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And now, every day for a year, everyone gets to wake up and wonder if this is the day that they will get laid off. Why can't they wait and make the announcemen

• 67726e 12y ago
  I'm assuming that an announcement like this could effect stock prices. I have no knowledge of stock trading at all, but I would assume they would announce something like this if they expected it to have a positive effect.
  • kabdib 12y ago
    Stock is up over 45 now . . . Getting rid of dead wood is a great idea. Tons of middle management there, just sitting for years and causing obstructive damage.
    • TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      From the content of this email, it's not middle management that's the problem.
      • 72deluxe 12y ago
        Perhaps! It should have read: "We need to cascade memos about our holistic logistical matrix approaches."
    • UweSchmidt 12y ago
      Not a big fan of metaphors like "dead wood" to describe employees. Regarding the "tons of middle managers" (another dehumanizing expression imo.) - I haven't met anyone just "sitting for years" and happily "causing obstructive damage" yet. I have however met quite a few where it took me some time to appreciate their work (looked like nothing/trivial from the outside) and realize their failed struggle with organizatorial constraints on their work. Apologies if I am reading too much into your post. However, there seems to be pervasive contempt for the people affected by layoffs in threads like these that's unnecessary and unwarranted.
      • 72deluxe 12y ago
        Very thoughtful, thanks. I too had probably been swept along by the generalisations of people, but they're just that - real people with real problems and situations.
      • kabdib 12y ago
        Facts of life at Microsoft: - There is dead wood. People who do negative work, or who do not add value, only process, to shipping products - There are toxic middle-to-upper level managers. These people exist; I have personal experience with one who I believe is an actual psychopath - There are many partner-level people who have essentially reduced their careers to manipulation of other people's careers, by canceling products, or getting people canned or quashing promotions, or backing poor promotions. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that middle management at Microsoft is riddled with "dead wood".
    • aikah 12y ago
      > Tons of middle management there, just sitting for years and causing obstructive damage. how do you know it's middle management? > Getting rid of dead wood That's such a despicable way to talk about human beings,but not surprising here,unfortunatly.
      • mynewwork 12y ago
        Oh come on. Referring to unproductive jobs as dead wood is a perfectly fine idiom. Nobody is implying the people who hold those jobs have any personal failings or aren't capable of doing productive work, but the jobs themselves are not helping the business.
    • silverbax88 12y ago
      A friend of mine who has been CFO of a couple of Fortune 500 companies once told me that layoffs always drive a stock price up, and that it's also one of the single biggest proofs that Wall Street analysts have no idea how to run a real business. He explained that any company who could shed a massive amount of its workforce within a year, or all at once, is a red flag for massive internal problems. At the time we had this discussion, he was the CFO of a company that had over 30,000 employees globally. His thinking was that the same principals that small companies use (not hiring too quickly, etc.) should be scaled up regardless of the company size. You either need people or you don't. You don't hire too fast simply because you are experiencing rapid revenue growth, because revenues do not grow unabated. You hire as slowly as you can, so that when recessions hit or market forces change, you don't suddenly have 3 or 4 times the staff you need. His thinking (which I agree with) is that since those people worked extra hard to cover the work when times were booming, you don't turn around and lay them off just because things slow for a couple of years. Those people worked hard for the company because they are good employees; he saw it as more important to have good employees on hand when things ramped up again rather than just cut them loose and hope he could get more good employees later. Since that discussion, he's gone on to two more companies, leading one through an IPO as the CEO. All of his companies have operated like gangbusters - he comes in, revenues go through the roof, debt gets paid down and he's NEVER LAID ANYONE OFF. In the meantime, in his work history, he's been through 3 IPOS (two as CFO, one as CEO) and I don't know how much he made personally on each I do know that he cleared $41 million in a single day on one of them. This is in complete opposition to what I've heard from several other CEOs, who tell me 'labor is your most controllable expense'. Yet, none of their companies (some also on the NYSE or NASDAQ) have performed anywhere near what my friend's has. I think he's right. Wall Street is full of guys who have no actual experience running a business. They see layoffs as 'cleaning house' and 'cutting expenses' but the reality is that while that can be true, it more often is a harbinger that the company is not well run.
