7 ms·

Microsoft laid me off after 15 years of service. Life after Microsoft?

• badmadrad 12y ago
  Naturally, he is very disappointed but he should keep things in perspective. It's not that bad of situation to be in. You have 15 years of software development experience at Microsoft and there are going to be a lot of open doors. This could really be blessing in disguise.
  • s_kilk 12y ago
    hmm, he is however up against every one of his ex-collegues who are in the same boat.
  • nanidin 12y ago
    Yeah, I'm about to start a job search pretty soon. Not so nice that the market is being flooded with ex-MS people at the moment.
    • chiph 12y ago
      Be willing to move. The hard part about this is convincing the HR department that you can self-relocate and don't want relo money.
      • akg_67 12y ago
        The most common objection I have heard in past six months during my job search. Another two objections that I have heard are "too much experience" and "your past salary was too much, we don't want to offer less but can't afford to pay you what you deserve."
        • pc86 12y ago
          You're don't necessarily deserve $n if the market can no longer bare it. There's nothing wrong with taking $(0.8n) if that's what the market has determined your skills are worth.
          • akg_67 12y ago
            I am open but companies are not :-(
          • nilkn 12y ago
            The problem is that the company is afraid that you'll bolt the second you get an offer at the n level again. They'd rather not hire you at all than hire you, invest in you, and then lose you just as quickly afterward.
            • humanrebar 12y ago
              Offer a longer term contract then. The guy in the video was at his last job for 15 years. I'm sure he'd be OK with that assuming the benefits were good enough.
      • kken 12y ago
        I doubt that relo money plays any role in a decision for or against any candidate.
  • huhtenberg 12y ago
    Except every interviewer will be wondering why did Microsoft let go someone with so much experience. What did Microsoft know that's not on the resume.
    • bhrgunatha 12y ago
      I don't know the details of the Microsoft case, but my job was made redundant a number of years ago and I definitely was able to bounce back. There are lots of legal regulations around terminating employment and one of the easier legal ways is to remove a particular job or position. That's why generally people are not made redundant, their job, position or title is. It's a legal method of cutting costs by pruning the organisation. It's nothing to do with whether you are a worthy employee. Redundancies don't work that way. They are a practical, legal way of reducing numbers - payroll and staff. In the video, he's wondering why they couldn't simply find another position for him where he could apply his expertise. It's probably because they had to state his job is no longer viable and so the job (and the person occupying those jobs) are let go. If the company were to find other positions for their favorite employees, it opens all kinds of legal problems for HR.
    • omnibrain 12y ago
      I don't think that's the case if he is one of 17k others.
      • SheepSlapper 12y ago
        Not to mention the fact that he worked there for 15 years. Successful companies don't make a habit of holding onto bad employees for that long :)
        • kamaal 12y ago
          That's just one way of looking at it. An acquaintance of mine who is also a HR guy once told me its in a person's best interest to keep hopping companies every ~3 years at least. Working at one company for a long time can be interpreted in many different ways. More like a person, who isn't excited about looking for new opportunities. Or a person who is just lazy to not make a move etc etc. Also if you stay at a company for a very long time, unless the company gives you a generous raise every year your salary will be way behind market standards. And if you are OK with your work being valued so little for so long, it only means two things either you just agree that your work or contributions aren't very important to be paid enough, or you are just lazy. And both are negative indicators. Its pointless to show loyalty that spans across 1.5 decades to a mega corporation where the boss two layers above probably doesn't even know your name, let alone the work you do. No wonder they don't blink twice before letting go some one. As much talented you might be, and how many algorithms you've memorized or how many nano seconds faster you can make a program run. I fail to understand why anybody would stay so long, its like setting yourself up for a big meltdown sooner or later.
  • badman_ting 12y ago
    I hope this person is OK but that strikes me as unrealistic. Ageism is a real problem for software developers, but also that 15 years at MS could just as easily be viewed as a negative than a positive.
