12 ms·

Large Round of Layoffs Expected at Microsoft

304 points by davmre 12y ago

crypto5 12y ago
Did they essentially fire 5k with stack ranking annually before?
quaunaut 12y ago
Microsoft was made significantly flatter today, so hearing there is indeed going to be layoffs isn't surprising, though I admittedly hoped they'd figure out how to do it without incurring so many layoffs.
- _delirium 12y ago
  It's always interesting in these situations to speculate which came first. Was the initial goal to reorganize the company, and layoffs are a byproduct, whether fortunate or unfortunate? Or was the goal to reduce headcount, and reorganizing the company was the mechanism to produce the needed redundancies?
  - jdp23 12y ago
    It's typically not one driving the other. Reducing costs by laying off employees can happen with or without reorganizing in a major way. If you want to get to a more effective organizational structure (arranged around company priorities and strategy, clear authority and responsibility, aligned goals, less hierarchy and unnecessary dependence, etc.), you can do that with or without significant layoffs. So theoretically what happens in this case is the company's senior leadership decides on strategic priorities and a proposed level of investment. Once that's approved by the board, they look at the organization and specific resource allocation. It's not really that linear, though: changing market conditions and surprising opportunities or threats can lead to changes in how much they'll invest overall, which can have a big impact on the size of the layoffs. Of course the reality is typically a lot messier -- no idea what actually happened in this case.
- X-Istence 12y ago
  Where is more information about Microsoft having been made flatter?
  - kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
    They had a vague announcement about organizational changes a few months ago to a "flatter" hierarchy. It was the first hint of the layoffs that have now come to fruition.
- codeonfire 12y ago
  What do you mean by flatter? Middle managers think it means all grunt level jobs are going to have the same job title. They are oblivious that their org is stacked 3 VPs and 3 directors deep.
deleted 12y ago
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arthurcolle 12y ago
I guess this means between 7000-9000 layoffs based on the crude calculation 600M/(60,000 ~ 75,000)~ approximately
- nness 12y ago
  USA Today ran with a prediction of 5-10% of Nokia staff, around 12,000 to 25,000 employees.
  - bkjelden 12y ago
    The nokia acquisition only brought in about 20k headcount, so one of those numbers can't be right.
    - cpeterso 12y ago
      The GP's statement could be parsed as meaning there are 12,000 to 25,000 Nokia employees and 5–10% of those could be laid off.
- simpleblob2 12y ago
  Good 1st estimation. you also need to add in the impact of severance packages.
- localhost 12y ago
  If the goal is 600MM / year in savings, your denominator is off by quite a bit. Fully loaded cost of an employee is significantly higher than 60-75K. Try 3-4x that amount.
  - ryanburk 12y ago
    you should assume ~200k for an engineer in a market like seattle
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      In what languages? Obviously location is important but I am writing C++ on multiple platforms in the UK and $200k is far away.
chc 12y ago
I wonder how much of Nokia is going to get rejected. A friend of mine is a former Nokia employee who was really psyched to be working on the Surface team now — that would be pretty rough if that team got laid off just after getting settled into the company.
- yulaow 12y ago
  On zdNet they say that 1/5 of ex-Nokia workers in Finland could be axed [ http://www.zdnet.com/one-in-five-ex-nokia-workers-in-finland-could-be-axed-as-microsoft-prepares-layoffs-7000031667/ http://www.zdnet.com/one-in-five-ex-nokia-workers-in-finland... ] Personally I think it will be even more
  - sirkneeland 12y ago
    As a current Nokia employee (didn't transfer to Microsoft) it pains me to hear this. But on the plus side, Nokia Technologies is hiring...
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago
  They bought Nokia's mobile division for patents, not personnel.
  - tdicola 12y ago
    No, Microsoft didn't get the patents in the sale: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/03/us-nokia-microsoft-patents-idUSBRE9820ZZ20130903 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/03/us-nokia-microsoft... They only have a license to the patents, not the ability to use them to go after other companies. IMHO they bought Nokia because it was on the verge of collapsing and taking Windows Phone down with it. Whether it really mattered is up for debate considering WP's now shrinking market share.
bhouston 12y ago
