10 ms·

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 mas

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.
  - yebyen 12y ago
    when looking for crap, setting off the crap sensor would be a positive result... you don't want to accidentally fire the good ones.
jgalt212 12y ago
That's all well and good, but I bet there's tons of dead weight in the engineering ranks as well. Not just areas/jobs indirectly linked to core business functions as you cited.
poof131 12y ago
The military is especially prone to this problem. I’d hesitate to refer to people as dead weight, but the retirement structure encourages mid-level management to hang-on for twenty. Even if people are burnt out after 10 years, which the military is very capable of doing, many stay even when they and the Service would be better off if they moved on.
- fredophile 12y ago
  The problem with the military is how benefits are set up. There is a big jump in benefits at twenty years. If you put in 10-12 years your benefits aren't significantly better than someone who just did minimal time. If there was a small jump around the ten year point they'd probably see people willing to stop there instead of holding out 8-10 more years.
  - mpyne 12y ago
    Well the personnel problems with the military go far beyond the timing of benefits alone, unfortunately. As it stands the military actually has great difficulty retaining people past 10 years. Many military communities are chronically undermanned at the senior enlisted and officer leadership levels. So while it's fair to say that the military has held onto lower-skilled workers, it's not exactly the case that it's leading to a glut of excess deadweight just hanging on. Rather, we use the "idiots" to fill the desks that would simply be left empty were it not for these guys biding their time to 20 years. Whether that's a net positive or not depends on the given billet being filled, but we'd have to do away with billet-based manpower and fine-tuned "year group" tracking entirely in order to truly see benefit from dropping deadweight in the 10-18 YOS ranks. But the way it stands now, many billets require a certain rank or grade to fill them, no matter what the skill level might be of excess junior (or senior) personnel.
    - mcguire 12y ago
      I know several people who left the U.S. Navy after 6-8 years rather than taking unpalatable billets (one was a master-at-arms (IIRC), serving on several of the hospital ships who was given the choice of leaving or moving to Diego Garcia; several others were Sea-Bees) or who took the latter of the up-or-out option after being unable to advance under new requirements. It always seemed like the Navy was doing its best to get rid of skilled workers.
kabdib 12y ago
In the last layoffs, many of the people who were let go were back working for Microsoft again in a year or so (often as full-time employees, more often as contractors). I believe that Microsoft has more contractors than it does employees. That is just crazy. Also, it's nearly impossible to fire even the most grossly incompetent people. One person I worked with was a utter flatline and doing negative work (very bad Q/A, argumentative, and the most useless person I have ever had as a coworker. It took six months to fire the guy, and it was no secret to the third and fourth layer management that the guy was a huge mistake. MS needs to get rid of the right people.
- JibberMeTimbers 12y ago
  Contractors can be cheaper than employees, despite paying a higher salary. The reason is that they don't need to do so much legal work or pay their insurances and etc, etc. When a project is finished, they can just end the contract and avoid all of the legality. I've known many people that leave their job as employee and get contracted to the same company for those reasons (and more).
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    And contractors don't get stock options. Microsoft has gotten in trouble before about their use of "permanent contractors".
    - sirmarksalot 12y ago
      The stock isn't really a big deal anymore now that the company is stable, more or less. Back in the '90s, however, some preferred stock could mean retiring at age 35. And when the orange-badges started seeing their officemates buying mansions and supercars, despite not having worked all that much harder, they felt the need to get the lawyers involved.
      - r00fus 12y ago
        Is this the case? I mean, sure options won't be as lucrative, but RSUs are basically an extra way for companies to compensate employees, and still count as "velvet handcuffs". If the stock rises, that's magnified, but even while relatively static, RSUs count up.
liveoneggs 12y ago
and who selects the ones to fire? The ass-kissers of course.
- jarsin 12y ago
  Exactly. Every layoff i have seen personally or through close friends at other company's the ass kissers survive and those t hat threaten them get laid off. Those that threaten them (the competent ones) are always painted as non team players because generally the competent ones are unhappy when the teams gain so many slick talking ass kissers but few doers.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Competent people need to know the political basics, it's like defensive driving. http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/04/politics-101-chapter-3-myth-just-world-part-1 http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/04/politics-101-chapter-3-... http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/05/politics-101-chapter-3-myth-just-world-part-2 http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/05/politics-101-chapter-3-...
    - jarsin 12y ago
