4 ms·
Microsoft lays off 2,100, axes Silicon Valley research
- nostromo 12y agoThe logic of spreading out layoffs over the corse of an entire year escapes me. Particularly when it's the first year of a new CEO. What are they thinking?
- ArkyBeagle 12y agoI have to wonder if they're not trying to speed up the rate of voluntary exits.
- jedanbik 12y agoDefinitely. If you quit, you don't get unemployment insurance benefits. Microsoft is trading morale for money.
- ThomPete 12y agoOr they give people a chance to find something else.
- judk 12y agoThat doesn't make sense. People would either get new jobs or coast till layoff. No one preemptively quits to do nothing because they fear a layoff.
- jedanbik 12y agoIt would make sense to do it this way if these voluntary exits are a thing. Are they? Are they not? I'd love to learn more about this type of situation.
- ArkyBeagle 12y agoI would not think people would simply quit. They'd basically start to look for a job to beat the effect of all those other people being in the water. Of course this is no great secret so it might already be as if those people were in the water.
- funkyy 12y agoI have been to one of the campuses few times (working as a contractor with newly transfered employees) - they said themselves - Microsoft was like communist country: -extraordinary social -very low performance targets -completely guaranteed work -overspending on servicing employees (renting them cars, providing accommodations, even giving out quick loans to those that needed) This was hurting the market, finally seems to be over. I wonder how much of the workforce was employed in Nokia directly though.
- jmspring 12y agoCurious. I've not heard of this. Skype/Yammer kept some of their pre-acquisition perks -- food, snacks, services (that you have to pay for) on-site. This? Nope.
- xnull 12y agoIt's weird. We have this notion in America that corporations are (or are supposed to be) efficient. They're not. Markets are if you grant a series of tenuous assumptions. Markets are the fair efficient competition between unfair and inefficient firms.
- enraged_camel 12y agoYeah, if anything, corporations are islands of communism where resources are distributed by central planners (i.e. executive management). And it has been proven over and over that central planning is a horribly inefficient way to distribute resources.
- jacques_chester 12y agoMarkets involve search costs, planning involves calculation costs. Sometimes one exceeds the other, so one form of allocation emerges over the other: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
- WildUtah 12y ago
- acomjean 12y agoWhen I was at IBM research last century, we thought MS research was doing awesome things, but unable to get products out. There appeared to be some fear that MS would start producing stuff from their research. (MS and IBM were competing in the Notes vs Outlook arena) I hope the New England R&D (NERD) which has been very generous with allowing software groups to use their space to meet continues to do so. Short sited and a sad day.
- swartkrans 12y agoWhen I read about the immense amount of money that has reportedly gone into research at companies like Microsoft, billions of dollars, and seen very little ever come of it, I can't help but think maybe they would have been better of just making it a venture capital fund. I don't think R&D departments have the incentive entrepreneurs have in actually making research useful. Google X stands out as different, and I think that's because Google seems to be using it for marketing as much as research. We've yet to see any game changers come out of there, unless you think Google Glass was a success. The self-driving automobiles are interesting and will probably lead to something, and the air drones too. It's probably not all a wash.
- reboog711 12y agoThe conspiracy theory I heard is that MS is playing a long game to go private. Whenever their stock starts to go up; they pump a lot into R&D which makes them less attractive to investors stabilizing or lowering their stock price while not devaluing the company. I don't know enough about stock manipulating to evaluate these statements, but I found them interesting when first told to me.
- tiffanyh 12y agoThe dollar figures for "R&D" are really deceiving. Don't forget the "D" stand for development. For a company the size of Microsoft, who has 130k employees, it's not unrealistic to imagine 40k employees are developers and/or product management. At an average fully loaded cost of $150k per developer x 40k developers = $6 Billion. So all the cost to just maintain their EXISTING product set, in this illustration, might be $6B ... none of which is "research"
- mikeryan 12y ago(this thread is a dupe) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336954
- aaronbrethorst 12y agoThat thread is also a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336033, but it really doesn't matter in the end.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoBeing optimistic, this will presumably generate loads of new companies.
- bkjelden 12y agoIt seems that satellite campuses are particularly hard hit with this round. I wonder if there is a desire at the top to move more things back to redmond.
- chetanahuja 12y agoIt's a real shock in this day and age of intense competition for talent to let go of such a large number of talented (they must be, to be there in the first place) engineers (or is it scientists) in the heart of silicon valley. To me that's a sign of a company that doesn't see a way to grow new products via creative efforts of it's employees. Oh well, I guess it's good news for the startups who could much better use the that same talent. (Edit - to remove what might have sounded like a recruiting pitch)
- bunkydoo 12y agoHow else do you think they got the cash to buy Minecraft?