Are they just going to make teams leaner (with less features in the next release) or are they going to be cutting projects/products? I'd like to see a narrower focus from Microsoft towards things that have nice growth trends. But I guess for strategic reasons Microsoft has to continue to fund its Mobile OS division, even if it doesn't gain much ground on Android, iOS. PS. http://bgr.com/2014/07/01/windows-phone-market-share-3/ http://bgr.com/2014/07/01/windows-phone-market-share-3/ Windows Phone market share is dismal and shrinking.
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tphan 12y ago
I knew Microsoft was on the way out but I didn't know the situation was so bad. Hopefully those who lost their jobs will find a place at Google or Apple.
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  It's more that with the purchase of Nokia, MSFT got 25k new employees which is kind of a lot.
- rgrieselhuber 12y ago
  While layoffs suck, I see this as positive for the company.
- jamesaguilar 12y ago
  They are on the way out in the same sense as the sun is. Someday, but no time soon. They profit many billions every quarter, and it seems far fetched to guess that this move will do anything other than strengthen the firm.
- nness 12y ago
  Layoffs are fairly regular occurrences, and don't necessarily represent the end of a company. In fact, even if it wasn't just 5% of their workforce, and not mostly Nokia staff, it wouldn't be a concern — its just business as usual. Companies often experience a raise in share-price after a layoff.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    It's true this doesn't represent the end of a company. But layoffs of 1/20 of a large company's entire workforce are not regular occurrences, and are a cause for concern. It's the kind of thing you can do once, but not again for a long while; two layoffs of that magnitude within a short period, and you trigger a death-spiral where anyone who's left is looking for the exit.
    - dagamer34 12y ago
justizin 12y ago
http://www.luimbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/photo.edit_.community.magnitude.jpg http://www.luimbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/photo.edit_... ? :/
tdicola 12y ago
Never good news to hear about layoffs, but for those that are affected I can say there is life beyond Microsoft. (it might even be better!)
- zer0nes 12y ago
  Why can't it be good news? And good news to whom? To me, who cares about this company, this is good news because I think that MS needs to get much more nimble. I'm saying this as someone who can receive very bad news tomorrow.
  - TallGuyShort 12y ago
    To quote, perhaps inaccurately, Louis CK: "Divorce is always good news. It would be terrible if there was a couple who as happy and in love, and they had this perfect life, and then they got divorced? Oh that would be horrible! But that has happened exactly zero times."
    - boyter 12y ago
      As someone who's parents are going through this I cannot disagree more. There are circumstances where it does happen.
      - 72deluxe 12y ago
        That's very sad. Why are they getting divorced if they are happy?
        boyter 12y ago
        I don't want to get too deeply into it but PTSD is one hell of a disease and destroys families.
        72deluxe 12y ago
        Sorry to hear it.
TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
Any company that has been around for as long as Microsoft, has a huge amount of dead weight in its mid-level management. I mean people whose main skill is mastery of the internal political process. Lest people think I'm singling out Microsoft specifically, this same problem is present at Google as well, but is less of a problem because Google has not been around long enough to pick up the same amount of dead weight personnel. The first generation of people at a company were fighting for market, and they rose due to their ability to deliver value to colleagues and customers. But when a company becomes successful, the resources available to teams within the company becomes somewhat decoupled from company revenue. Soon, political skill becomes as important or more important than impacting the company's bottom line. Microsoft and Intel alumni in the late 90s used to tell me that they knew managers whose main goal was to grow the headcount under them, in order to grow their own prestige. Today at Google you can see some of this same behavior in its nascency. Most of the deadweight is outside Engineering teams because its hard to bullshit when you have to deliver a product. Still, there are peripheral functions like business development, marketing, intellectual property, privacy, policy, etc., where you can always find a few deadbeats that talk slick, but don't seem to have much to show for their time except hiring more people and making a few high impact appearances at meetings. You can go a long way if you can talk the talk, look the part, and kiss the right asses. Microsoft has been picking up useless deadbeats for nigh on 25 years now. They really need to shed these people. One company you have to admire is Facebook. I don't know if its true, but I'm told you basically get fired at Facebook in the first year if you don't know how to deliver something of tangible value within that time. That is hardcore. If that metric was applied at Microsoft and Intel, you'd see the companies shedding 25% of their workforce immediately. I suspect even Google would shed 10-15% of its people.