      This is good stuff. Thanks for the links. I have seen many times and even done the withdraw and become cynical that they talk about. In my case I hated the entire company so it was a bigger issue. I will say though that when companies lay off competent people one thing I see time and time again the competent people that survived (who probably are better at the politics) always abandon ship. Its very demoralizing watching the kick ass coder you work with go and Joe Slick that never checked in one line of code stay. So its really not in a companies interest to get rid of those that can do their jobs well even if they are not wise on the politics.
      - walterbell 12y ago
        One remedy for this in the software world would be to publish detailed credits for key employee names/roles associated with software releases, something that is done in the film industry where people care very much about where their name appears in the opening and closing credits. Great teams are quite rare and short-lived. One specific version of a software product can be fantastic due to the short-lived team that designed and built that one release. You see this clearly with hardware, e.g. the 2012 version of device model XYZ earns a higher price in the resale market. It would be great if the teams building these positive exceptions could be recognized, as they scatter and reform across companies.
ekianjo 12y ago
> Microsoft has been picking up useless deadbeats for nigh on 25 years now. They really need to shed these people. Isn't the key reason for these layoffs the recent acquisition of Nokia operations ? If that is, the layoff is just about eliminating redundancy post acquisition, and not addressing the deadweight problem.
- asdfologist 12y ago
  Or, the redundancy argument could be used to justify laying off dead weight.
  - andyjdavis 12y ago
    Certainly lay offs due to post acquisition redundancy would seem less likely to generate lawsuits compared to lay offs due to dead weight regardless of the true reason.
    - potatolicious 12y ago
      AFAIK they pulled this during the '08 crisis also. I heard from a few people on the inside that, while the public reason for the layoff was to trim headcount in response to economic downturn, it was more of a house cleaning.
CMCDragonkai 12y ago
That's what Enron did and General Electric under Jack Welch. Up or out strategy. If you put the incentive under delivering something of value too much, you end up with people lying. Sometimes it's not just about star individuals, but star teams.
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  To provide a counterpoint: Enron collapsed under massive fraud and GE would have been bankrupt if they had to mark-to-market their debt during the financial crisis.
  - sopooneo 12y ago
    What does it mean that they would have been bankrupt? I thought (wrongly perhaps) that you were only bankrupt if you couldn't pay your bills. So no matter their true debt back then, doesn't GE's current existence prove they weren't bankrupt?
    - lotsofpulp 12y ago
      I think what mickeyouse means is that if the taxpayers didn't step in to subsidize all the financial institutions, then GE would have bee bankrupt (just like most other financial institutions).
    - mikeyouse 12y ago
      If your assets are worth less than your liabilities, you're technically insolvent. If you can still pay your bills from cashflows, you don't need to claim bankruptcy, but on a long enough timeline without a significant change, you will go bankrupt. There was a long stretch of time post-GFC where this was the case with GE. Banks have to 'mark-to-market' their debt periodically, but since GE wasn't a bank, they didn't abide by the same regulations. Say there were two identical houses on a street with $500k mortgages, but the market crashed, the houses are worth less, and only 1/2 of the mortgages will be repaid. If Bank of America owned the first house, the mortgage asset (it's an asset to the bank) would be marked-to-market and what was formerly a $500k asset would now be worth $250k, and the bank would show a loss of $250k. GE doesn't have to do this and could carry assets at their previous value (and didn't have to mark down bad debt either). To simplify the story, during the GFC, GE had that one mortgage "worth" $500k and debts worth $400k. If they were a bank, they would have had to admit that the mortgage was really worth $250k, and they would've gone into receivership. If not for that accounting quirk and the massive amount of bailout cash they took from the Federal Reserve / FDIC, they would have actually had to declare bankruptcy. Ironically enough, the FDIC program and Federal Reserve are to shore up banks and GE was explicitly not a bank per the above few paragraphs. So make sense of how they got access to bailout money solely authorized to bail out banks.. [1] - $45B in losses buried on GE's balance sheet: http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-living-on-planet-ge-2009-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-living-on-plane... [2] - GE borrowed $16B from Federal Reserve: http://www.propublica.org/article/general-electric-tapped-fed-to-borrow-16-billion http://www.propublica.org/article/general-electric-tapped-fe... [3] - FDIC to back $139B in GE Capital Debt: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/fdic-to-back-139-billion-in-ge-capital-debt/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/fdic-to-back-139-bill... [4] - GE Borrows $59.3B from FDIC program: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-01/ge-borrowed-16-billion-in-commercial-paper-plan-fed-data-show.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-01/ge-borrowed-16-bill...
adventured 12y ago
Facebook does indeed have a very efficient corporate structure (whether that will last is another question). Perhaps 7,000 to 7,300 employees (assuming some pickup the last quarter or two), and $8.9 billion in sales. Microsoft by comparison had roughly 15,000 employees when they had that level of revenue (adjusting for inflation), circa 1993 / 1994.
- retroencabulato 12y ago
  Is it really that black and white to compare the size of engineering teams 20 years apart?
