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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
- lazypenguin 4y ago> The company had 221,000 full-time employees, including 122,000 in the United States and 99,000 internationally, as of June 30, according to filings. The size of these organizations always catch me off guard. 11,000 is a huge number but 221,000 is even more staggering!
- mgkimsal 4y agoNow add in part time workers, contractors, and contracted-out workers like cleaning staff that are still required, just not counted as FTE. Would be interested to know those numbers too, and... are any of them being affected as well (assuming so, but it'll be accounted for in various other ledgers).
- ethbr0 4y agoHistorically (not sure if still true), Microsoft had top tier profit:employee.
- shagie 4y agoThey're likely still up there. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Microsoft+vs+Apple+vs+Google+vs+Netflix&assumption=%7B%22C%22%2C+%22Microsoft%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%22Financial%22%7D https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Microsoft+vs+Apple+vs+G... They're not the best best, but $919k/employee/year is impressive. Google is at $1.5M/employee. Apple is $2.4M/employee and Netflix is $2.7M/employee. (and to the dead comment reply claiming $10M/employee for Musk companies) Tesla: $158,613 https://csimarket.com/stocks/TSLA-Income-per-Employee.html https://csimarket.com/stocks/TSLA-Income-per-Employee.html SpaceX: $210,526 https://www.zippia.com/space-exploration-technologies-careers-39035/revenue/ https://www.zippia.com/space-exploration-technologies-career... (though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX would put it even lower) Starlink: (I can't find any reliable 'how many employees'; crunchbase has it at "1-10")
- vt85 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lsh123 4y agoNumbers here are significantly different: https://moneytransfers.com/news/content/meta-platforms-profit-per-employee-of-497338-highest-among-the-big-techs https://moneytransfers.com/news/content/meta-platforms-profi...
- samspenc 4y agoSo this looks like true profit-per-employee ratio, the OP is revenue-per-employee ratio. I would expect companies to rank differently based on how profitable they are vs how much total money they are making. E.g. one big outlier is Amazon, huge revenue income from retail, but close to zero profits.
- samspenc 4y agoLooks like for the tech companies this is revenue per employee, and not profit per employee right? Then for Tesla, it would be $754K in an apples-to-apples comparison. I can't find any info for SpaceX though. Meta is at $1.64M per employee btw, roughly similar to Google. Didn't realize Apple and Netflix ratios were so much higher. Source for Tesla and Meta: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Microsoft+vs+meta+vs+tesla https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Microsoft+vs+meta+vs+te...
- ensignavenger 4y agoThat is revenue/employee, not profit/employee.
- shagie 4y agoGood catch. Tesla: number of employees: 99,290 ( https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/number-... ) revenue: $74.863B https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/revenue https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/revenue And that gives us $753k/employee - in agreement with your number. --- SpaceX: Number of employees: 12,000 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX ) Revenue: $2 billion ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/20/spacex-revenue-2-billion-from-rockets-last-year-jefferies-estimate.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/20/spacex-revenue-2-billion-fro... (estimate) ) And that brings us: $166k/employee.
- o_m 4y agoBetween 2020 and 2021 they grew by 40k. 11k doesn't seem that much considering.
- rvz 4y ago"Engineers not affected! /s" Like I said before, no-one is safe. not even the FAAMNG companies.
- prng2021 4y agoAgreed. As an aside, these tech sector acronyms have gotten ridiculous.
- QuercusMax 4y agoThe G should really be another A, and the F should be an M... pretty soon will be MANAMANA
- Slighted 4y agoFAGMAN works just fine.
- add-sub-mul-div 4y agoYou're the least safe at the companies that have the most money, because those are the ones that overhired.
- morelisp 4y agoOn a seven person team just merged into a 200 engineer company and we’re responsible for a third of the revenue, I’ve never felt so safe. (Shame that also means everything else about the new company sucks.)
- Xeoncross 4y agoI'm wondering what data really drives the back-and-forth at big tech. We've seen google, amazon, microsoft, meta, etc.. do hiring freezes, then layoffs. Hiring freeze, then back open, or layoffs then more layoffs later. I would expect a longer term plan than just looking forward or backwards one quarter which seems like what has been happening the last year. I would assume they had better information and insights than common investors, but the activity out of these companies in relation to hiring and layoffs has seemed to be as sudden as people changing their stock allocations.
