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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#161

Post by 1123581321 »

tensor wrote: post #155
jstummbillig wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I took from it – and I think they might be on to something – is that it's opportunistic firing. Firing people at this scale would have been pretty expensive just a few month back, PR wise. Right now, a lot less so. So you might be tempted to think of the current climate as a good opportunity to shed some fat, to the point where you go into it with the idea of hiring back right away and being able to do so at bet…

PR wise to who though? I don't think any of Microsoft's customers actually care. For developer hiring yeah it will hurt their PR, but at the end of the day sorry to say devs tend to go where the pay is highest irrespective of PR.

Even if retail doesn't care, the news would matter to large customers, job candidates, existing employees, and investors. Acquisition targets as well.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#162

Post by bg24 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #140
adam_arthur wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.

> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs Desperation from the remaining devs? I mean, I can crank out crap as fast as anyone wants me to if it doesn't have to work right.

Another approach to look at this:

- They are experimenting more aggressively. - Depends on what features you build and time that it take to build those. - How much can you afford to delay the tech debt.

When the CEO is focused on rolling out features faster, everyone rallies behind. Does it mean the company is operating great. End of 2023 will be a good indicator.

Also note that recent tooling around LLMs (eg. ChatGPT) will improve aggregate efficiency.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#163

Post by robertlagrant »

dragontamer wrote: post #110
adam_arthur wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.

But not the features that retain advertisers. Which were the silent issues that no one talked about before. And indeed, advertisers aren't talking about it now. They're just leaving the platform in droves. There's no one _to_ talk about it with. Entire teams (including high ranking executives) that kept relationships with advertisers have been fired. Twitter doesn't even have anyone answering / categorizing the compl…

> Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y.

It would be interesting to have a UI that lets them say that they don't want to be next to X, or they do want to be next to Y, and they pay different prices to appear next to more/less popular things.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#164

Post by tensor »

bink wrote: post #53
qeternity wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they spend any amount much less $3b or $10b to keep people they don’t need/want?

Normally, hiring 11,000 people you "didn't need" would be a warning sign that management was incompetent and require much more than just laying off the unneeded workers. It would suggest that large reforms are needed in planning and hiring. But these days it's just dismissed as an "oops!".

Or, it means that they didn't forsee the economy going down to the extent it has. Corporate finances work like any large investment company. How much cash do you have on hand, how much is it earning per year, what is your revenue.

If you suddenly are getting 10% less from investments and possibly less from revenue due to a severe economic downturn, then you need to save 10% in costs somewhere, and for tech companies people are always the biggest cost.

There is no conspiracy here. You may wish that these large companies would have seen a recession coming, but that's not a very realistic wish.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#165

Post by adam_arthur »

dragontamer wrote: post #132
adam_arthur wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. Not because sales staff were laid off. It's quite obvious to anybody looking at the situation objectively. Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated. Too many developers have an inflated sense of self importance

> Not because sales staff were laid off. There's plenty of advertisers who have blogged about "My emails to Twitter stopped getting answered" around the time of the 75% layoffs. This is well documented. What do you want the advertisers to do? To just keep giving money to Twitter even when all their contacts have disappeared? There's some pretty basic behaviors that have nothing to do with politics here that Twitter i…

If I were an advertiser (and I have in the past), I would look at the metrics of engagement for my ads to assess their efficacy, not talk to a representative. Either you're happy with the revenue lift or you're not.

To say that ad sales has to be a manual, high touch channel is simply wrong. Perhaps you have staff on hand for large accounts, but why would e-commerce drop shipping headphone company #7 need to talk to a human?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#166

Post by artificialLimbs »

jwilber wrote: post #131
adam_arthur wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.

Twitter has been objectively worse since the layoffs. I get tons of sex-bot accounts liking my posts that never existed before, the app constantly refreshes itself, there’s a few second loading message every time I view my timeline that didn’t exist beforehand, and my timeline is much worse than before (instead of seeing mostly tech stuff in the area of my interest, 60% has become fluff akin to my instagram story rec…

Opposite experience here. I've had almost 0 porn spammers as opposed to at least weekly before.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#167

Post by mardifoufs »

bentcorner wrote: post #152
BitwiseFool wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me ignorant but Twitter seems no different from what it was a year ago. There has been way more media attention and pearl clutching since Elon's takeover, but that hasn't translated to noticeable a difference in terms of usability and product.

Twitter stopped working entirely for some 3rd party apps late last week. Dev communication looks extremely slim and the only comms has been a very vague tweet: "Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not working."

But how is that relevant? Pulling the rug under third party apps is probably a bad move from Twitter, but everything seems to indicate that it was intentional and not just a breakage/outage caused by a shortage of staff.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#169

Post by hbn »

bentcorner wrote: post #152
BitwiseFool wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me ignorant but Twitter seems no different from what it was a year ago. There has been way more media attention and pearl clutching since Elon's takeover, but that hasn't translated to noticeable a difference in terms of usability and product.

Twitter stopped working entirely for some 3rd party apps late last week. Dev communication looks extremely slim and the only comms has been a very vague tweet: "Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not working."

I'm pretty sure breaking 3rd party clients was intentional.

Twitter had tightened the reigns on them years ago because it just cost them money to keep them alive. It makes sense that would be first on the chopping block when they're looking for cost-saving measures, and I figured it was inevitable regardless of the Elon takeover.

I have a feeling it's coming for reddit too. That one I dread cause their official app is horrible.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#170

Post by pwinnski »

adam_arthur wrote: post #108
dragontamer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product. Twitter is said to have lost $2.5 Billion/year in advertiser money, largely because Twitter's sales teams have not been returning emails from worried Advertisers. That's a pretty huge impact on Twitter's #1 revenue stream (estimated to be $5 Billion in 2021). Twitter's core product is advertisements. Without sales staff to keep the advertisers, the…

Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.

So far every new feature has been a previously-developed canceled feature. Even Twitter Blue was an existing feature repurposed, and it took two tries to release.
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