- marincounty 12y ago
  I still think about FB spending 3 billion on that app?
  - tdicola 12y ago
    Microsoft has made billion dollar blunders too. Look at aQuantive, it torched almost 7 billion dollars.
- psbp 12y ago
  Let's be honest, Facebook has a much more efficient product, and by that I mean the product does most of the work for them.
  - joevandyk 12y ago
    Microsoft had a product that was bundled with ever computer sold. If that's not a product selling itself I don't know what is.
- ams6110 12y ago
  But Facebook is in a much more tenuous position. Nobody really needs Facebook; it's mostly entertainment and could be toppled in a few years time by the next internet/tech fad. Microsoft is a lot more entrenched in a lot more places that actually depend on their software.
bkjelden 12y ago
As someone currently with the company, this description of some mid-level management really resonates with me. I am incredibly skeptical, however, that any round of layoffs attempting to get rid of these people will have a good hit rate. Plenty of really talented engineers and engineering managers will end up losing their jobs too. I a lot of my older peers from university went to work for IBM for a couple years right after school, where layoffs occurred pretty regularly. The culture they've described to me, that was present as a result of constant layoffs, isn't something I think many current Microsoft employees will want to be a part of.
- greendestiny 12y ago
  When whom to layoff is a political decision, layoffs will just compound the problem.
  - kamaal 12y ago
    That always happens. The problem is the CEO needs an internal partner to get a list of people who need to be let go. And that's generally delegated to the immediate exec staff, they delegate to some layers below and when the list is built, it bubbles up back to the CEO. In the process, most people think performance is the key to decide who stays and who leaves. While the fact is first ones to go are political enemies, followed by people who pose threat to the middle management(Kind of people who managers think will eventually take their job, if they stay) these kind of people are worst sufferers, because they would have performed well only to be perceived as threats. Next come people who don't fit well in the organization's pay parity. The last one's if they ever go are weak people who can be sacrificed to save manager's yes men and manger's inner circle. What generally remains are people who are yes men, political alliances and generally people and partners needed to keep political cartels running. Which is why if a company is laying off people, its generally an indication they will perform worse in the time to come. Because a round of good people have been laid off, many good ones are leaving. And worst stay on, and are more entrenched in the new set up.
    - stcredzero 12y ago
sopooneo 12y ago
I have begun wondering lately if the reasons for the inevitable death of living things has any anologue to the dynamics you describe here for corporations.
- ams6110 12y ago
  The BCG matrix. Microsoft is in the Cash Cow stage and moving to the Dog stage.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Yes, organization development literature is sorely lacking in research and discussion of immortality.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    I'm not sure if your joking, but there is research into managing a business' longevity, such as the book "Built to Last": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built_to_Last:_Successful_Habits_of_Visionary_Companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built_to_Last:_Successful_Habi...
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Not joking :) Built to Last is inspirational, a bit like Warren Bennis "Organizing Genius". I was thinking of research topics like these: 1) Financing, staffing and governance of short-lived organizations which perform complex tasks then disband, e.g. film production, election campaigns, bi-annual sporting events, disaster relief, NGO coalitions. How are institutional identity and knowledge preserved when developed within temporary contexts? 2) What organizational scenarios have been proposed by scifi/fantasy writers for worlds where humans or other lifeforms are immortal? Do those scenarios suggest areas for research or innovation in modern corporations? Olaf Stapledon, A. E. Van Vogt, C.S. Lewis, R.A. Lafferty, Walter Jon Williams, etc. 3) Historically, business has been run by families with inter-generational inheritance. Some public and many private companies still operate this way. There is a body of literature on family-based governance and succession planning. Is that literature relevant to public companies like Facebook and Google where the founders have inheritable shares with unique voting rights on corporate futures? Will other corps seek superpowered share classes? Will consumers seek out B corps, public corps, private corps or hybrids? Garther Morgan's "Images of Organization" provides food for thought: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/13/the-eight-metaphors-of-organization/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/13/the-eight-metaphors-of-...
lgleason 12y ago
I was at a company once that had layoffs where the company said that they were going to lay off managers. An old timer succinctly summed up how it would go as follows........ You have a tree full of monkeys. So you shake the hell out of the tree to get the monkeys out of hit. How many monkeys do you have in the tree after your done? The same number, they are just in different branches.
peterjancelis 12y ago
This is why I believe in a Semco type culture where every team member receives a cut of the profits and there is a peer review process of who gets to join / stay in the team. It's the most realistic way a profitably franchise can avoid taking in the political rent seekers. What you spend more on profit share you probably make back on cost savings, and at the very least it buys you a more happy, productive workforce.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Would you recommend a reference on Semco's approach?