    • spartango 12y ago
      That 15 years of experience at one of the world's top software companies is seen is a negative disgusts me. It seems disrespectful to judge an employee based on the negative perception of an entire company. For all the broken things within a company like Microsoft, I think it would be foolish to mark the company's talent pool as tainted. Perhaps this reflects a subtler form of the fanboy-ism that exists in technology culture today. The sentiment is that companies we dislike must have incompetent employees. Competent employees would surely build a better product, right? Obviously this is naive. Absolutely right, ageism plays into this as well. If you're hiring, keep in mind that, while fashionable, it is illegal to discriminate based on age. I wish this law was slightly easier to enforce.
      • buckbova 12y ago
        It's not unlike Steve Jobs thoughts on hiring Big Blue types in the early years. They were not the right culture fit. I don't think it's a perception of incompetence, but more of inflexibility. The thinking that a microsoft employee of 15 years is set in their ways.
  • Scuds 12y ago
    yup. you're not hurting for .net / sql dev roles in the Puget sound area. Starbucks, Expedia, Nordstrom, and any number of other consulting firms and smaller dev shops. Of course - Node, Rails, Django, Spring etc wouldn't be bad to learn.
  • lightblade 12y ago
    I heard that Microsoft is almost a direct feed into Google. Perhaps he should try there?
• acchow 12y ago
  Honest question as a Canadian - what do you do about health insurance when you're 50 and get fired from your lifer job? Should you really have been paying for your own policy in parallel with your employer's so that you can continue with the low premiums post-employment?
  • ajross 12y ago
    These days you go to your state exchange (for the putative ex-MS person, that's likely to be https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/ https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/), search for a plan, click on it and sign up. It used to be worse, of course. But even then it wasn't a disaster for the case at hand: the COBRA act allowed you to continue to buy your existing plan at the same premiums for a year and a half until you found a new job.
    • kstrauser 12y ago
      COBRA is impossibly expensive for many people. When you simultaneously have your salary drop to $0 and your portions of your insurance premiums triple (say, if you have a spouse and kids covered by the plan), that's a rough situation to be in. About the only good thing about COBRA is that it covers preexisting conditions.
      • dataminded 12y ago
        I can cosign this. Cobra for my wife and I was ~$1000/month.
        • bmelton 12y ago
          Not to contribute to the ACA vs. non-ACA arguments further, but ACA plans for my wife, daughter and myself are more than double that in Maryland. I don't know what the differences would be if I were earning $0 per year, especially as the relevant question (on the form I filled out) was something like "How much do you anticipate earning this year?" which is a question I have no idea how I would answer if I were currently unemployed.
• smrtinsert 12y ago
  It's really sad to hear him talk about his son. What department was he in, and what could the new direction be?
  • kevinstubbs 12y ago
    SDET in Windows.
    • badman_ting 12y ago
      Anecdotally it seems like a lot of the people let go were in SDET roles.
      • yuhong 12y ago
        Yea, I think it is deliberate, they want to merge dev and test.
      • kevinstubbs 12y ago
        It's part of an effort to move towards something called "combined engineering" and was started as a pilot in Bing. The basic idea is less testers, more devs. Devs take on more responsibility for testing, while at the same time getting more details about usage from customers in the wild... My understanding is that it's like A/B testing features - something Bing does a lot with "micro-flighting".
• mercwear 12y ago
  Being laid off can really take a shot on your confidence but the approach you are taking seems to be a healthy one. You have also got a great set of skills to "fall back on" should bring your own boss not work out (I hope it does!). I personally believe that Windows PowerShell desired state configuration experience is about to become worth its weight in gold as more Windows shops move towards automation. If you have any experience with DSE finding a rewarding and well-paying job in the future probably won’t be too hard.
• ianstallings 12y ago
  It made me a little sad but ultimately when he said he wants to be his own boss it gave me hope. I believe we're in an age of personal empowerment for developers and others in the industry. The idea of a one man shop isn't so far fetched these days.