- zer0nes 12y ago
  The problem is that if the culture is already bad, it's very easy to shed the false positives, i.e. the good people, and keep the false negatives.
  - lionspaw 12y ago
    i think you mean the other way around.
li-ch 12y ago
And these positions will be soon filled by Indians.
akurilin 12y ago
Interesting how this will impact the job market on the West Coast. You'd think that 5-10k people in IT would quickly fill a lot of the currently open positions.
- deleted 12y ago
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- georgeecollins 12y ago
  I work in silicon valley and it seems like there is a huge shortage of people with software development skills. I am not talking about geniuses, just people with skills. I work at a company that isn't the sexiest (but a good stable employer) and man, it is hard to find people.
  - mattm 12y ago
    I'm looking to take a trip to SV in November and set up some interviews. Could you send me details on the company you work for? Sorry to message here but you don't have contact info in your profile.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    if you're having trouble hiring people at the market rates, you need to revisit your assumptions (at minimum, the one about paying market rates)
    - nilkn 12y ago
      If they have people regularly turning down offers, then yes, it's likely explained by compensation. If they can't get talented people to apply in the first place, then there are countless other reasons that could be at play.
      - bcbrown 12y ago
        If they bumped the numbers up $50k and advertised that, I bet they'd get a lot more applications, assuming they're in a tech hub or allow remote work.
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yawaramin 12y ago
Well, I have to say after reading the Monday Note piece decoding Satya Nadella's public email to the employees: http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/07/13/microsofts-new-ceo-needs-an-editor/ http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/07/13/microsofts-new-ceo-need... ... This doesn't come as much of a surprise. His main message seemed to be 'Shape up or ship out.'
PaulMest 12y ago
Context: I was at Microsoft during the first and only round of layoffs in company history (2009). My job was not impacted at all by the layoffs so I speaking from my memory of what was happening around me. In fact, I was working on an incubation project that was one of the few ideas that was green-lighted with a pretty sizable team that year. My perspective: From a company perspective, eliminating 5000 people in 2009 was a great idea. It was (and is) a huge company so it probably could have been more. However, the layoffs in 2009 were seriously botched. Many organizational best practices were violated. Microsoft made an announcement saying that there would be ~5000 layoffs and that they would be completed over the following 18 months. This timeframe is too long! Layoff best practices say: cut deep and cut fast. Get rid of the people that have to be let go, treat them as well as you can on the way out, and then show some serious TLC to the employees you want to retain and rebuild your culture and trust with the people who stick around. Don't let the entire company live in fear for 18 months! As much as the stack rank was a thing at Microsoft in those days, even if you were the lowest ranked employees for 2 years, Microsoft was hard-pressed to actually fire anybody. Even during this time of layoffs, Microsoft decided to divest in many businesses/products and chose not to eliminate people based on performance. For example, they shipped one last version of MS Money and then the whole team was RIF-ed. Everybody on that team would get ~2 months to interview and find other jobs in the company otherwise they got a generous severance package and were no longer employed. Combine this with the fact that many Microsoft teams had recently restricted their headcount, it was relatively more difficult than it ever had been to find a job within the company. The divesting strategy was interesting and it probably would have been a good way to do massive position elimination except that not all final versions of products were aligned to ship in the same timeframe. So anybody working on small-ish or lame-ish products had a fear for many many months that after shipping their current product, they would be out of a job. IIRC, this strategy of divesting took about ~12 months instead of the 18 months they originally announced before they provided comfort to the employees that the layoffs had completed. This was also during the economic downturn of 2008 so there was extra angst from people who lost their job because they had just lost a lot of their net worth from a seriously depressed market. Morale suffered. Lots of good people defected to Amazon, Facebook, Google. This time around, I hope Microsoft does a better job of keeping the timeframe for cutting to a reasonable period of time like 1-2 months. Unfortunately, even if you make it through the layoffs and feel secure that you have SOME JOB, you'll probably not really know WHAT SPECIFICALLY you're working on until all of the re-orgs play out. This is colloquially known as re-org hell. Best of luck to the people impacted. It's a relatively better market this time around. If any of you make it to San Francisco, I'm happy to grab coffee or give you pointers on some cool companies looking for great people.