- anonporridge 4y agoMass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of this if you can justify them by economic conditions. There's also an effect of wanting to do smaller, pulsating layoffs over the course of many months or even years rather than one massive layoff of the size you actually need, because ultimately no one knows exactly how the machine of a corporation works, and you have to be careful not to cut so deep that you go beyond cutting out fat and start to damage critical systems. A rapid, 90% loss of workforce like what happened at Twitter might be what the company ultimately needed, but cutting that fast and deep is an insanely risky operation that could lead to a company hobbling along in a compensatory state until it finally falls to decompensatory systems collapse that you can't recover from.
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoWhat % of their work force is 11k employees? Article says 5%. Would also be curious to know what % of the 11k are engineers/breakdown by department/org, etc.
- anonporridge 4y agoYeah, 5% is a small, manageable number. Small enough that if you find you accidentally cut important people or roles, you can quickly get them back. The point in my second paragraph is that if the company actually needs a 15% layoff to maintain itself long term, it would be safest to do it in three smaller 5% waves rather than one fell swoop. After each layoff, you let the system settle and recover, making sure that the body is still generally healthy before continuing with the next operation.
- hardware2win 4y agoHow to interpret this? MSFT felt like stablest FAANG
- colordrops 4y agoApple seems far more stable.
- this_user 4y agoMSFT is more diversified and has a lot of sticky B2B customers while AAPL is mostly B2C. Sure, they are selling to businesses too, but MacBooks can be easily replaced, unlike MS Office and its like.
- bob1029 4y ago> has a lot of sticky B2B customers Indeed. We are all-in on using .NET6+ for building software for our customers. This locks us into VS/Azure/Windows subscriptions as a side-effect. Our clients sign 5+ year contracts, so we aren't leaving this area any time soon. There are certainly less expensive ways we could run our business and deliver our product, but the amount of risk associated with those options is far beyond what our investors, leadership and customers would tolerate.
- arwineap 4y agoFWIW, we run .NET6+ on linux / docker on AWS
- bob1029 4y agoBiggest reason we are stuck on windows is because we use some windows-specific dependencies. If we dedicated ~6 months we could consider cross platform, but that would just be the beginning of the conversation. The 3rd party hosting/licensing costs on a per-customer basis don't even approach 1% of the total cost of the solution.
- 4y ago
- squokko 4y agoEvery Big Tech collects bad hires and these are the best times to get rid of them.
- reverius42 4y agoWhy isn't "as soon as you know they are a bad hire" the best time to get rid of them?
- guessbest 4y agoI think that some companies buy up all available talent to deny their competitors hiring pool.
- spydum 4y agopeople like to keep the bad hires around for when the CFO comes and says you need a haircut. it's kind of gross how many of these big corps work
- squokko 4y agoIt is, but it's difficult to do, needs documentation, etc., and most managers in Big Tech would rather not do it unless required to from above (which is what a layoff gives them the opportunity to do).
- technofiend 4y agoThe overhead of managing someone out is far higher than that of a mass action laying off hundreds or thousands. I'm not saying I agree with sentiment.
- llIIllIIllIIl 4y agoBigCo has a tedious process of getting rid of bad hires. Most managers are not going that path unless they are forced to.
- bagacrap 4y agoSometimes you can have an employee that just lacks motivation, and keeping them around while hoping to motivate them one day is cheaper/easier than finding a new hire, when hiring is super competitive. MS may have less time/patience for these people right now.
- adrr 4y agoDoes Microsoft still do stack rank layoffs every year?
- squokko 4y agoNo
- googlryas 4y agoHow do layoffs like this happen? Every team cuts 5%? Wholesale elimination of teams?
- squokko 4y agoBoth. Teams that haven't gotten exec buy-in just get axed (with lots of good people) and then every Director is required to sacrifice a few people (in this section, most of the people laid off are low performers, but definitely some good performers who have made the wrong enemies or haven't made the right friends).
- cldellow 4y agoIt varies. I was at MSFT during the 2008 layoffs. My division fired a few percent of people. A friend's group had a "We're firing everyone in Redmond who works on this team and consolidating in Hyderabad."
- ChicagoDave 4y agoIf you’re laid off from anywhere, are in a position to join a very early startup, love Texas Hold’em, and have technical or design experience, drop me a note. https://mach9poker.com/ https://mach9poker.com/
- Yoric 4y agoIf you haven't done so yet, you should post in the monthly "Who's Hiring" thread.
- ChicagoDave 4y agoComments seem to be closed for January who’s hiring list.
- Animats 4y agoPossibly a purge of the people who predate mobile.