      • eitally 12y ago
        imho, the biggest cause of this kind of thing is lack of sufficient strategic direction, and delegation with accountability to middle management of initiatives that are in line with that direction. When middle/lower managers aren't in lockstep with the CEO's/Board's strategy, confusion, misdirection and unnecessary politics ensue, and the lowest possible level workers suffer most. Counter Nadella's communications over the last few weeks with what Larry Page said/wrote when he took over from Eric Schmidt. Even though Google pursues hundreds of interesting initiatives of varying revenue importance, it appears they have a coherent strategy (internally, at least) and have been making appropriate decisions to further it, even when those decisions are sometimes indecipherable to external viewers.
    • Tloewald 12y ago
      Layoffs almost always improve stock price (literally the first thing "strategy" consultants do when brought in to help "fix" a company is look at an org chart and start hacking bits off). Whether layoffs are actually a good move in the long run doesn't become apparent until much later. (Did you destroy your ability to keep doing business to get a nice bottom line in the short term? Corporate raiders specialize in buying companies with borrowed money, firing a bunch of people, pumping the bottom line, and then selling them before the fact that they're now crippled becomes apparent.) I had a guy under me laid off, and I resigned on the spot -- because his being laid off meant the company was giving up on a core capability that was the main reason I wanted to be at the company. A friend of mine was working at a large software company that laid off "dead wood" (according to management) including key engineers, which literally led to all the other experienced engineers on his team leaving.
    • Zigurd 12y ago
      Getting rid of the senior management and board members who allowed the Nokia buy to happen in the first place would address the cause. Layoffs are just a symptom of such management failures.
    • personZ 12y ago
      We don't even know who was laid off, so the market isn't judging based upon it being a productive reduction of force -- they're reacting because in the short term, layoffs almost always improve profits, especially for an organization like Microsoft that is coasting on prior wins. It may sacrifice the future, but few of those holders have any commitment to the future. In every post about this story, right near the top have been dreamy posts about "dead weight" and "middle management" being cut, as if all of Microsoft's prior executive bungles are suddenly being resolved (with most of the same executives, as an aside). Yet the bulk of the layoffs come from Nokia (man, Finland is going to be pissed), people whose only mistake was following a leader who was widely considered a trojan horse. Elop keeps his job. Those people lose theirs. And how ridiculous prejudicial for all of these people whose only mistake was being in a company that main horrendous strategy decisions time and time again -- having people title you "dead wood".
• mattzito 12y ago
  It's actually an attempt to try to be smart about letting people go. Sure, yes, they could come up with a master list and just pull the trigger today. But the odds of sweeping up a huge number of "false positives" grow considerably. The idea behind waiting is that along with these layoffs are a lot of restructuring work - teams get moved around, some people actually get promoted, newly manager-less teams are absorbed by another team, etc. When that happens, there will be a certain number of people who might have been underperforming that start to thrive, possibly because of having a better manager, or because they're more interested in their new group, etc. Other people who might have been coasting by and taking up space but getting decent reviews might suddenly be under a better manager and have no where to hide. But basically, you can do layoffs, restructure, and then in 6 months time re-evaluate. Typically, barring one-off events, they'll do several rounds here, a few months apart. Done properly, it won't be an every day worry, it'll be a concern 2-3 times over the next year.
  • Gracana 12y ago
    Seems like this looming threat/uncertainty might also cause people to leave of their own accord. I don't know if that's the strategy, but I could see it being a desirable alternative to actually laying people off.
  • rayiner 12y ago
    That's plausible, but also plausible is that the drawn-out process causes the better performers to leave while they can. It's easy to say from the outside that the layoffs will hit underperformers and people who are just coasting, but the fact is that layoffs of this scale inevitably involve politics. We're talking about an organization that had so much trouble getting the Office people on the same page as the Mobile people that they launched a make-or-break product (Surface) with a buggy beta version of its killer feature (Office). You think that organizational dysfunction won't extend to the restructuring process itself? At least if you do them and get them done quickly, the people you want to keep know where they stand.