  • billmalarky 12y ago
    Working for yourself is pretty high risk though especially with a special needs child. Though his risk is offset by being able to find a job if need be rather quickly I would think (being an ex-microsoft engineer).
• fndrplayer13 12y ago
  Hopefully things work out better for him outside of Microsoft. Microsoft is just another big company these days, and their policies and products reflect/have reflected that for quite awhile. Work for yourself, or work for a small company, you'll feel more rewarded and hopefully like a more important part of the team. My 2 cents after having worked for a huge company and now working at a small company.
• socrates1998 12y ago
  It sounds rough, but if you are not invaluable to your company, then you are always at risk. And almost no one is invaluable at such a large company. There is no more "lifer" jobs.
  • billmalarky 12y ago
    On the flip side, being "irreplaceable" isn't necessarily a good thing either because it generally means you are needed for one specific task that will stagnate your professional growth.
  • Tactic 12y ago
    Nobody is invaluable at a company. Period. And especially in the tech industry. Code is just code. It doesn't take a magical power to read it.
    • wsc981 12y ago
      Unless of course you'd take some extra measures to increase your job security: https://www.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html https://www.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html
• ausjke 12y ago
  Don't we have Obamacare these days? why COBRA is still mentioned here? is it still relevant as it used to be? I thought OBAMACARE is beneficial for those who got laid-off, as low income got a huge discount, is it?
  • akg_67 12y ago
    COBRA is not only for health insurance. It also includes other insurance such as dental and vision. ACA only covers health insurance. COBRA is still relevant for health insurance if you employer offers to cover part of health insurance premium for certain duration after being laid off. In this situation, you will come out ahead with COBRA than ACA. Also, ACA doesn't cover vision and dental for which you will need to go through COBRA to get decent coverage with too much restrictions.
  • bitexploder 12y ago
    Except the healthcare MSFT has is probably way better than anything you will get on the individual market. So you aren't in the terrible position you were before ACA, but you are still in a less good position.
  • guelo 12y ago
    COBRA is an extension of your ex-employer's healthcare program that you pay out of pocket. You have always had the option to either buy COBRA or buy individual coverage on your own. Often it is cheaper to buy individual coverage through private insurers than to buy COBRA, especially if you're willing to settle for catastrophic-only insurance. Obamacare is a new Marketplace for buying individual coverage that includes regulations on the types of coverage offered and includes subsidies if you make less than $46k over a tax year. Since Obamacare doesn't offer bare-bones catastrophic insurance it will often be cheaper to buy outside the Obamacare marketplace if you're not getting a subsidy. Obamacare also has the awful anti-consumer feature called "Open Enrollment Period" which means you can only buy Obamacare insurance between November and February of every year, which makes it useless if you get laid off now.
    • fencepost 12y ago
• wopwopwah 12y ago
  I was also sent off from Microsoft last Thursday. What a day. My observations: - This was the best kept secret ever at Microsoft. Many VPs and directors were not knowing until the day of. - It's clear the layoff decisions were not personal or based on talent or seniority, but just rather the high executives each doing a large pruning of their own branches. Whole branches of the company being lopped off because they had no role in the future picture. Especially after the Nokia buyout the total headcount was too high so this was also to get headcount under control. - Severance terms were good. Overall I can't blame Microsoft. Their competitors are making much more hay with much less people.
  • dapz 12y ago
    Layoffs not based on talent? As competitive as the market is, throwing away valuable people seems insane to me.
    • cmsj 12y ago
      Agreed, but at the scale they're talking about, trying to rank competent people out of the tens of thousands being let go... you're gonna need a lot of Bobs ;)
• TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
  I feel bad for the guy, but Microsoft really does need to reinvent itself, and the deadweight of a huge Windows-focused testing-QA bureaucracy wasn't going to help that mission. After 15 years at MS, this guy is probably unemployable anywhere else unless he is open to learning new things and retraining. Big company people often just learn how to operate in a big company environment, and forget how to do real work.
