7 ms·
About 700 Microsoft employees will be laid off next week, sources say
- Omnipresent 10y agoI'm genuinely curious if POTUS will take note of this.
- jusq2 10y agoMy prediction, based on the fact that POTUS has a mind of a 7 year old kid, is a tantrum will be thrown. The adults in the room will pacify it with some superficial meaningless action/distraction and the cycle will repeat for 4 years. As Daniel Kahnemen has said there is high demand for overconfidence these days. And the tech industry has blindly satisfied that demand by creating platforms that prop up characters like POTUS. Not just in the sphere of politics but you can see this within your family, friends, teachers, scientists, religious and biz leaders basically everywhere you look. If we want solutions that trend has to be reversed.
- PutinIsEvil 10y agoThank god we have you!! Much smart, so wow!!! Did you see the latest photos of the Obamas, glorious, right? Nobel peace prize winner obama who killed more people using drones than even Dubya Bush. Allowed false flag chemical attacks on Syrians. Preannounced Iraq offensive on ISIS so ISIS runs to Syria. Love you jusq2. Will you please run for president sometime soon?????!!!!
- rat87 10y ago> My prediction, based on the fact that POTUS has a mind of a 7 year old kid, is a tantrum will be thrown. The adults in the room will pacify it with some superficial meaningless action/distraction and the cycle will repeat for 4 years. You assume adults are let into the room and will be making the decision. He is the POTUS as long as he cares and isn't lazy enough to pawn it off he'll be the one making decisions.
- akhilcacharya 10y agoFantastic point. I think he'll tweet about it eventually and try to make a cause for H1B Reform (even though MS is hardly an example of visa fraud).
- CydeWeys 10y agoWhy would Microsoft even have layoffs? They're highly profitable and this is a small percentage of their workforce. Surely they're taking a huge morale loss and hiring hit when they do something like this? Why would I consider working for a company that just had layoffs recently? Why wouldn't they just fire the underperformers and reassign the others? Mass indiscriminate layoffs are bad.
- mattnewton 10y ago> "We understand that Microsoft typically gives laid-off employees 60 days to find a new position internally and offers two weeks pay for every 6 months of employment, according one employee." It sounds like this is close to what is happening, except it's less about underperformer and more about specific skillsets.
- CydeWeys 10y agoInteresting. Why announce the total number if a lot of them may just find another project inside Microsoft? Shouldn't they wait the 60 days to see how many are actually getting laid off? Or do most people not find another project?
- Eridrus 10y agoI think there are legal reporting requirements.
- jstewartmobile 10y agoThey file thousands of worker visas because there's a "shortage" of qualified people, yet they also set a layoff target of 2,850 people back in June 2016... It's like no one really cares if anything adds up anymore. Perhaps it was always this way?
- WalterBright 10y agoQualified people are not interchangeable. I'm qualified for some jobs, and worse than useless for others. (You wouldn't pick me to formulate a new rocket fuel.)
- Hydraulix989 10y agoSoftware jobs don't just need quality people, there are actual costs associated with ramping up new employees and knowledge transfer of old ones. There's certain things employees keep in their heads that you can't quantify as lost mindshare when they are gone. Software has so much domain knowledge that there are all sorts of funny memes about what happens whenever the person that originally wrote the code leaves the company.
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoYou're forgetting but Microsoft isn't just a software shop. They also do quite a lot of hardware, games / VR, design among other things. I don't know who they're laying off but if they worked in, say, ARM Surface Hardware or maybe phone hardware engineering, they're going to have a smaller amount of places to go. Yes they could go learn software development but if they haven't done it that ramp up time is going to be years.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoThe same argument applies to hardware engineering (after all, so much of hardware engineering nowadays is coding, Verilog or otherwise). Also, it's worth noting that I'm very familiar with Microsoft.