  - rimantas 12y ago
    The books by Ricardo Semler? "Maveric" and the "The Seven Day Weekend". Both worth reading, imho. Even if you won't be able to apply the same principles they can serve as a good eye-opener for the many things we take for granted.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Remarkable story, thanks for the pointer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler
- tdicola 12y ago
  Microsoft is a publically traded company, they have a fiduciary responsibility to return their profits to shareholders and not employees, for better or worse.
  - Hermel 12y ago
    This is a myth often used to justify unpopular decisions. The board has a responsibility to guide the company in accordance with the articles, but the shareholders are free to define the articles. If they think redistributing profits to employees is a good idea, they are free to do so.
backn4th4ever 12y ago
At Google, if you don't make it to level 5 sweng within a certain amount of time(2 years from being hired at level 4), you will most likely get fired. After that you can relax more. So the fluff in software engineering(including managers) is minimal. Facebook though... Ask their employees how that build system is working out for them. There's a lot of doing, agreed, but sometimes you need to just take a chill pill, stop the goddamn hacking for chrissakes, design THEN code.
- enneff 12y ago
  > At Google, if you don't make it to level 5 sweng within a certain amount of time(2 years from being hired at level 4), you will most likely get fired. Don't know where you get that idea from. I have a lot of anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
  - backn4th4ever 12y ago
    I saw it first hand. My manager was pushing everyone to get promoted to level 5, of the few who didn't, one was put on a pip then fired, the others worked like madmen after seeing that, still didn't get promoted and somehow moved into another group. They still haven't gotten promoted but they work insanely hard/ aren't the same people. I guess it depends on the group, but I was told that timelines for promotion to level 5 are an unwritten rule.
    - sanowski 12y ago
      there's no 'unwritten rule' for promotion timelines
      - wan23 12y ago
        It's actually a written rule. Look up the job descriptions for SWE2's and 3's and compare them to those for higher levels. It specifically says that you are expected to advance.
      - nostrademons 12y ago
swalsh 12y ago
Its good in theory, but in practice it doesn't work. Those guys who mastered the political process. They don't get fired. Not getting fired is what they do. Thats the thing they're really good at.
- crag 12y ago
  Exactly. And it's not just tech. Most large companies have mid-level workers whose sole job is to not to get laid off (fired). I pity anyone under them cause they are usually the hardest working and first to go. Companies should be looking top-down instead of the usual bottom-up. And man, it gets cut-throat. You know, when I traded, I used to think that was the most cut-throat work environment. Then the firm I was trading for got acquired by a bigger (much bigger) "traditional" bank. I quickly realized the trading floor was a picnic compared to mid-level management (at a bank they are called VP's) politics. At least a trader, you know the score. Make a profit you win. Don't you leave. Working at this bank; I had to learn to watch my back. It was at that point I decided to leave banking, and NYC.
  - wavegeek 12y ago
    > And it's not just tech. It also applies to countries. Look at the increasing resources that go to people who produce little or nothing of value to others eg lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, financial engineers, LBO operators etc. Not to mention many of the people on welfare.
    - basyt 12y ago
      > Not to mention many of the people on welfare. Woah, slow down tiger :) More seriously, please elaborate. Or maybe I am just a bleeding heart.
    - yardie 12y ago
      > Not to mention many of the people on welfare. Spoken like someone that has never used welfare, doesn't know anyone on welfare, and gets all their ideas from talk radio and Fox News.
    - 12y ago
tn13 12y ago
Rules of layoff - Keep the indispensable people in terms of work. - Keep the people who are on good terms with you (the top management). - Keep people who sleep with you (the top management). - Keep people with whom you play poker. - Fire everyone who will create no fuss for firing.
cpplinuxdude 12y ago
"The deepest cuts are expected to come from the businesses the company bought from Nokia several months ago"
eitally 12y ago
In relation to Google, though, I've read that the current workforce is somewhere between 20-35% composed of contractors. That seems like a reasonable way to A) avoid certain types of costs, and B) reduce or delay the onset of the type of corporate malaise you describe. What do you think?
thearn4 12y ago
This describes working at NASA down to a T.
- mcguire 12y ago
  Hey! Don't tell people that! We build rockets! And all of our software has to be manned-flight-rated! (Including people.nasa.gov!)
  - thearn4 12y ago
    Writing a one-off throw away analysis script? Better consult NPR 7150.2A and matrix it correctly! It's not about safety. It's about checking of a box and satisfying a process.
hyperliner 12y ago
I have seen way too much dead weight in engineering functions too. Basically, people who keep their jobs because they write horrendous code that nobody else can manage. So you can BS your way in many functions.
wahsd 12y ago
LOL The irony of someone getting fired at Facebook for not delivering something of tangible value is so juicy.