fu9ar 12y ago
Raise your hand if you saw that coming when Android and Apple beat Microsoft to the punch in the global mobile market, and then kicked them a few times while they were down, and then laughed about it.
- mynameisvlad 12y ago
  Yeah, I doubt this has anything to do with mobile. Microsoft has a lot more technologies than mobile. This has way more to do with the insane hierarchical structure they have in place.
outside2344 12y ago
Microsoft employee here. This is great news - we have so much duplication and layers. Anything to reduce the bloat and increase agility is great news. There is a lot of great news at Microsoft these days - great place to be - hope I'm around after tomorrow!
anoothrowaway 12y ago
As someone starting at Microsoft in the near future, should this make me worried?
- tdicola 12y ago
  No, MS isn't in dire straits that they need to start letting the lowest guys on the totem pole go. For the first couple years focus on being the best employee possible and making your manager's life easier. Don't shy away from doing the boring, ugly grunt work that no one else wants to do. You need to establish yourself as a reliable performer.
  - eru 12y ago
    Also, never forget that there are other companies around.
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  It should make you cautious and curious. A few years ago I accepted an offer from a large company who announced massive layoffs in the near future. I contacted my recruiter and asked if this affected my offer and they said no. I later pushed them for more details about who I would report to, if I could speak with a member of the team, what I should do to prepare, and what I would work on. They were very closed about all this and hard to contact. Eventually I found out the entire department was gone and I was going to work on mobile apps and web pages instead of highly scalable backend infrastructure and distributed databases. I also found out they had intentionally hid this from me, so I immediately told them I would not join the company. I don't share this to scare you or suggest Microsoft would do the same, but understand that you are entitled to have your questions about your standing with the company answered. Pay attention to who they let go, and question how well that bodes for your goals at the company. If they can't or won't help you understand this, understand the risk you're taking. As I've said elsewhere in this thread, layoffs can be a sign the company is doing what it needs to for the future if it's done correctly.
  - TallGuyShort 12y ago
known 12y ago
Companies ruined or almost ruined by imported Indian labor (US) http://sammyboy.com/showthread.php?98021-Companies-ruined-or-almost-ruined-by-imported-Indian-labor-%28US%29 http://sammyboy.com/showthread.php?98021-Companies-ruined-or...
- ctrlaltkill 12y ago
  That thread got very racist very quickly. I don't know if it's intended to be satire, but it conflates a lot of issues and blames it on Indians. AIG and Lehman, for example, collapsed due to very different reasons.
  - known 12y ago
    http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-most-corrupt-while-doing-business-abroad.htm http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-...
- FlyingLawnmower 12y ago
  Is this serious? Many of those companies were suffering from severe structural issues, and this article is just cherrypicking any problems related to India while happily ignoring everything else. I'd like to think that racism (and sheer idiocy) of this level isn't appreciated on HN (coming from a US citizen).
cpplinuxdude 12y ago
"The deepest cuts are expected to come from the businesses the company bought from Nokia several months ago" Will that affect Qt?
ulfw 12y ago
How can you fire 18,000 people without seriously disrupting your business (not even considering loss of morale, angst, good employees running away or getting their resumes ready). But just logistically. How do you decide who those 18,000 are? Just random? How do you know which are 'expendable' or the 'bad Apples'? When you are talking this size, I doubt that is even possible.
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  It's impossible for 1 individual, but if it's as "strategic" as the letter says, then it was probably done to specific departments by specific amounts. That'll filter down and the final, specific decisions probably get made at much smaller scales. There's certainly going to be some sub-optimal decisions, though.