- 10y ago
- sean_patel 10y agoWhat's worse is that it most likely affects American Citizens. They usually leave the H1B Visa workers intact, in part, because they file justifications for not being able to find an equally qualified person in USA. Related: See => U.S. Senator blasts Microsoft's H-1B push as it lays off 18,000 workers (2014): http://www.computerworld.com/article/2490207/technology-law-regulation/u-s--senator-blasts-microsoft-s-h-1b-push-as-it-lays-off-18-000-workers.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2490207/technology-law-... [ EDIT: Down-voters, explain yourself. You are being PC and ridiculous. What I've stated here are true, ugly facts. ]
- djsumdog 10y agoThat's not what's going to happen. All the new proposed legislation will do is drive up wages (and therefore income inequality) for both Americans and H1-B holders. It will also allow the big firms to shed their worse employees and hold on to only their best, thereby making it incredibly difficult for smaller competitors and public entities to find staff: http://fightthefuture.org/articles/hr-170-will-all-large-companies-to-consolidate-talent-in-the-tech-industry/ http://fightthefuture.org/articles/hr-170-will-all-large-com...
- mc32 10y agoWhy should Americans be concerned about foreign worker's ability to find a job in the American job market? Are People in Australia, Japan, India concerned with the ease or difficulty Americans have finding jobs in those respective economies? Certainly Americans should be concerned with income inequality at home, or at least concerned with decreasing poverty among all Americans.
- yurymik 10y agoBecause that affects willingness for others to come and work in the country. If country relies on foreigners to bring in required skill sets, it better not to allienate the very same people.
- 10y ago
- fdsaaf 10y agoMicrosoft has a lot of deadweight, mostly holdovers from the Ballmer era.
- frik 10y agoThey lost their most skilled staff from the 1990s era due to early retirement. They fired all QA staff. Nowadays they have a big piles of legacy codebases. They outsourced or better say moved development of many products to India. Nowadays you really feel the lower skilled work force (compared to 1990s staff) and no QA to speak of everywhere in there products. Their product feel like designed by people who have little engineering knowledge, a far cry from 1990s software UI. Well it already started with WinXP that contained already HTML based UI parts like "software" control panel, and many more parts - an undocumented new UI API where the EU fined them. Plus the 1984 style spyware features their Nadella CEO introduced and forces upon end consumers like there is no tomorrow.
- praneshp 10y ago> no QA to speak of everywhere in there products nit: their, not there.
- garganzol 10y agoBallmer was among the ones who pushed Microsoft into Azure. Not exactly a deadweight if you look at revenue sheet today.
- sharps_xp 10y agoWhen it seems like companies don't complain enough how scarce it is to find hirable talent, I wonder what the details are on their engineering layoffs. Why not just move them to a different team? Why not just keep work on tech debt efforts? Laying them off seems like a terrible long term decision. I'm assuming these lay offs are not some guise to hide that they're getting rid of their low performing engineers.
- WalterBright 10y agoThe article says they can apply for other positions within Microsoft. > some guise I would expect many companies to do this so the employee can save face by being laid off rather than fired.
- sharps_xp 10y ago> The article says they can apply for other positions within Microsoft I don't know how I would handle that mentally, to have to re-apply to the company that just laid me off. The message is weird. "We're letting you go, but if you REALLY want to stay, find a team that wants you. Here, we'll put a 2 month timer on it." Sorry if that sounds like rambling, but I simply don't understand.
- erinnh 10y agoIts more like: "Your team is going to be no more or is being downsized because its not as important anymore, we really want to keep you though, so we are going to give you 2 months to find another place inside the company where you would like to work at."
- sharps_xp 10y agoMaybe, but they're weighing another place inside the company against another place in some other company PLUS severance.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
- bkjelden 10y agoSad to see Microsoft seeming to fall into this pattern of a recurring trickle of layoffs, especially when they are still so profitable. These kinds of layoffs can be incredibly corrosive to morale. The 'update skills in various units' argument rings a little hollow at a company where a new hire on an eng team in an org with lots of legacy systems, like Windows or Office, will be expected to need 6+ months to be fully integrated in the team. If that were true, why not just retrain the people you already have?
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago> The 'update skills in various units' argument rings a little hollow at a company where a new hire on an eng team in an org with lots of legacy systems, like Windows or Office, will be expected to need 6+ months to be fully integrated in the team. If that were true, why not just retrain the people you already have? I didn't see where it said who they were laying off. What if they were laying off hardware engineers? If they haven't done software before that ramp up time to integrate into a software development team may be years. They do a lot more than just software. I agree if they're laying off of software then there is no reason they can't be retrained in another dev team but that's not always the case here. You're also missing the part where Microsoft gives them 60 days to find a new position within the company. I'm assuming they have to re-interview but probably no way to avoid that.