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.
- yebyen 12y ago
  when looking for crap, setting off the crap sensor would be a positive result... you don't want to accidentally fire the good ones.

jgalt212 12y ago

That's all well and good, but I bet there's tons of dead weight in the engineering ranks as well. Not just areas/jobs indirectly linked to core business functions as you cited.

poof131 12y ago

The military is especially prone to this problem. I’d hesitate to refer to people as dead weight, but the retirement structure encourages mid-level management to hang-on for twenty. Even if people are burnt out after 10 years, which the military is very capable of doing, many stay even when they and the Service would be better off if they moved on.

fredophile 12y ago
The problem with the military is how benefits are set up. There is a big jump in benefits at twenty years. If you put in 10-12 years your benefits aren't significantly better than someone who just did minimal time. If there was a small jump around the ten year point they'd probably see people willing to stop there instead of holding out 8-10 more years.
- mpyne 12y ago
  Well the personnel problems with the military go far beyond the timing of benefits alone, unfortunately. As it stands the military actually has great difficulty retaining people past 10 years. Many military communities are chronically undermanned at the senior enlisted and officer leadership levels. So while it's fair to say that the military has held onto lower-skilled workers, it's not exactly the case that it's leading to a glut of excess deadweight just hanging on. Rather, we use the "idiots" to fill the desks that would simply be left empty were it not for these guys biding their time to 20 years. Whether that's a net positive or not depends on the given billet being filled, but we'd have to do away with billet-based manpower and fine-tuned "year group" tracking entirely in order to truly see benefit from dropping deadweight in the 10-18 YOS ranks. But the way it stands now, many billets require a certain rank or grade to fill them, no matter what the skill level might be of excess junior (or senior) personnel.
  - mcguire 12y ago
    I know several people who left the U.S. Navy after 6-8 years rather than taking unpalatable billets (one was a master-at-arms (IIRC), serving on several of the hospital ships who was given the choice of leaving or moving to Diego Garcia; several others were Sea-Bees) or who took the latter of the up-or-out option after being unable to advance under new requirements. It always seemed like the Navy was doing its best to get rid of skilled workers.

kabdib 12y ago

In the last layoffs, many of the people who were let go were back working for Microsoft again in a year or so (often as full-time employees, more often as contractors). I believe that Microsoft has more contractors than it does employees. That is just crazy. Also, it's nearly impossible to fire even the most grossly incompetent people. One person I worked with was a utter flatline and doing negative work (very bad Q/A, argumentative, and the most useless person I have ever had as a coworker. It took six months to fire the guy, and it was no secret to the third and fourth layer management that the guy was a huge mistake. MS needs to get rid of the right people.

JibberMeTimbers 12y ago
Contractors can be cheaper than employees, despite paying a higher salary. The reason is that they don't need to do so much legal work or pay their insurances and etc, etc. When a project is finished, they can just end the contract and avoid all of the legality. I've known many people that leave their job as employee and get contracted to the same company for those reasons (and more).
- cpeterso 12y ago
  And contractors don't get stock options. Microsoft has gotten in trouble before about their use of "permanent contractors".
  - sirmarksalot 12y ago
    The stock isn't really a big deal anymore now that the company is stable, more or less. Back in the '90s, however, some preferred stock could mean retiring at age 35. And when the orange-badges started seeing their officemates buying mansions and supercars, despite not having worked all that much harder, they felt the need to get the lawyers involved.
    - r00fus 12y ago
      Is this the case? I mean, sure options won't be as lucrative, but RSUs are basically an extra way for companies to compensate employees, and still count as "velvet handcuffs". If the stock rises, that's magnified, but even while relatively static, RSUs count up.

liveoneggs 12y ago

and who selects the ones to fire? The ass-kissers of course.

jarsin 12y ago
Exactly. Every layoff i have seen personally or through close friends at other company's the ass kissers survive and those t hat threaten them get laid off. Those that threaten them (the competent ones) are always painted as non team players because generally the competent ones are unhappy when the teams gain so many slick talking ass kissers but few doers.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Competent people need to know the political basics, it's like defensive driving. http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/04/politics-101-chapter-3-myth-just-world-part-1 http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/04/politics-101-chapter-3-... http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/05/politics-101-chapter-3-myth-just-world-part-2 http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/05/politics-101-chapter-3-...
  - jarsin 12y ago
    This is good stuff. Thanks for the links. I have seen many times and even done the withdraw and become cynical that they talk about. In my case I hated the entire company so it was a bigger issue. I will say though that when companies lay off competent people one thing I see time and time again the competent people that survived (who probably are better at the politics) always abandon ship. Its very demoralizing watching the kick ass coder you work with go and Joe Slick that never checked in one line of code stay. So its really not in a companies interest to get rid of those that can do their jobs well even if they are not wise on the politics.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      One remedy for this in the software world would be to publish detailed credits for key employee names/roles associated with software releases, something that is done in the film industry where people care very much about where their name appears in the opening and closing credits. Great teams are quite rare and short-lived. One specific version of a software product can be fantastic due to the short-lived team that designed and built that one release. You see this clearly with hardware, e.g. the 2012 version of device model XYZ earns a higher price in the resale market. It would be great if the teams building these positive exceptions could be recognized, as they scatter and reform across companies.

