft HIRED FOURTY THOUSAND ADDITIONAL STAFF during the tech bubble representing their biggest hiring spree in all o
So- (Score:4, Interesting)
Given it's apparently layoff-palooza for businesses left and right, is there someone tracking which companies laid off which workers, and how their profit margins have looked before and after?
I'm curious what kind of correlation (if any) exists.
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Given it's apparently layoff-palooza for businesses left and right, is there someone tracking which companies laid off which workers, and how their profit margins have looked before and after?
I'm curious what kind of correlation (if any) exists.
Like Yahoo yesterday? "We're in pretty good financial condition, but fuck it: let's have a firing-palooza, just for the fun of it!"
Re:So- (Score:4, Insightful)
The layoffs are not "businesses left and right". The layoffs are basically segregated completely to the software development market. Everyone else is begging for skilled employees.
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Well then, maybe those skilled employees should just learn to code!
Oh, wait, I seem to have crossed my streams here. Which cue cards was I supposed to be using again? Oh right, tech no longer needs employees because employees are overrated and negatively impact the bottom line by expecting to be paid and never, ever, contribute anything to the record-breaking year-over-year recorded profits. Right. Gotta remember that.
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opportunity costs are changing, not profits.
When interest rates were nothing, investment capital was plentiful (even if investors lose some of the time, they make more off of the successes than they would by just saving the money in a bank). It was worth spending (almost free) money on good employees that you don't really need in order to keep them away from your competition, and just in case you do need them later.
As interest rates increase, investment capital is less available. It no longer makes sense
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The layoffs are not "businesses left and right". The layoffs are basically segregated completely to the software development market. Everyone else is begging for skilled employees.
Are you sure? The most recent data I could find (Nov2022, so after some of the big layoffs last year but not all) was 2.2% unemployment rate among software engineers, compared to national non-form unemployment rate of 3.5%-3.7%. My read is that software engineering is begging for skilled employees every bit as much as other industries.
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Agreed. I was just saying this is a market adjustment of the overvalued software engineering workforce. The engineers getting laid off will not have a hard time finding another gig, but will probably have a hard time finding another gig paying the salary they were paid before. They will be fine.
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Yeah, but these companies seem to lay off non-software people (see TFS: "At the Xbox gaming unit, reductions came in marketing and the Xbox Gaming Ecosystem, one of the people said"). That means mostly non-engineers.
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Some journalist (any left in the USA?) needs to investigate the investors. It seems some funds are going around with their tiny % of shares and demanding mass firing at tech companies with the excuse that in the future there may be a recession. It looks far more like a few conservative billionaires who watch too much Faux News. They only need to threaten a lawsuit that the shareholders are not being looked out for to make CEOs worry that a corrupt judge will rule against them should it go to court.
The evid
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He certainly demonstrated that companies ran in a certain fashion have at least twice as many employees on payroll as they actually need to run the company.
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Given it's apparently layoff-palooza for businesses left and right, is there someone tracking which companies laid off which workers, and how their profit margins have looked before and after?
I'm curious what kind of correlation (if any) exists.
I don't know who is participating in Layoff-Palooza; but I sure know who isn't.
https://fortune.com/2023/02/10... [fortune.com]
Now we know which tech company is run by actual adults; rather than ridiculous man-child "management".
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Most of the correlation is "we hired a lot of people during the pandemic peak to meet temporary demand + assumed growth which didn't materialize".
So now the extra people that aren't actually needed + all the diversity hires that were taken on as dead weight for PR reasons (read: to get bigger piece of pie of ESG investing) are getting axed.
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Given it's apparently layoff-palooza for businesses left and right, is there someone tracking which companies laid off which workers, and how their profit margins have looked before and after?
The only ones really doing any layoffs are those who hired completely unsustainably during the tech bubble in 2021. Just FYI Microsoft hired 40000 additional people in 2021. It was their largest addition to their company in history. If you subtract the 10000 from it now it will only be ... still the largest addition to their company in history.
This is a course correction for stupid companies driving my kneejerk management, nothing more.
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https://layoffs.fyi/ [layoffs.fyi]
It at least covers the first part of your question.
Computer Engineers have market adjustment (Score:3)
Computer/Software Engineering and development has long obviously been over valued vs. other professions of similar education and technical level. They are now experiencing a market correction.
The engineers and developers will be fine.
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There really can’t be a correction when they’re simultaneously saying they can’t find people to do absolutely critical work.
They know this too, they eat and breathe negotiation, PR, and the laws of supply and demand. This is a conspiracy.
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Why can't both things be true? Too many people, not enough critical people. Sounds very plausible to me. Mind you, I have a somewhat dim view of my profession...
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That is actually correct.
Re: Computer Engineers have market adjustment (Score:1)
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I think you have that back to front i.e. any effort put into XBox drains resource away from making windows worse.
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Ooh, guess I pissed off the guy who puts those ads in Windows 11!
Market is shifting anyway (Score:1)
The rest of industry is still innovating, though. Agritech, for instance, is going to be huge in the coming years as climate change and population growth begin to collide.
My advice to all the laid off technical folk is to not try and get back into the tech-bro world. Find another industry that is using tech to transfor