- llIIllIIllIIl 4y agoNever let a good recession go to waste without firing people.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aliljet 4y agoThis is a curious decision. Microsoft shows a ~73 billion dollar net income [0] and it's probably reasonable to assume their shareholders are enjoying a robust, growing business. I wonder what they believe this reduction in staff is meant to provide? Will this really and meaningfully move their bottom line or will it better tighten the performance characteristics of the staff? [0] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/789019/000156459022026876/msft-10k_20220630.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/789019/00015...
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> I wonder what they believe this reduction in staff is meant to provide? An increase in profitability most likely? If we can agree "you need to have + pay employees in order to deliver projects which grow revenue", I don't know how they expect to grow with "less employees" delivering on less growth projects?
- bagacrap 4y ago> it's probably reasonable to assume their shareholders are enjoying a robust, growing business I don't know what you mean by enjoy here, but shareholders generally enjoy it when stock price appreciates, which is not what's been happening the last 12-14 months.
- runjake 4y agoIt means more profit, even as the world undergoes "challenging times". The execs must be doing a great job to have accomplished this. Let's give them some sort of bonus or promotion, when the time is right.
- opportune 4y agoIf you have 10k in your checking account and are saving an extra 10k per year, would you not cancel a $200/mo gym membership you don’t need?
- roncesvalles 4y agoBy your analogy, the 11k laid off would need to be costing the company over $1.5m per employee on average. If we instead assume it's 300k per employee, it's more like a $40/mo gym membership.
- endsync 4y agoThere was a
- ChicagoBoy11 4y agoIt's hard not to read some of these stories and not think that somehow some of these companies are free-riding on the ability to do some firings with minimal pushback because of the "well, look at what everyone else is doing!" climate that exists now. I'm having a hard time teasing out how much of this is driven by some sort of fundamental analysis of the economy, some collective BigCo CEO shared thinking, or, at my most cynical, an Overton window that's been pushed outwards by Elon firing an extremely significant quantity of the (comparably tiny) workforce of Twitter with seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product.
- squokko 4y agoThat's what some of these companies have stated on the record. Like Zuck explicitly said that some people shouldn't be here, months before the layoffs.
- rufusroflpunch 4y agoWhat are you getting at, exactly? Are you implying they don't need to fire these people, they just want to? Or are you saying they think they need it, but they really don't?
- dakiol 4y agoIsn't it obvious? They don't need to fire those people.
- burnished 4y agoThe phrase "hard time teasing out" typically implies that the author doesn't know what to think amidst several options.
- brightball 4y agoI think he's suggesting that they want to do periodic layoffs regardless but that there may be a more negative perception of doing so in isolation rather than the current situation of multiple other big tech companies doing it.
- 4y ago
- 33955985 4y agoThese layoff articles are incomplete without mentioning how many they hired and when. This brings Microsoft back to their staffing levels of when exactly? March 2021?
- clintonb 4y agoWhat’s the relevance of knowing a previous employee count? How does this information “complete” the story?
- ironick09 4y agoBelieve it or not, like the stock market, employee headcount doesn’t only go up, it goes down too.
- matsemann 4y agoBecause if they hired for instance 30 000 people the last two years, 11 000 brings them back a year or so. If however 11 000 is the headcount they've grown the last 10 years, it's a much more dramatic sign.
- 33955985 4y agoIf your friend told you they lost $10,000 in the stock market today, would you feel bad for them? What if they then told you that they're up $500,000 over the past year? How about then?
- mgkimsal 4y ago11,000 people - let's say an average loaded cost of $250k/yr. That's... ~$3b/yr these folks cost MSFT. Granted, it's per year, but ... keeping these people on for another 3 years would cost ~$10b. MSFT currently have $100b cash on hand. It's gotta be a little... frustrating to get be part of a 5% cut when there's so much free cash sitting around. I know, it's a narrow view of corporate finance, and I don't have the 'big picture', but... still doesn't sit right with me. That said, I don't know what severance packages people are being offered. That might help soften the blow for some folks. EDIT: re one reply about people earning $250k. I indicated 'loaded cost' - health insurance, likely some cost of options/stock, retirement matching, FICA and more. I possibly could have removed 'average'. I suspect many of the folks being cut have on paper salaries (well?) below $200k. Is the 11k number global or US only? Round the number down to $200k. It's closed to $2.2b/year then.
- INeedMoreRam 4y ago[dead]
- qeternity 4y agoWhy would they spend any amount much less $3b or $10b to keep people they don’t need/want?