ekianjo 12y ago

> Microsoft has been picking up useless deadbeats for nigh on 25 years now. They really need to shed these people. Isn't the key reason for these layoffs the recent acquisition of Nokia operations ? If that is, the layoff is just about eliminating redundancy post acquisition, and not addressing the deadweight problem.

asdfologist 12y ago
Or, the redundancy argument could be used to justify laying off dead weight.
- andyjdavis 12y ago
  Certainly lay offs due to post acquisition redundancy would seem less likely to generate lawsuits compared to lay offs due to dead weight regardless of the true reason.
  - potatolicious 12y ago
    AFAIK they pulled this during the '08 crisis also. I heard from a few people on the inside that, while the public reason for the layoff was to trim headcount in response to economic downturn, it was more of a house cleaning.

CMCDragonkai 12y ago

That's what Enron did and General Electric under Jack Welch. Up or out strategy. If you put the incentive under delivering something of value too much, you end up with people lying. Sometimes it's not just about star individuals, but star teams.

mikeyouse 12y ago
To provide a counterpoint: Enron collapsed under massive fraud and GE would have been bankrupt if they had to mark-to-market their debt during the financial crisis.
- sopooneo 12y ago
  What does it mean that they would have been bankrupt? I thought (wrongly perhaps) that you were only bankrupt if you couldn't pay your bills. So no matter their true debt back then, doesn't GE's current existence prove they weren't bankrupt?
  - lotsofpulp 12y ago
    I think what mickeyouse means is that if the taxpayers didn't step in to subsidize all the financial institutions, then GE would have bee bankrupt (just like most other financial institutions).
  - mikeyouse 12y ago
    If your assets are worth less than your liabilities, you're technically insolvent. If you can still pay your bills from cashflows, you don't need to claim bankruptcy, but on a long enough timeline without a significant change, you will go bankrupt. There was a long stretch of time post-GFC where this was the case with GE. Banks have to 'mark-to-market' their debt periodically, but since GE wasn't a bank, they didn't abide by the same regulations. Say there were two identical houses on a street with $500k mortgages, but the market crashed, the houses are worth less, and only 1/2 of the mortgages will be repaid. If Bank of America owned the first house, the mortgage asset (it's an asset to the bank) would be marked-to-market and what was formerly a $500k asset would now be worth $250k, and the bank would show a loss of $250k. GE doesn't have to do this and could carry assets at their previous value (and didn't have to mark down bad debt either). To simplify the story, during the GFC, GE had that one mortgage "worth" $500k and debts worth $400k. If they were a bank, they would have had to admit that the mortgage was really worth $250k, and they would've gone into receivership. If not for that accounting quirk and the massive amount of bailout cash they took from the Federal Reserve / FDIC, they would have actually had to declare bankruptcy. Ironically enough, the FDIC program and Federal Reserve are to shore up banks and GE was explicitly not a bank per the above few paragraphs. So make sense of how they got access to bailout money solely authorized to bail out banks.. [1] - $45B in losses buried on GE's balance sheet: http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-living-on-planet-ge-2009-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-living-on-plane... [2] - GE borrowed $16B from Federal Reserve: http://www.propublica.org/article/general-electric-tapped-fed-to-borrow-16-billion http://www.propublica.org/article/general-electric-tapped-fe... [3] - FDIC to back $139B in GE Capital Debt: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/fdic-to-back-139-billion-in-ge-capital-debt/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/fdic-to-back-139-bill... [4] - GE Borrows $59.3B from FDIC program: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-01/ge-borrowed-16-billion-in-commercial-paper-plan-fed-data-show.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-01/ge-borrowed-16-bill...

adventured 12y ago

Facebook does indeed have a very efficient corporate structure (whether that will last is another question). Perhaps 7,000 to 7,300 employees (assuming some pickup the last quarter or two), and $8.9 billion in sales. Microsoft by comparison had roughly 15,000 employees when they had that level of revenue (adjusting for inflation), circa 1993 / 1994.