- ac29 10y ago>I didn't see where it said who they were laying off "The upcoming cuts won't be specific to any single group, but will be spread across the company's worldwide offices and business units, including sales, marketing, human resources, engineering, finance and more." Sounds like perhaps they dont expect to make their quarterly numbers, and are doing blanket layoffs to appease investors.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago> "The upcoming cuts won't be specific to any single group, but will be spread across the company's worldwide offices and business units, including sales, marketing, human resources, engineering, finance and more." I was referring to the type of people, mostly. Like, software engineers, hardware engineers, designers, HR folks, etc. > Sounds like perhaps they dont expect to make their quarterly numbers, and are doing blanket layoffs to appease investors. They announced these over 6 months ago so I'm not necessarily convinced that's why. Though I would love to know for sure.
- xfour 10y agoHow exactly is this not just people being fired? I understand they get severance so that's nice for employees, but what's the goal of doing it this way from the companies perspective?
- phamilton 10y agoGet it all done at once.
- burkaman 10y agoMany states make it illegal to fire some or all types of employees without cause.
- jdavis703 10y agoA firing usually means the employee did something wrong, such as harassing a co-worker, stealing money, or violating critical policies. A layoff means simply that your services are no longer needed, and that's it.
- dawnerd 10y agoIn addition being fired looks really bad. Being laid off not so much (if at all).
- sbuttgereit 10y agoThere can be legal differences as well as some of the reasons mentioned by others already.
- mankash666 10y agoWhile sad, most employment is "at will". The employer can let go for no reason what so ever with a two week notice, by law
- mindcrime 10y agoHow is that sad? I love the fact that I can quit my job and go take another job at any time. If the flip-side of that coin is that I can be fired at any time, then so be it.
- lima 10y agoMost people appreciate it once they've settled down and have family.
- mindcrime 10y agoWhat, you think having a family means you want to be stuck in the same boring job for the rest of your life? Or that you won't still want to seek higher pay down the road? What if you have another kid? Job flexibility could come in handy...
- hiddencost 10y agoMost people take many months to find a job, and it is an incredibly stressful and demoralizing experience.
- mindcrime 10y agoSo? We should end at-will employment so a few people don't have to experience the occasional "stressful and demoralizing experience"? I'm not buying it. Nobody said life was all sunshine and rainbows...
- rincebrain 10y agoFamily, in this case, generally means they appreciate the stability, and are willing to trade the slower mobility for the increased security.
- fuzzfactor 10y agoIt is good to see some messages from those who do have inside knowledge about working within (and being kicked out of) this particular bureaucracy. The similarities and differences between different bureaucracies in different "tech" companies, some quite similar and others quite different by design, is interesting too. Regardless, it fundamentally looks like the decent companies that have a system to truly hire employees worth investing in, and are qualified enough investors to never let that investment in their people lapse (since it always pays off, short-term or long-term), would be the last ones to lay people off at all. Certainly not layoffs as part of a non-emergency long-term planned business strategy, in such a non-astute effort known as "across-the-board", or even more childishly by algorithm. As a businessman while trying to maintain or accelerate growth, if you can also limit the downside to the rate of attrition, you will never need to lay anybody off. Depends on how good a businessman you are. There have always been companies that are not decent, some even have an actual system to exclude potential employees who would otherwise provide the most return on resource investment, and there are some that never even leverage a respectable percentage of their capable people anywhere near their full potential. Even for these lesser companies, bold downsizing leaves unmeasurable damage to the company and remaining employees, just as strongly as it can to those who are kicked out. Although many who are laid off move on to much better careers after being separated from companies which didn't seem so poor up until that point. When the unmeasured damage exceeds the cost of retaining actual good people, the direct negative effect on the bottom line can still be completely obfuscated. This can easily be ignored by the ignorant or malicious, or swept under the rug by a large variety of bureaucracies, most of which are not capable of building or maintaing alignment of employee interests with those of shareholders. In this case it can be a significant notch-down in opportunities for both employees and shareholders from that point forward, with no indication whatsoever on any current financial statement. Too bad it's the future financial statements that will be less impressive or more disappointing, depending on the situation. Just like in the 20th Century, 19th Century . . .