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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#171

Post by dragontamer »

adam_arthur wrote: post #165
dragontamer wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm talking about the $100+ Million advertisers, not small ones like you.

Disney is most interested in making sure that Mickey Mouse / Winnie the Pooh / Zootopia is not accidentally shown next to furry porn. Southwest doesn't want its ads shown next to airplane disasters. Kellogs doesn't want "Itsssss GREAT" being shown next to the Ukrainian War.

As I said before: you can't predict the "X is being shown next to Y, please stop that" problem. Its impossible to predict X, its impossible to predict Y. You just gotta have email lines with these big companies and promptly issue your programmers / machine learning / data scientists the new algorithms to keep advertisers happy.

-------

Twitter is 100% the grounds where furry porn, Airplane Disasters, and Ukrainian War disasters are constantly being discussed and shared. Advertisers want protection of their brand, despite the online discourse.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#172

Post by twblalock »

mgkimsal wrote: post #34

11,000 people - let's say an average loaded cost of $250k/yr. That's... ~$3b/yr these folks cost MSFT. Granted, it's per year, but ... keeping these people on for another 3 years would cost ~$10b. MSFT currently have $100b cash on hand. It's gotta be a little... frustrating to get be part of a 5% cut when there's so much free cash sitting around. I know, it's a narrow view of corporate finance, and I don't have the '…

Companies that think that way wouldn’t get to the point of having that kind of cash.

Furthermore, efficiency only increases in importance as companies grow.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#173

Post by paxys »

jimbok wrote: post #80

Just last week MSFT nixed the accrual PTO benefit employees enjoyed and opted for the rouse of 'unlimited' PTO. Effectively, ending a liability/cash outlay they would pay when folks quit, or get fired. I hope those who were affected today receive severance that makes up for them losing this benefit. -James

All accrued vacation balance got paid out when Microsoft made the switch.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#174

Post by [deleted] »

shagie wrote: post #87
ethbr0 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically (not sure if still true), Microsoft had top tier profit:employee.

They're likely still up there. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Microsoft+vs+Apple+vs+G... They're not the best best, but $919k/employee/year is impressive. Google is at $1.5M/employee. Apple is $2.4M/employee and Netflix is $2.7M/employee. (and to the dead comment reply claiming $10M/employee for Musk companies) Tesla: $158,613 https://csimarket.com/stocks/TSLA-Income-per-Employee.html SpaceX: $210,526 https://w…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#175

Post by opportune »

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!".

For one, in many many companies layoffs start in HR/hiring themselves. If MS needed to hire a ton of people in 2020-2022 it’s not at all a sign of incompetence if they hired a lot of recruiters/other HR folks in that time to handle it, and then spin it down when they aren’t as busy hiring.

The same goes for marketing. If you are going to reduce your marketing spend you don’t need as many FTEs to work on it.

For engineering, MS is a lot more old school than some other tech companies. Internal transfers basically require re-interviewing, and a lot of people don’t have many transferable skills. MS could be better off (and employees even better off) if they directly laid off e.g. engineers working on Windows LTS rather than trying to find them roles in Bing.

Not saying layoffs are ever good, and the details of this one remain to be seen, but I don’t think a 5% layoff signals incompetence

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#176

Post by occamsrazorwit »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #85
estebank wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product In both technical and product axes Twitter has already deteriorated massively, possibly beyond repair and the company might not make it to 2024, so I wouldn't call that "negligible".

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.

Users have been reporting issues with missing reply notifications and missing replies for a while. It's not obvious if you're not paying close attention, so I think most people won't really notice. Try counting the number of replies versus the number of replies shown. It doesn't appear to be a spam-filter issue either as those replies are benign and still exist if you navigate to them via a profile.

Here's an example I just pulled up that's the second thread on my feed: https://twitter.com/LordCarsonEsq/status/1615134592222257155

There are six replies here. If you refresh enough, you can see a different subset of two replies, so that's probably not a spam-filter.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#177

Post by yalogin »

dragontamer wrote: post #73
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #25

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…

> 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…

Advertising revenue fell because of Elon's new "extreme right wing beyond conspiracy theories" stance. It is not because of the sales staff not responding to emails.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#178

Post by jstummbillig »

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.

> at the end of the day sorry to say devs tend to go where the pay is highest irrespective of PR.

I have to assume that, in the same way that glass palace FANG offices and around the clock full-service employee pampering are doing something for (potential) employees, the idea of large scale firings will move the needle in the opposite direction. Clearly, it's not only about who pays most.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#179

Post by pwinnski »

adam_arthur wrote: post #148
objclxt wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. I don't know if deliberately breaking their developer API for third party clients counts as "shipping features faster than ever".

They obviously did that because the API is not benefiting them at all from a revenue perspective. If it were, they wouldn't have gotten rid of it. Twitter was run as a charity prior to the acquisition. Just as many VC fat tech companies were

This is "obviously" based on... no communication whatsoever from the company yet.

Another comment of yours says "quite obvious" about advertising, which doesn't seem to be an industry segment in which you work.

It seems your observations are right in line with Twitter's new owner, to whom everything that's happened over the last few months has also been "obvious," and mostly wrong.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#180

Post by paxys »

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?

There's very little incentive for managers to cut bad hires. It is a tedious process (involving HR, PIPs, lots of paperwork), and firing people always looks bad. Most will just choose to let them hang around and give them unimportant tasks.

Plus, when upper management mandates that you have to fire 10% of your org, well now you have all these people you can put on the list with zero impact to the product.

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