  • Ecio78 12y ago
    After 15 years at MS, this guy is probably unemployable anywhere else unless he is open to learning new things and retraining. I've not seen the video so I don't know what he was really doing in Microsoft, but you know that there are other places where Microsoft software is used outside Microsoft, right? I don't get whz he should be unemployable anywhere else..
    • TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
      I don't know of too many places other than Microsoft where testing Microsoft software with Microsoft internal testing tools is an applicable skill.
      • tdicola 12y ago
        The SDET role varied a lot by team, but in my experience it dealt a lot with building automated test tools and not manual testing or other rote tasks. The skills are definitely applicable elsewhere.
    • kamaal 12y ago
      >>I don't get whz he should be unemployable anywhere else.. Your ability to get work done has nothing to do with getting a job. Getting a job depends on clearing interviews. These days that means live coding over shared sessions, all kind of crazy math and puzzle questions, getting grilled over esoteric corners of CS, and your regular tests of algorithm wizardry. If you haven't interviewed in 1.5 decades. Its very likely you are going to go through hell before you find something you like.
• Mc_Big_G 12y ago
  I'm not against H1B visas or green cards for skilled immigrants and, in fact, have great friends who fit that profile. However, considering this massive layoff, what reason could Microsoft and Bill Gates have to lobby so aggressively for H1B high-skilled tech talent, besides wanting cheap labor?
  • Infinitesimus 12y ago
    Maybe because the H1B process right now isn't too great?
  • untog 12y ago
    Because the H1B process is pretty broken right now. Very skilled people can be denied a visa because the quota is filled with less talented developers that got lucky.
  • curtis 12y ago
    Because most years they hire more people than they lay off.
• _random_ 12y ago
  I guess, maybe it's OK to live in a socialistic country and pay a lot of tax. That insurance thing is a horrible situation to be in. I wonder how many staff will be replaced by cheap(er) fresh immigrants in the end (I am not against immigration BTW).
  • abhinavk 12y ago
    They are sliimming down, not replacing them by outsourcing to cut costs.
  • humanrebar 12y ago
    It isn't because of socialism. It's an accident of the tax code. Medical coverage is tax-deductible for businesses (as an expense) but not for individuals. This loophole in the tax code was not closed by the recent healthcare reforms, which is a big shame.
• sjg007 12y ago
  Sounds like a great opportunity to start a startup or join one in the Seattle area.
• buckbova 12y ago
  I'd love to be laid off with a good severance. It's an extended paid vacation. It might be a slam to your ego, but every doer out there needs to know, you are seen by management as a cog in a machine, easily swapped out. Everyone is replaceable.
  • fencepost 12y ago
    If you regard it as an "extended paid vacation" there's a good chance it's going to impact your earnings for years if not decades. It may be an opportunity to work on your side projects, get some training/education, reevaluate your options and direction, etc. but it's not a vacation. It's "unemployed" and just having that gap in your resume/job applications can really start to hurt you - in part because other people aren't treating it as a vacation. If you're a cog but nobody's chosen to slot YOU in place of someone else "easily replaceable," what's wrong with you? "What did previous interviewers see that I'm missing? Meh, he's a cog, why risk it, 'NEXT!'" Just ask some of the long-term unemployed about how hard it is to even get a call back. Even if you avoid that, one of the questions you're going to get is "What have you been doing since you were at XYZ?" and you'd best have an answer.
    • YZF 12y ago
      Q: What have you been doing since you were at XYZ? A: I took a year off. I don't think it's really that bad. People do that. It's not like you're going to be looking for a job on Mars, when you come back you'll call your friends (who by then have found jobs or started new companies) and through them you will find plenty of opportunity. Those places where you're a cog - you probably don't want to work there anyways. We need to rewire these workplaces. If they want cogs don't work there and let them know why.