- bink 4y agoNormally, hiring 11,000 people you "didn't need" would be a warning sign that management was incompetent and require much more than just laying off the unneeded workers. It would suggest that large reforms are needed in planning and hiring. But these days it's just dismissed as an "oops!".
- Decabytes 4y agoReminds me of the LayOff Microsoft did in Q4 of 2014 where they laid off 18k
- nickdothutton 4y agoCorporate excellence programmes are about removing the bottom 10% of performers. However most mass lay-offs aren’t about that kind of performance, they are the answer to the question asked by the buy-side analyst: “If companyX spends 5% on areaY, and you spend 7%, where’s should I look for the benefit delivered in your results, because I’m not seeing it.” I’ve been there.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoIndeed. What is also not understood, company performance is not a result of individual performance, any more than efficiency of your car is a result of quality of steel used to build the body of the car. Incorrect organisation and priorities will absolutely waste the best individual performers, and lead them to depression to boot. Correct organisation can deliver results even from a mediocore team.
- ejb999 4y agoI have a feeling Apple will be next - CEO announces he will be taking a huge pay cut in compensation was maybe an effort for him to preemptively show he is 'sharing the pain' (though 'only' 50M comp is not really much pain)
- NickC25 4y agoTrue, but didn't the amount of stock he took versus cash actually increase? Could be wrong, probably am, but I thought I saw that his base pay dropped significantly but his stock options and grants were virtually untouched if not raised.
- Jemm 4y agoUsing employees as a profit buffer. Just another shitty way corporations work. Somebody got a bonus for making this suggestion at Microsoft.
- ProAm 4y agoIm not sure I follow your thought process. Are you suggesting these employees would make Microsoft more profit YoY than laying them off when they are deemed as a cost center vs profit center?
- endsync 4y agoBloat is real, but there's another labor market dynamic in play here. There was a huge run-up in corporate employee compensation in the tech sector over the last few years. (Some called it a "shortage," remember. Some of it is genuine growth in the sector, some of it was definitely "labor hoarding" by large companies that could afford to carry excess staff in a tight market as a hedge against being unable to fill critical roles - or to deny talent to competitors.) While I would be surprised to learn of explicit collusion to suppress wages (unlike the _In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation_ case,) collusion is not needed. The more tech employers lay people off, the more incentive there is for the next large tech employer to announce a layoff, and that's discoverable without collusion. In the aggregate, the benefit to flooding the market to reduce employee bargaining power offsets potential loss of critical talent, because it drives down the cost of acquiring new talent. The "war for talent" quickly turns to the "war on talent."
- bagacrap 4y agoIs this a war on talent, or just free market dynamics?
- jmugan 4y agoThey are both free market dynamics.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago'Free market dynamic' just means 'natural' - for some reason people think natural = good. Cystic fibrosis is natural. So is the Plague and brain tumous. Collusion, wash trading, self-dealing and insider trading are all 'free market dynamics'.
- safog 4y agoThere's no reason to view it as a pure tech-only thing. Every single company has hoarded talent in the past two years owing to the tight labor market. And it only needs some folks to signal before the flood gates open. Finance is beginning now but a lot of layoffs will follow in H1 2023 IMO. I don't attach any positive or negative moral value beyond everyone just working in their own self interest.
- jimbok 4y agoJust last week MSFT nixed the accrual PTO benefit employees enjoyed and opted for the rouse of 'unlimited' PTO. Effectively, ending a liability/cash outlay they would pay when folks quit, or get fired. I hope those who were affected today receive severance that makes up for them losing this benefit. -James
- arwineap 4y agoMy understanding is that the way they converted to unlimited PTO was by paying out people's vacation time with a one time payout. In which case, they didn't lose benefit at all
- opportune 4y agoThey lost it going forward, and also lost any kind of arbitrage when paired with salary increases. Eg my accrued vacation is “worth” 10% more after a 10% salary bump than before it.
- bialpio 4y agoIt also serves as a nice buffer when you are switching jobs - you can take the PTO and still be employed (& so covered by health insurance for a bit longer, and stocks are still vesting), making for a nice break from work.
- 4y ago
- oldstrangers 4y agoWhat sort of system exists for these monster layoffs that they can just (relatively) quickly patch the hole left by removing 11,000 people? I can't comprehend what that looks like logistically.