    • sz4kerto 12y ago
      > That's plausible, but if I were at Microsoft I'd be sending out my resume right now. No -- most people who work at a big company know _exactly_ whether they're in danger or not. We're speaking about 5% of the original (pre-Nokia acquisition) workforce. You must know whether you're in the bottom 5%, or if your product is in the least critical 5%. Of course there are surprises and some good/productive guys will be laid off because of politics (as the process is not completely effective), but in general that's not the case. I've seen similar things happening inside the financial industry around 2008. Many people left (sometimes much more than 5%), but we could usually guess who's going to be affected (with really high accuracy).
• dasil003 12y ago
  How do you propose a corporation the size of Microsoft decide who to fire without it leaking internally that layoffs are coming? It would have to be an incredibly coarse-grained and thus terrible decision. Besides, I fail to the see the logic that advance warning isn't objectively good. If you're going to be laid off it's better to have some additional time on the job before your severance, even if there's uncertainty. And besides, how much peace of mind did employees at Microsoft have anyway? If they were paying any attention at all to how the company is doing everyone at the company had to see that layoffs and restructuring were inevitable sooner or later anyway.
• tgeorge 12y ago
  This is where the Bob's come in...
• pparkkin 12y ago
  Some countries' legislation requires a company to express intent to let people go before being able to go ahead with it. Also some of the legalities may make it impossible to know beforehand who specifically will be let go when the time comes. Look into co-determination in Finland for an example. Finland of course is also a big part of the news from Microsoft today.
• netcan 12y ago
  My guess would be that laying off this many is a big hairy job. A lot of people need to be involved. They would all need to know about it. Keeping it secret is a lost cause. There would be rumors and theories and half truths flying around.
• plerophoria 12y ago
  Personally I'd much rather hear about a potential layoff far in advance. It would give me a chance to prepare financially and start looking at new jobs.
  • cordite 12y ago
    Generally that's what severance time or packages are for. I often hear 1-3 months of employment and or pay over the time, giving hopefully adequate time to prepare.
• makecheck 12y ago
  Companies announcing "X" layoffs typically don't need to lay off "X" people, they actually need to lay off "X + N" people; they are counting on attrition following such an announcement to quietly make up the difference. That makes the press (slightly) better, and the people who quit because they sense a sinking ship, etc. won't cost the company in severance packages either.
  • marcosdumay 12y ago
    It's funny to see all those people on HN talking about "redundancy" and "letting people quit on their own", as if people were perfectly fungible - and in a software company! Yep, I'm sure they'll save a lot in severance when their best people quit.
• outside1234 12y ago
  Microsoft employee here: I took this exactly the opposite way. I know I'm valuable, I know many others aren't (sorry: being honest) and this is a good thing from my perspective because at Microsoft we are finally facing reality and getting the right people in place. My only gripe is that the layoffs are not larger - we need about 20% of the marketing folks and 20% of the program managers that we currently have. I would cut deeply in those disciplines as well and then Page-style cut all of the deadwood non-strategic low-revenue projects (and there are a lot of them). Laying off Terry Myerson (Windows) and Kevin Turner (chief hacker culture killer) would be a great improvement as well - they are both cancers.
  • ww520 12y ago
    Letting 80% marketing and PM go? Wow. I thought PM are pretty good in Microsoft.
    • 72deluxe 12y ago
      Didn't Ballmer's reorganisation mean that there was a triad of developer, project manager and tester working together? That would mean one project manager for each developer wouldn't it? Or am I wrong? Has that changed?
      • Smudge 12y ago
        The triads are at a higher level. Once you get down to individual contributors there is typically a high ratio of Dev and QA to PM (maybe 1-2 PMs per team of 15), and usually a couple more Devs than QA. I'm not sure how widely those ratios are enforced or how much it varies from team to team.
      • ehaughee 12y ago
        We don't have one PM/test per dev, no. My team is currently something like 8 devs, 3 testers, 3 PMs. There was an internal shift to change the test/dev ratio to something like 2/3 or 1/3 (I can't remember exactly) instead of matching it. I don't know of a team in my division that has a 1:1 for PM or test to dev.
• AUmrysh 12y ago
  I'd rather know ahead of time so I could start finding a new employer.
• easymovet 12y ago
  It means less severance packages will have to be paid out because a lot of people won't want to be in limbo and will resign on their own first.