304 points by davmre 12y ago

Did they essentially fire 5k with stack ranking annually before?

Microsoft was made significantly flatter today, so hearing there is indeed going to be layoffs isn't surprising, though I admittedly hoped they'd figure out how to do it without incurring so many layoffs.

_delirium 12y ago
It's always interesting in these situations to speculate which came first. Was the initial goal to reorganize the company, and layoffs are a byproduct, whether fortunate or unfortunate? Or was the goal to reduce headcount, and reorganizing the company was the mechanism to produce the needed redundancies?
- jdp23 12y ago
  It's typically not one driving the other. Reducing costs by laying off employees can happen with or without reorganizing in a major way. If you want to get to a more effective organizational structure (arranged around company priorities and strategy, clear authority and responsibility, aligned goals, less hierarchy and unnecessary dependence, etc.), you can do that with or without significant layoffs. So theoretically what happens in this case is the company's senior leadership decides on strategic priorities and a proposed level of investment. Once that's approved by the board, they look at the organization and specific resource allocation. It's not really that linear, though: changing market conditions and surprising opportunities or threats can lead to changes in how much they'll invest overall, which can have a big impact on the size of the layoffs. Of course the reality is typically a lot messier -- no idea what actually happened in this case.
X-Istence 12y ago
Where is more information about Microsoft having been made flatter?
- kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
  They had a vague announcement about organizational changes a few months ago to a "flatter" hierarchy. It was the first hint of the layoffs that have now come to fruition.
codeonfire 12y ago
What do you mean by flatter? Middle managers think it means all grunt level jobs are going to have the same job title. They are oblivious that their org is stacked 3 VPs and 3 directors deep.

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arthurcolle 12y ago

I guess this means between 7000-9000 layoffs based on the crude calculation 600M/(60,000 ~ 75,000)~ approximately

nness 12y ago
USA Today ran with a prediction of 5-10% of Nokia staff, around 12,000 to 25,000 employees.
- bkjelden 12y ago
  The nokia acquisition only brought in about 20k headcount, so one of those numbers can't be right.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    The GP's statement could be parsed as meaning there are 12,000 to 25,000 Nokia employees and 5–10% of those could be laid off.
simpleblob2 12y ago
Good 1st estimation. you also need to add in the impact of severance packages.
localhost 12y ago
If the goal is 600MM / year in savings, your denominator is off by quite a bit. Fully loaded cost of an employee is significantly higher than 60-75K. Try 3-4x that amount.
- ryanburk 12y ago
  you should assume ~200k for an engineer in a market like seattle
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    In what languages? Obviously location is important but I am writing C++ on multiple platforms in the UK and $200k is far away.

chc 12y ago

I wonder how much of Nokia is going to get rejected. A friend of mine is a former Nokia employee who was really psyched to be working on the Surface team now — that would be pretty rough if that team got laid off just after getting settled into the company.

yulaow 12y ago
On zdNet they say that 1/5 of ex-Nokia workers in Finland could be axed [ http://www.zdnet.com/one-in-five-ex-nokia-workers-in-finland-could-be-axed-as-microsoft-prepares-layoffs-7000031667/ http://www.zdnet.com/one-in-five-ex-nokia-workers-in-finland... ] Personally I think it will be even more
- sirkneeland 12y ago
  As a current Nokia employee (didn't transfer to Microsoft) it pains me to hear this. But on the plus side, Nokia Technologies is hiring...
AlyssaRowan 12y ago
They bought Nokia's mobile division for patents, not personnel.
- tdicola 12y ago
  No, Microsoft didn't get the patents in the sale: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/03/us-nokia-microsoft-patents-idUSBRE9820ZZ20130903 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/03/us-nokia-microsoft... They only have a license to the patents, not the ability to use them to go after other companies. IMHO they bought Nokia because it was on the verge of collapsing and taking Windows Phone down with it. Whether it really mattered is up for debate considering WP's now shrinking market share.

bhouston 12y ago

Are they just going to make teams leaner (with less features in the next release) or are they going to be cutting projects/products? I'd like to see a narrower focus from Microsoft towards things that have nice growth trends. But I guess for strategic reasons Microsoft has to continue to fund its Mobile OS division, even if it doesn't gain much ground on Android, iOS. PS. http://bgr.com/2014/07/01/windows-phone-market-share-3/ http://bgr.com/2014/07/01/windows-phone-market-share-3/ Windows Phone market share is dismal and shrinking.