- applejacks 4y agoMy understanding is that this is a ~5% decrease in employees? Pretty easy to imagine losing 1 person in your 20 person department. Really depends on the "who", which tends to get lost in headlines consisting of large numbers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ddalex 4y agoIt can be either (whole product/teams get cancelled) either horizontal (lowest rated 5%). Usually both, with the critical teams get extra headcount
- bagacrap 4y agoMicrosoft, Apple and Alphabet are sitting on extremely profitable businesses and huge piles of cash. (Other megacaps like NVDA, Meta, NFLX, maybe less so.) So far we have not seen much in the way of the highly-anticipated earnings decline, and the current projection for Q4 GDP is around 4% growth, which suggests to me that Q4 earnings should be better than anticipated by the pessimists out there. I would see this as a relatively painless opportunity to cut out low performers. Sure it sucks for those who are being cut, but my experience working at a FAANG tells me there are a lot more than 10% who contribute very little.
- hiq 4y ago> I would see this as a relatively painless opportunity to cut out low performers. As many other comments have pointed out already, that's not how mass layoffs work in practice.
- danielxli 4y agoHere's a dashboard we made keeping track of the economy. We're now at a higher number of layoffs in January than any month in 2022 except for November https://app.plusdocs.com/startup-funding-/page/clcgzzo551257608jm5a8kdd8o https://app.plusdocs.com/startup-funding-/page/clcgzzo551257...
- pcurve 4y agonearly 0 savings rate and all time low consumer sentiment. Hrm...
- type-r 4y agolooks like it could be interesting but the charts come up crazy blurry on zoom for me in iOS
- roncesvalles 4y agoDo you add unconfirmed layoff reports like this one? I don't believe Microsoft has put out an official statement.
- havblue 4y agoThis isn't a moral justification, but isn't laying off workers when other companies have layoffs a simple supply and demand response? That is, the demand curve is the same for these workers but the supply curve shifts to the right and prices for the same job drops. They're betting that the people hired in a recession will perform better per dollar than the people let go.
- rossdavidh 4y agoA layoff of ~5%, especially if it is the first one in a while, is usually (at large corporations) just a way to get rid of (perceived to be) non-performing staff without having to do as much paperwork as actually firing someone. This isn't to say they are correct about those 5% not performing, and even if they are it may not have been that person's fault, but the real motivation for a layoff of this type (first one in a while, less than 1 in 10) is usually just to get rid of people it would otherwise be too stressful/legally fraught to get rid of.
- topkai22 4y agoYou’d wish, but in my experience individual performance is only a small factor in layoffs. In one layoff I survived, our GM (with 1000+ people) was told who was being let go a day before the event. That involved 100+ people. People with above average performance ratings were let go, some with below average ratings stayed. As best we can tell, HR went with laying off senior/expensive employees based on the lack of certain technologies on their internal resume. Of course, your best employees don’t update their their internal resume much, because they are busy with all the work being thrown at them. It was chaos. I’ve also seen companies do layoffs by cutting entire teams. Top performer on a misaligned team? You are also laid off.
- raydev 4y agoHow old is your data on this? This is repeated multiple times in this thread, but my experience with layoffs hasn't shown that poor performers are cut. It's random or it's entire teams/orgs.
- AtNightWeCode 4y agoIs it the staff of the Teams team? Worst product ever. One can't even as a logged in user click on search results within the app without going into login hell.
- jaza 4y agoYes, Teams sucks. But (from my anecdotal observations) it's pretty popular. And in my opinion that's mainly because many companies decide: "meh, it's good enough, and it's easier (for accounting dept) and safer (for risk dept) to go with Microsoft, than to go with Slack / Zoom". Plus I'd say quite a few companies migrate to Teams from WebEx, which sucks way more, so hey, it's all relative. So, in conclusion, Teams is probably a decent revenue earner for Microsoft at the moment, therefore I doubt that the Teams team will be hit too hard by this round of layoffs.
- mordae 4y ago> human resources and engineering divisions, No lobbyists? Why am I not surprised.
- jacob0385 4y agounlimited time off plot twist
- berz01 4y ago1. Too many humans - decision-making is slowed down & and it's expensive Cut half - faster decisions, more money. Will you have more problems, Yes. But you'll never know how bloated you were till you get lean again. 2. Too expensive humans Most developers at FANGS can be replaced with mediocre devs in iowa or India. They will cut high-priced salaries soon and replace them with entry-level talent.
- zerohp 4y ago> Most developers at FANGS can be replaced with mediocre devs in iowa or India. They will cut high-priced salaries soon and replace them with entry-level talent. Software companies have been trying this for 30 years and it has never worked.
- hintymad 4y agoI was wondering to which year of employment level will all the lay-off roll back. For instance, FB has the same number of employees as they did back in Jan 2022 after the laid-off. Let's say the employment level went back to 2018 for the tech industry, would it be a bad thing? The packages back in 2018 were still pretty cushy.
