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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#21

Post by aliljet »

This is a curious decision. Microsoft shows a ~73 billion dollar net income [0] and it's probably reasonable to assume their shareholders are enjoying a robust, growing business. I wonder what they believe this reduction in staff is meant to provide? Will this really and meaningfully move their bottom line or will it better tighten the performance characteristics of the staff?

[0] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/789019/00015...

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#24

Post by anonporridge »

Xeoncross wrote: post #4

I'm wondering what data really drives the back-and-forth at big tech. We've seen google, amazon, microsoft, meta, etc.. do hiring freezes, then layoffs. Hiring freeze, then back open, or layoffs then more layoffs later. I would expect a longer term plan than just looking forward or backwards one quarter which seems like what has been happening the last year. I would assume they had better information and insights tha…

Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of this if you can justify them by economic conditions.

There's also an effect of wanting to do smaller, pulsating layoffs over the course of many months or even years rather than one massive layoff of the size you actually need, because ultimately no one knows exactly how the machine of a corporation works, and you have to be careful not to cut so deep that you go beyond cutting out fat and start to damage critical systems.

A rapid, 90% loss of workforce like what happened at Twitter might be what the company ultimately needed, but cutting that fast and deep is an insanely risky operation that could lead to a company hobbling along in a compensatory state until it finally falls to decompensatory systems collapse that you can't recover from.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#25

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

It's hard not to read some of these stories and not think that somehow some of these companies are free-riding on the ability to do some firings with minimal pushback because of the "well, look at what everyone else is doing!" climate that exists now. I'm having a hard time teasing out how much of this is driven by some sort of fundamental analysis of the economy, some collective BigCo CEO shared thinking, or, at my most cynical, an Overton window that's been pushed outwards by Elon firing an extremely significant quantity of the (comparably tiny) workforce of Twitter with seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#26

Post by squokko »

googlryas wrote: post #12

How do layoffs like this happen? Every team cuts 5%? Wholesale elimination of teams?

Both. Teams that haven't gotten exec buy-in just get axed (with lots of good people) and then every Director is required to sacrifice a few people (in this section, most of the people laid off are low performers, but definitely some good performers who have made the wrong enemies or haven't made the right friends).

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#28

Post by spydum »

reverius42 wrote: post #17
squokko wrote: post #7

Every Big Tech collects bad hires and these are the best times to get rid of them.

Why isn't "as soon as you know they are a bad hire" the best time to get rid of them?

people like to keep the bad hires around for when the CFO comes and says you need a haircut. it's kind of gross how many of these big corps work

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#29

Post by qbasic_forever »

hardware2win wrote: post #5

How to interpret this? MSFT felt like stablest FAANG

They make a lot of money selling services to companies that are on shakey ground or pulling back their finances and spending. This means that instability eventually bubbles up to Microsoft and other companies depending on their customers to keep spending and buying services.
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