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tphan 12y ago

I knew Microsoft was on the way out but I didn't know the situation was so bad. Hopefully those who lost their jobs will find a place at Google or Apple.

adamnemecek 12y ago
It's more that with the purchase of Nokia, MSFT got 25k new employees which is kind of a lot.
rgrieselhuber 12y ago
While layoffs suck, I see this as positive for the company.
jamesaguilar 12y ago
They are on the way out in the same sense as the sun is. Someday, but no time soon. They profit many billions every quarter, and it seems far fetched to guess that this move will do anything other than strengthen the firm.
nness 12y ago
Layoffs are fairly regular occurrences, and don't necessarily represent the end of a company. In fact, even if it wasn't just 5% of their workforce, and not mostly Nokia staff, it wouldn't be a concern — its just business as usual. Companies often experience a raise in share-price after a layoff.
- _delirium 12y ago
  It's true this doesn't represent the end of a company. But layoffs of 1/20 of a large company's entire workforce are not regular occurrences, and are a cause for concern. It's the kind of thing you can do once, but not again for a long while; two layoffs of that magnitude within a short period, and you trigger a death-spiral where anyone who's left is looking for the exit.
  - dagamer34 12y ago

justizin 12y ago

http://www.luimbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/photo.edit_.community.magnitude.jpg http://www.luimbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/photo.edit_... ? :/

tdicola 12y ago

Never good news to hear about layoffs, but for those that are affected I can say there is life beyond Microsoft. (it might even be better!)

zer0nes 12y ago
Why can't it be good news? And good news to whom? To me, who cares about this company, this is good news because I think that MS needs to get much more nimble. I'm saying this as someone who can receive very bad news tomorrow.
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  To quote, perhaps inaccurately, Louis CK: "Divorce is always good news. It would be terrible if there was a couple who as happy and in love, and they had this perfect life, and then they got divorced? Oh that would be horrible! But that has happened exactly zero times."
  - boyter 12y ago
    As someone who's parents are going through this I cannot disagree more. There are circumstances where it does happen.
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      That's very sad. Why are they getting divorced if they are happy?
      - boyter 12y ago
        I don't want to get too deeply into it but PTSD is one hell of a disease and destroys families.
        72deluxe 12y ago
        Sorry to hear it.

TheMagicHorsey 12y ago

Any company that has been around for as long as Microsoft, has a huge amount of dead weight in its mid-level management. I mean people whose main skill is mastery of the internal political process. Lest people think I'm singling out Microsoft specifically, this same problem is present at Google as well, but is less of a problem because Google has not been around long enough to pick up the same amount of dead weight personnel. The first generation of people at a company were fighting for market, and they rose due to their ability to deliver value to colleagues and customers. But when a company becomes successful, the resources available to teams within the company becomes somewhat decoupled from company revenue. Soon, political skill becomes as important or more important than impacting the company's bottom line. Microsoft and Intel alumni in the late 90s used to tell me that they knew managers whose main goal was to grow the headcount under them, in order to grow their own prestige. Today at Google you can see some of this same behavior in its nascency. Most of the deadweight is outside Engineering teams because its hard to bullshit when you have to deliver a product. Still, there are peripheral functions like business development, marketing, intellectual property, privacy, policy, etc., where you can always find a few deadbeats that talk slick, but don't seem to have much to show for their time except hiring more people and making a few high impact appearances at meetings. You can go a long way if you can talk the talk, look the part, and kiss the right asses. Microsoft has been picking up useless deadbeats for nigh on 25 years now. They really need to shed these people. One company you have to admire is Facebook. I don't know if its true, but I'm told you basically get fired at Facebook in the first year if you don't know how to deliver something of tangible value within that time. That is hardcore. If that metric was applied at Microsoft and Intel, you'd see the companies shedding 25% of their workforce immediately. I suspect even Google would shed 10-15% of its people.