- pkaye 4y agoHow many employees did Microsoft add since the beginning of the pandemic. I know there was a lot of hiring during that time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- skizm 4y agoJust some initial Googling shows they had roughly 144K employees in 2019 and ~221K in 2022. If you take out 11k, they still added 66K jobs in 3 years. I'd be curious to know the breakdown of the kinds of jobs they added vs the ones they're now eliminating. The article says this cut affects mostly HR and engineering, but doesn't give exact numbers, and it is hard to tell the breakdown for jobs added (unless someone smarter than me can find the info in the public filings).
- tyingq 4y agoI would guess there's some correlation to a boom in O365 because of the pandemic. Companies that only gave licenses to some employees expanding it to all employees to handle remote work, company-wide events, etc. And now a plateau in that reached sooner than MS expected.
- redleggedfrog 4y agoSo one 1 out of 20 are getting let go. Looking around near 50 employee company I work for I easily see 2.5 employees I would let go just because they're near useless. Hell, I'd say it's at least 5. I'd say unless you've got a good manager, really good hiring, and are keeping close tabs on the technical people (just to make clear, I'm one of them those technical people) I figure you've at least got 1 our of 20 you should just be sacking on principle.
- Aperocky 4y agoEventually you'll run out of bad ones to sack and then the that's when the good ones leave because they don't want to play the ladder game. You're left with middling who might have a hard time finding other jobs but could play the ladder game well enough - potentially with devastating consequence for health of the technical stack as more "features" get developed.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoIn my experience you’re right that the best devs don’t care to play the ladder game, but they’re generally pretty okay at it. It’s not that much of a distraction from your regular work to think about “How can I help my manager look good to their manager?” which is all the ladder game is.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoThis logic has a nice way of being used against you. I think the employees you feel are useless would sack you if they could. Focusing on productivity is of course the right metric, but the metric that gets used in practice is “Which of you helped advance your manager’s career?” After all, your manager is the one who decides who goes, and there’s no incentive to keep someone that does nothing for them over someone who helps them look good to the VP — which is who decides whether your manager goes. Same rule applies recursively.
- sosodev 4y agoYou'll say this until you are the one let go. Companies are irrational and layoffs of this scale are not capable of targeting the poor performers.
- kabdib 4y agoI've survived multiple layoffs at various big tech companies in the 80s, 90s and 00s. I'm currently at Microsoft. It's always a bit of a gut clench. Ugh.
- Patrol8394 4y agoGranted that there are definitely people there resting and vesting and not contributing much. I get it. This still does not explain why all these big tech companies went on hiring spree when clearly they did not need that many people. And now they all: ops sorry, we did not know ... I would like to see top managers bonuses/refreshes and so on trimmed and maybe fired as well.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stuaxo 4y agoWell, this is a pointless move on their behalf.
- z3t4 4y agoMicrosoft has been bribing enterprise executives with jobs, as part of their sales process.
- saos 4y agohonest question – Is this the danger of overpaying engineers $200k+ salaries?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dr_faustus 4y agoNot to offend anyone affected, but considering the cost/profit structure of those big companies has not really changed that much (except, maybe, Meta), I get the feeling, that this round of layoffs is in some ways welcomed by those companies. In many cases, they are basically returning to pre-pandemic levels and instead of an actual financial need, these layoffs are probably a result of the fact that you cannot effectively incorporate an headcount increase of 20% in a high-tech company within 1-2 years. It seems like they hired to please investors because everyone else was also hiring like mad. Since the shareholder expectations have reversed, the companies are using the "opportunity" to return to manageable numbers of engineers and administrators.
- ROTMetro 4y agoMember when Carly Fiorina shut down HPs calculator division because it wasn't PROFITABLE enough? Pepperidge Farms remembers. It's not enough you make a company profit, it depends on the quality of that profit to the stock to determine if you are worth keeping around. There are some seriously broken things about that and about our modern economy.
- yevpats 4y agoThat's just the first wave out of three. The first one are with the most severance usually as there is still more cash in the bank, so even though it sucks to get laid off you can look at the glass half full. Be strong everyone there!
- cpsns 4y agoAlways remember: your employer doesn’t give one single iota of a fuck about you when it’s convenient to get rid of you.
- refurb 4y agoPretty sure these layoffs are due to the rule.. "There are three ways to make a living in this business; be first, be smarter, or cheat. Now, I don't cheat. And, although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first."