  • nilkn 12y ago
    For most people, it's extremely risky to treat a severance package as a vacation. You should typically start looking for your next job immediately and with considerable haste and seriousness. A gap of unemployment on your resume, for any reason, is going to hurt 90% of job seekers.
• mimog 12y ago
  34 years old and has been at Microsoft for 15 years? That seems a little strange
  • vyrotek 12y ago
    I know a guy on the Entity Framework team who started working for Microsoft at the age of 19. He already had his BS in CS as well. I went to school with him. I don't know what this guy's situation was but I imagine there many young & smart individuals at MS.
• throwaway12312 12y ago
  Ageism is overblown to the point of being a myth. I'm 34 as well, my resume is not really that impressive, and yet I've had interviews with Google, Samsung and Amazon (+ some name-brand statups) in the past 6 months. Sure, I didn't land any of them, but I wasn't far off. If you're getting interviews, they want to hire you.
  • throwaway12312 12y ago
    Caveat: Ageism is probably a real thing in small startups, to their own detriment. "Let's hire 23-year-old Stanley who can't program for shit because he's got a strong hairline and wears a hoodie and Converse! Fuck that old guy with 10 years of direct experience!"
• nilkn 12y ago
  Getting laid off after 15 years at a large tech company is a very scary notion. For aspiring developers, here are some encouraging thoughts: Pay is currently sufficiently high that you could, with a sufficiently frugal lifestyle and prudent investment habits, go from zero to millionaire in that time period. Being a millionaire isn't what it used to be, but that would provide one hell of a buffer should you find yourself laid off after 15 years. Think of it like this. If your total compensation over that period averages $150k, that's about $7.7k/month net in CA, $8.8k in WA. If you can invest $4k of that per month at a conservative 4% annual return, you'll have $1M in 15 years; about $1.2M if your return is 6%; and about $1.4M if your return is 8%. This is all assuming that you have don't marry a spouse during that period who is also earning an income and helping boost those savings. This is just a back of the envelope calculation, but my main point is that if you're dedicated to the task and you work hard, you can create for yourself a very strong safety buffer over the course of a 15 year career in the technology industry. $1M is almost enough to retire off of if you were to move to a rural area of the country and continued to live frugally--health insurance would be your most costly concern.
  • tdicola 12y ago
    Housing costs don't really make it practical in WA to put away $4k/month when you're pulling in $6-7k/month after taxes. A mortgage on any decent-ish place is going to be around $2500-$3500+ a month. If you just bought a place recently your savings were probably tapped out out to come up with the $100k+ down payment. It's definitely possible to save a lot of money, but $1 million in the bank is pretty tough IMHO.
    • nilkn 12y ago
      I said "sufficiently frugal" for a reason. You can't do this if you want to buy the big house in the big city and a fancy car right off the bat. The way you do this is fairly simple: don't buy the house. Rent an apartment (not a luxury one), possibly even share it with a roommate. I recognize that not everybody will be willing to do this. But owning a home in a major city is a luxury these days IMHO. Besides, this is assuming you're doing this all on your own -- no income from a spouse. Why do you need a house by yourself? (By the way, the income figure I cited was $8.8k/month in WA after taxes, not $6-7k.)
• 2J 12y ago
  He says that he will try to be a youtuber full-time now, but I don't think that it will last very long. He was definitely earning a lot more while he was working in Microsoft, and working on videos full-time while he only has <150k subscribers seems a bit low, especially considering his son's situation. He obviously has plans to make his channel grow and has to be earning a fair amount to make this decision, but I think that it would've been a better choice to just keep youtube as a hobby and apply for a different job in a company or become part of a start-up. This particular guy's future aside, I wonder what exactly Microsoft's "future picture" is that they chose to lay off what seems like a large number of talented people. How will the company function without the people in key roles? I wonder how they will relocate the remaining manpower so that they will continue to be successful.