retroencabulato 12y ago
Is it really that black and white to compare the size of engineering teams 20 years apart?
marincounty 12y ago
I still think about FB spending 3 billion on that app?
- tdicola 12y ago
  Microsoft has made billion dollar blunders too. Look at aQuantive, it torched almost 7 billion dollars.
psbp 12y ago
Let's be honest, Facebook has a much more efficient product, and by that I mean the product does most of the work for them.
- joevandyk 12y ago
  Microsoft had a product that was bundled with ever computer sold. If that's not a product selling itself I don't know what is.
ams6110 12y ago
But Facebook is in a much more tenuous position. Nobody really needs Facebook; it's mostly entertainment and could be toppled in a few years time by the next internet/tech fad. Microsoft is a lot more entrenched in a lot more places that actually depend on their software.

bkjelden 12y ago

As someone currently with the company, this description of some mid-level management really resonates with me. I am incredibly skeptical, however, that any round of layoffs attempting to get rid of these people will have a good hit rate. Plenty of really talented engineers and engineering managers will end up losing their jobs too. I a lot of my older peers from university went to work for IBM for a couple years right after school, where layoffs occurred pretty regularly. The culture they've described to me, that was present as a result of constant layoffs, isn't something I think many current Microsoft employees will want to be a part of.

greendestiny 12y ago
When whom to layoff is a political decision, layoffs will just compound the problem.
- kamaal 12y ago
  That always happens. The problem is the CEO needs an internal partner to get a list of people who need to be let go. And that's generally delegated to the immediate exec staff, they delegate to some layers below and when the list is built, it bubbles up back to the CEO. In the process, most people think performance is the key to decide who stays and who leaves. While the fact is first ones to go are political enemies, followed by people who pose threat to the middle management(Kind of people who managers think will eventually take their job, if they stay) these kind of people are worst sufferers, because they would have performed well only to be perceived as threats. Next come people who don't fit well in the organization's pay parity. The last one's if they ever go are weak people who can be sacrificed to save manager's yes men and manger's inner circle. What generally remains are people who are yes men, political alliances and generally people and partners needed to keep political cartels running. Which is why if a company is laying off people, its generally an indication they will perform worse in the time to come. Because a round of good people have been laid off, many good ones are leaving. And worst stay on, and are more entrenched in the new set up.
  - stcredzero 12y ago

sopooneo 12y ago

I have begun wondering lately if the reasons for the inevitable death of living things has any anologue to the dynamics you describe here for corporations.

ams6110 12y ago
The BCG matrix. Microsoft is in the Cash Cow stage and moving to the Dog stage.
walterbell 12y ago
Yes, organization development literature is sorely lacking in research and discussion of immortality.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  I'm not sure if your joking, but there is research into managing a business' longevity, such as the book "Built to Last": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built_to_Last:_Successful_Habits_of_Visionary_Companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built_to_Last:_Successful_Habi...
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Not joking :) Built to Last is inspirational, a bit like Warren Bennis "Organizing Genius". I was thinking of research topics like these: 1) Financing, staffing and governance of short-lived organizations which perform complex tasks then disband, e.g. film production, election campaigns, bi-annual sporting events, disaster relief, NGO coalitions. How are institutional identity and knowledge preserved when developed within temporary contexts? 2) What organizational scenarios have been proposed by scifi/fantasy writers for worlds where humans or other lifeforms are immortal? Do those scenarios suggest areas for research or innovation in modern corporations? Olaf Stapledon, A. E. Van Vogt, C.S. Lewis, R.A. Lafferty, Walter Jon Williams, etc. 3) Historically, business has been run by families with inter-generational inheritance. Some public and many private companies still operate this way. There is a body of literature on family-based governance and succession planning. Is that literature relevant to public companies like Facebook and Google where the founders have inheritable shares with unique voting rights on corporate futures? Will other corps seek superpowered share classes? Will consumers seek out B corps, public corps, private corps or hybrids? Garther Morgan's "Images of Organization" provides food for thought: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/13/the-eight-metaphors-of-organization/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/13/the-eight-metaphors-of-...

lgleason 12y ago

I was at a company once that had layoffs where the company said that they were going to lay off managers. An old timer succinctly summed up how it would go as follows........ You have a tree full of monkeys. So you shake the hell out of the tree to get the monkeys out of hit. How many monkeys do you have in the tree after your done? The same number, they are just in different branches.

peterjancelis 12y ago

This is why I believe in a Semco type culture where every team member receives a cut of the profits and there is a peer review process of who gets to join / stay in the team. It's the most realistic way a profitably franchise can avoid taking in the political rent seekers. What you spend more on profit share you probably make back on cost savings, and at the very least it buys you a more happy, productive workforce.

