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Pay-frozen Microsofties not happy to hear of 'landmark year'
- Hippocrates 3y agoThey are right to be mad, but Nadella did cite “the labor market” as one factor in the pay freeze. That’s another way of saying “we won’t pay you more because we don’t need to” At the end of the day I don’t think the justification or excuse is important. It’s a “vote with your feet” scenario.
- wlesieutre 3y agoEven if they think their employees couldn't find more money somewhere else, "We had a great year and you get an effective pay cut due to inflation" isn't going to inspire people to work hard even if they don't quit over it.
- paxys 3y agoMicrosoft doesn't really have a "work hard" culture to begin with. The company simply owns a money faucet, and 200K+ employees are around to watch it and make sure nothing goes wrong.
- wlesieutre 3y agoIf the engineers are slacking off, who will build their replacement calculator app with a button that transfers your calculator session to the bing search web calculator? In Edge of course, regardless of what your default web browser setting is. They have a lot of bing integrations that need building across all of their money faucet divisions.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago> At the end of the day I don’t think the justification or excuse is important. It’s a “vote with your feet” scenario. I agree with this entirely. A business like Microsoft's is always a money-grab competition between shareholders, customers, non-executive employees, and executives. I can't recall a single occurrence (in my experience) that management's rhetoric to employees was a substitute for cash, stock, and/or a contract. In fact, that rhetoric would just sour me on management, because I take it as evidence that they're playing employees for fools. If you want employees to invest in the company's future, offer stock, not platitudes.
- andsoitis 3y ago> If you want employees to invest in the company's future, offer stock, not platitudes. And Microsoft, just like the other big tech firms, do make equity an important part of compensation, don’t they? https://www.cordantwealth.com/microsoft/full-guide-to-microsoft-rsus/ https://www.cordantwealth.com/microsoft/full-guide-to-micros...
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoIf you can vote with your feet, which is the whole justification for the pay freeze, because it’s hard to walk right now. Doesn’t say much for loyalty later when the labor market tightens again.
- seti0Cha 3y agoThe best people can pretty much always vote with their feet. MS may not see significantly higher attrition, but they may still see attrition of significance. I hope so, for all the employees' sakes.
- JohnFen 3y agoEven programmers that aren't 10X can vote with their feet. The job market isn't bad if you look outside of FAANG, SV, and the Microsofts of the world.
- mathattack 3y agoThat’s exactly it. They won’t raise salaries if Google and Microsoft aren’t in a rush to hire their top engineers anymore. They will when those companies are. Companies rarely pay based on contribution. They pay based on what it takes to keep someone from hiring you away.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoEverything works against the market. The price of anything must be higher than the cost to produce, but the market value has little to do with margin
- hedora 3y agoI get the impression the labor market is fine. Companies that have instituted mandatory work from home are seeing attrition way above forecasts, and are uniformly missing their hiring targets by 20-30%. This seems like a perfectly good market for voting with your feet.
- christophilus 3y ago> Companies that have instituted mandatory work from home are seeing attrition way above forecasts Do you mean mandatory work from office?
- spamizbad 3y agoThis hasn't been my experience. If anything, there seems to be way less churn - especially among WFH companies. At my company, they were hoping there would be more natural attrition and there wasn't, so they're having managers try and and cull 5% of engineers.
- ceejayoz 3y ago> Insider reports that 200,000 people saw the CEO's memo about the landmark 2023 and many responded to it with an upvote. That reads like something out of Black Mirror.
- zuminator 3y agoCould be 200,000 people thinking about their RSUs. Anyway, no matter how they felt about the wage freeze, the fact that there was a great fiscal year has to bode better for their future odds of a pay rise than if there had been a terrible FY.
- reaperducer 3y agoCould be 200,000 people thinking about their RSUs Or their H1Bs.
- throwaway5959 3y agoThere are only about half a million H1Bs in the US total.
- ceejayoz 3y agoI suspect they're not evenly distributed.
- jimbob45 3y agoTo be fair, most people at my company use upvotes as an acknowledgement like, “Yep, I saw and read your thing”. If you get no upvotes, you’ll worry your post didn’t go through. And, realistically, no one is unprofessional enough to downvote anything anymore unless they’re being silly.
- gigel82 3y agoI asked a MS friend because that looked suspicious. The post was seen by 220k people but it had only 5k emoji / reaction things (3k thumbs up and 2k hearts). They did mention the post has an uncharacteristic number of negative comments, spread among the more usual ass-kissing variety.
- rob74 3y agoSo, what else is new? It was already known that almost none of the tech giants laying off people were in danger of actually losing money, the layoffs and pay freezes were done to "increase efficiency" (or to phrase it differently, make the bottom line look nicer) - not because they were in dire financial straits, but because they felt they could get away with it. And now M$ has actually managed to improve the bottom line - no surprise there.
- for1nner 3y agoUnregulated free market capitalism. Profits over people. This isn't new, and until there are paradigm shifts in the market (lol), government, or greater society which emphasize something _other than profits_, this will continue to be the norm.
