To play Devil’s advocate, perhaps that team never delivered anything, despite consisting of (presumably) talented engineers. I’ve seen several “brilliant but un

To play Devil’s advocate, perhaps that team never delivered anything, despite consisting of (presumably) talented engineers. I’ve seen several “brilliant but unaccomplished” teams that never actually ship anything but nonetheless manage to hang around due to the raw intelligence of their team members. It can be hard to let someone go who talks like an accomplished CS professor at every meeting, but does little besides that. >It looks more like a spreadsheet driven culling of the product lines. You’d think a company as successful as Microsoft would be above such ineffective, morale-crushing moves (also profit-crushing, assuming the people being fired were actually productive), but then again, if this article [0] (and associated HN comments) are to be believed, Microsoft isn’t exactly optimizing [fh]iring decisions based on performance. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33165844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33165844