walterbell 12y ago
Would you recommend a reference on Semco's approach?
- rimantas 12y ago
  The books by Ricardo Semler? "Maveric" and the "The Seven Day Weekend". Both worth reading, imho. Even if you won't be able to apply the same principles they can serve as a good eye-opener for the many things we take for granted.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Remarkable story, thanks for the pointer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler
tdicola 12y ago
Microsoft is a publically traded company, they have a fiduciary responsibility to return their profits to shareholders and not employees, for better or worse.
- Hermel 12y ago
  This is a myth often used to justify unpopular decisions. The board has a responsibility to guide the company in accordance with the articles, but the shareholders are free to define the articles. If they think redistributing profits to employees is a good idea, they are free to do so.

backn4th4ever 12y ago

At Google, if you don't make it to level 5 sweng within a certain amount of time(2 years from being hired at level 4), you will most likely get fired. After that you can relax more. So the fluff in software engineering(including managers) is minimal. Facebook though... Ask their employees how that build system is working out for them. There's a lot of doing, agreed, but sometimes you need to just take a chill pill, stop the goddamn hacking for chrissakes, design THEN code.

enneff 12y ago
> At Google, if you don't make it to level 5 sweng within a certain amount of time(2 years from being hired at level 4), you will most likely get fired. Don't know where you get that idea from. I have a lot of anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
- backn4th4ever 12y ago
  I saw it first hand. My manager was pushing everyone to get promoted to level 5, of the few who didn't, one was put on a pip then fired, the others worked like madmen after seeing that, still didn't get promoted and somehow moved into another group. They still haven't gotten promoted but they work insanely hard/ aren't the same people. I guess it depends on the group, but I was told that timelines for promotion to level 5 are an unwritten rule.
  - sanowski 12y ago
    there's no 'unwritten rule' for promotion timelines
    - wan23 12y ago
      It's actually a written rule. Look up the job descriptions for SWE2's and 3's and compare them to those for higher levels. It specifically says that you are expected to advance.
    - nostrademons 12y ago

swalsh 12y ago

Its good in theory, but in practice it doesn't work. Those guys who mastered the political process. They don't get fired. Not getting fired is what they do. Thats the thing they're really good at.

crag 12y ago
Exactly. And it's not just tech. Most large companies have mid-level workers whose sole job is to not to get laid off (fired). I pity anyone under them cause they are usually the hardest working and first to go. Companies should be looking top-down instead of the usual bottom-up. And man, it gets cut-throat. You know, when I traded, I used to think that was the most cut-throat work environment. Then the firm I was trading for got acquired by a bigger (much bigger) "traditional" bank. I quickly realized the trading floor was a picnic compared to mid-level management (at a bank they are called VP's) politics. At least a trader, you know the score. Make a profit you win. Don't you leave. Working at this bank; I had to learn to watch my back. It was at that point I decided to leave banking, and NYC.
- wavegeek 12y ago
  > And it's not just tech. It also applies to countries. Look at the increasing resources that go to people who produce little or nothing of value to others eg lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, financial engineers, LBO operators etc. Not to mention many of the people on welfare.
  - basyt 12y ago
    > Not to mention many of the people on welfare. Woah, slow down tiger :) More seriously, please elaborate. Or maybe I am just a bleeding heart.
  - yardie 12y ago
    > Not to mention many of the people on welfare. Spoken like someone that has never used welfare, doesn't know anyone on welfare, and gets all their ideas from talk radio and Fox News.
  - 12y ago

tn13 12y ago

Rules of layoff - Keep the indispensable people in terms of work. - Keep the people who are on good terms with you (the top management). - Keep people who sleep with you (the top management). - Keep people with whom you play poker. - Fire everyone who will create no fuss for firing.

cpplinuxdude 12y ago

"The deepest cuts are expected to come from the businesses the company bought from Nokia several months ago"

eitally 12y ago

In relation to Google, though, I've read that the current workforce is somewhere between 20-35% composed of contractors. That seems like a reasonable way to A) avoid certain types of costs, and B) reduce or delay the onset of the type of corporate malaise you describe. What do you think?

thearn4 12y ago

This describes working at NASA down to a T.

mcguire 12y ago
Hey! Don't tell people that! We build rockets! And all of our software has to be manned-flight-rated! (Including people.nasa.gov!)
- thearn4 12y ago
  Writing a one-off throw away analysis script? Better consult NPR 7150.2A and matrix it correctly! It's not about safety. It's about checking of a box and satisfying a process.

hyperliner 12y ago

I have seen way too much dead weight in engineering functions too. Basically, people who keep their jobs because they write horrendous code that nobody else can manage. So you can BS your way in many functions.

wahsd 12y ago

LOL The irony of someone getting fired at Facebook for not delivering something of tangible value is so juicy.