zer0nes 12y ago
The problem is that if the culture is already bad, it's very easy to shed the false positives, i.e. the good people, and keep the false negatives.
- lionspaw 12y ago
  i think you mean the other way around.

li-ch 12y ago

And these positions will be soon filled by Indians.

akurilin 12y ago

Interesting how this will impact the job market on the West Coast. You'd think that 5-10k people in IT would quickly fill a lot of the currently open positions.

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georgeecollins 12y ago
I work in silicon valley and it seems like there is a huge shortage of people with software development skills. I am not talking about geniuses, just people with skills. I work at a company that isn't the sexiest (but a good stable employer) and man, it is hard to find people.
- mattm 12y ago
  I'm looking to take a trip to SV in November and set up some interviews. Could you send me details on the company you work for? Sorry to message here but you don't have contact info in your profile.
- x0x0 12y ago
  if you're having trouble hiring people at the market rates, you need to revisit your assumptions (at minimum, the one about paying market rates)
  - nilkn 12y ago
    If they have people regularly turning down offers, then yes, it's likely explained by compensation. If they can't get talented people to apply in the first place, then there are countless other reasons that could be at play.
    - bcbrown 12y ago
      If they bumped the numbers up $50k and advertised that, I bet they'd get a lot more applications, assuming they're in a tech hub or allow remote work.

deleted 12y ago

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yawaramin 12y ago

Well, I have to say after reading the Monday Note piece decoding Satya Nadella's public email to the employees: http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/07/13/microsofts-new-ceo-needs-an-editor/ http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/07/13/microsofts-new-ceo-need... ... This doesn't come as much of a surprise. His main message seemed to be 'Shape up or ship out.'

PaulMest 12y ago

Context: I was at Microsoft during the first and only round of layoffs in company history (2009). My job was not impacted at all by the layoffs so I speaking from my memory of what was happening around me. In fact, I was working on an incubation project that was one of the few ideas that was green-lighted with a pretty sizable team that year. My perspective: From a company perspective, eliminating 5000 people in 2009 was a great idea. It was (and is) a huge company so it probably could have been more. However, the layoffs in 2009 were seriously botched. Many organizational best practices were violated. Microsoft made an announcement saying that there would be ~5000 layoffs and that they would be completed over the following 18 months. This timeframe is too long! Layoff best practices say: cut deep and cut fast. Get rid of the people that have to be let go, treat them as well as you can on the way out, and then show some serious TLC to the employees you want to retain and rebuild your culture and trust with the people who stick around. Don't let the entire company live in fear for 18 months! As much as the stack rank was a thing at Microsoft in those days, even if you were the lowest ranked employees for 2 years, Microsoft was hard-pressed to actually fire anybody. Even during this time of layoffs, Microsoft decided to divest in many businesses/products and chose not to eliminate people based on performance. For example, they shipped one last version of MS Money and then the whole team was RIF-ed. Everybody on that team would get ~2 months to interview and find other jobs in the company otherwise they got a generous severance package and were no longer employed. Combine this with the fact that many Microsoft teams had recently restricted their headcount, it was relatively more difficult than it ever had been to find a job within the company. The divesting strategy was interesting and it probably would have been a good way to do massive position elimination except that not all final versions of products were aligned to ship in the same timeframe. So anybody working on small-ish or lame-ish products had a fear for many many months that after shipping their current product, they would be out of a job. IIRC, this strategy of divesting took about ~12 months instead of the 18 months they originally announced before they provided comfort to the employees that the layoffs had completed. This was also during the economic downturn of 2008 so there was extra angst from people who lost their job because they had just lost a lot of their net worth from a seriously depressed market. Morale suffered. Lots of good people defected to Amazon, Facebook, Google. This time around, I hope Microsoft does a better job of keeping the timeframe for cutting to a reasonable period of time like 1-2 months. Unfortunately, even if you make it through the layoffs and feel secure that you have SOME JOB, you'll probably not really know WHAT SPECIFICALLY you're working on until all of the re-orgs play out. This is colloquially known as re-org hell. Best of luck to the people impacted. It's a relatively better market this time around. If any of you make it to San Francisco, I'm happy to grab coffee or give you pointers on some cool companies looking for great people.