- andsoitis 3y ago> Unregulated free market capitalism. Can you give an example of an unregulated market? > society which emphasize something _other than profits_ Do you have some ideas and suggestions for how to make it happen?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- slowmovintarget 3y agoIf it were an unregulated market, the acquisition of Activision would have sailed through. China has shown the world an unregulated capitalist market. It gives you toxic toothpaste and food with sawdust in it.
- skinnymuch 3y agoChina is way more regulated tha the US. China is a transitional socialist state with free market elements. It’s not close to the much more free for all with power concentrated with top companies and people like the US has. Can you point to what isn’t a capitalist market among nation states or regions?
- cyanydeez 3y agoMmmm. America is giving you plenty of modern unregulated side effects, you don't need china to whip.
- aaronax 3y agoHold shares to reap rewards of "landmark years" of the underlying business. Paychecks are compensation for your time/effort. And of course as your time/effort becomes more directly linked to the success of the business, more of your compensation is in stock.
- noisy_boy 3y ago> Nadella in Jan, 2023 > That means every one of us and every team across the company must raise the bar and perform better than the competition to deliver meaningful innovation that customers, communities, and countries can truly benefit from. If we deliver on this, we will emerge stronger and thrive long into the future; it’s as simple as that. > Nadella in Jul, 2023 > As we approach the end of FY23, I want to express my sincere appreciation to everyone working hard across the company for a strong close. The innovation and creativity you continue to show have made this a landmark year not just for Microsoft, but for our customers, partners, and communities around the world So the folks on the ground raised the bar, performed better than competition, make it a landmark year, delivered a strong close and their sole financial reward will be their continued employment - is it as simple as that? Or have they started accepting sincere appreciations as payment at Trader Joe's? PS: "countries" were not in the list of beneficiaries this time.
- sombremesa 3y agoMicrosoft employees are some of the most complacent I've ever seen. Some of my Microsoftie friends haven't had an interview (aside from maybe one or two recruiter calls) in over ten years, having been there since graduation. Needless to say, their comp is peanuts. Yet they frequently stay at work late and have to drop engagements as a result. Microsoft has the magic formula for lifers who don't ask much and work just as hard as anyone else, if not harder (by big tech standards — startups folks work way harder for way less).
- gregd 3y agoWhat you call complacency, I call contentment. Some of us don't like job hopping. Still others of us don't like startup or hustle culture. Some of us have families to support and are quite content to work hard for better than average salaries and benefits, live and work where we want to, engage with friends we've made at work (even across business teams), build retirement. Some of us have even spent many months out of each year, traveling the world with some of our coworkers.
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- WaitWaitWha 3y agoI need some expounding on the words here please, because English is not my native language. When the CEO writes > The innovation and creativity you continue to show have made this a landmark year not just for Microsoft, but for our customers, partners, and communities around the world. (my emphasis) Would landmark year refer to innovation and creativity not profitability? In my mind, if staff made the year landmark for shareholders, it would be enumerated in the second part of that sentence, but it is not. As a side note, when I look at her EPS and associated surprise, they are but a shadow of previous years double digit positive surprises. Mid last year MSFT had her first EPS estimate miss since April of 2016.
- renewiltord 3y ago[dead]
- pierat 3y agoI'd say a union is how you start getting back power to the workers, but given tech's ignorant libertarian bent of "I can do better on my own"... Let's just say I'm not holding my breath.
- w0m 3y ago> given tech's ignorant libertarian bent of "I can do better on my own"... Tech is uniquely positioned currently I think where skilled labor isn't as prevalent as the demand. Hence; 'we can do better on our own' for (many/most, not all) of us. As soon as that balance tips; I'd agree with you.
- jawns 3y agoI would assume that most Microsoft employees receive both cash and stock compensation. While their cash compensation might be frozen, one would assume they'd be able to realize some upside from the equity side, if this is truly a landmark year. In that respect, they're in a better position than employees of non-public companies, where even if they're getting extra stock option grants to make up for salary freezes, they have a fat chance of seeing liquidity any time soon.
- charles_f 3y agoLots of proposing to vote with your feet, yet leaving is not the solution to make things better when everywhere else is the same. Two things I didn't see were 1) unionizing, which I get is complex, but at some point its a way of re-establishing some kind of power balance 2) taking the raise yourself by decreasing your hours. With remote, and given that the outcome is often barely noticeable, why not?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- VirusNewbie 3y agoI would rather have 6% stock growth than a 3% raise any day. Microsoft had a lot better than 6% growth.
- tzs 3y agoWhy not both? Go work someplace that pays more, and use that extra money to buy Microsoft stock.
- VirusNewbie 3y agoI just mean my daily stock fluctuations matter more than any raise i've ever gotten in my career. If I never get another raise ever but my stock continues to grow i'd be happy.
- Rastonbury 3y agoIs anybody in tech really expecting a good raise this year?
- anarticle 3y agoSome companies would sell you for meat if they could.