fu9ar 12y ago

Raise your hand if you saw that coming when Android and Apple beat Microsoft to the punch in the global mobile market, and then kicked them a few times while they were down, and then laughed about it.

mynameisvlad 12y ago
Yeah, I doubt this has anything to do with mobile. Microsoft has a lot more technologies than mobile. This has way more to do with the insane hierarchical structure they have in place.

outside2344 12y ago

Microsoft employee here. This is great news - we have so much duplication and layers. Anything to reduce the bloat and increase agility is great news. There is a lot of great news at Microsoft these days - great place to be - hope I'm around after tomorrow!

anoothrowaway 12y ago

As someone starting at Microsoft in the near future, should this make me worried?

tdicola 12y ago
No, MS isn't in dire straits that they need to start letting the lowest guys on the totem pole go. For the first couple years focus on being the best employee possible and making your manager's life easier. Don't shy away from doing the boring, ugly grunt work that no one else wants to do. You need to establish yourself as a reliable performer.
- eru 12y ago
  Also, never forget that there are other companies around.
TallGuyShort 12y ago
It should make you cautious and curious. A few years ago I accepted an offer from a large company who announced massive layoffs in the near future. I contacted my recruiter and asked if this affected my offer and they said no. I later pushed them for more details about who I would report to, if I could speak with a member of the team, what I should do to prepare, and what I would work on. They were very closed about all this and hard to contact. Eventually I found out the entire department was gone and I was going to work on mobile apps and web pages instead of highly scalable backend infrastructure and distributed databases. I also found out they had intentionally hid this from me, so I immediately told them I would not join the company. I don't share this to scare you or suggest Microsoft would do the same, but understand that you are entitled to have your questions about your standing with the company answered. Pay attention to who they let go, and question how well that bodes for your goals at the company. If they can't or won't help you understand this, understand the risk you're taking. As I've said elsewhere in this thread, layoffs can be a sign the company is doing what it needs to for the future if it's done correctly.
- TallGuyShort 12y ago

known 12y ago

Companies ruined or almost ruined by imported Indian labor (US) http://sammyboy.com/showthread.php?98021-Companies-ruined-or-almost-ruined-by-imported-Indian-labor-%28US%29 http://sammyboy.com/showthread.php?98021-Companies-ruined-or...

ctrlaltkill 12y ago
That thread got very racist very quickly. I don't know if it's intended to be satire, but it conflates a lot of issues and blames it on Indians. AIG and Lehman, for example, collapsed due to very different reasons.
- known 12y ago
  http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-most-corrupt-while-doing-business-abroad.htm http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-...
FlyingLawnmower 12y ago
Is this serious? Many of those companies were suffering from severe structural issues, and this article is just cherrypicking any problems related to India while happily ignoring everything else. I'd like to think that racism (and sheer idiocy) of this level isn't appreciated on HN (coming from a US citizen).

cpplinuxdude 12y ago

"The deepest cuts are expected to come from the businesses the company bought from Nokia several months ago" Will that affect Qt?

ulfw 12y ago

How can you fire 18,000 people without seriously disrupting your business (not even considering loss of morale, angst, good employees running away or getting their resumes ready). But just logistically. How do you decide who those 18,000 are? Just random? How do you know which are 'expendable' or the 'bad Apples'? When you are talking this size, I doubt that is even possible.

TallGuyShort 12y ago
It's impossible for 1 individual, but if it's as "strategic" as the letter says, then it was probably done to specific departments by specific amounts. That'll filter down and the final, specific decisions probably get made at much smaller scales. There's certainly going to be some sub-optimal decisions, though.