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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#181

Post by pavlov »

colechristensen wrote: post #133
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…

> So advertisers know that there's no hope for these issues to be fixed anymore, and are now leaving the platform. Having worked in adtech for a while the more likely scenario is that lots of companies have turned off their ad spend. That isn’t “leaving”, ad spend is volatile coming and going with many motivations is not uncommon. Pausing your campaigns because the ad publisher is a bit broken isn’t permanent. And wh…

> “Probably some advertiser tools were broken and the people who’d been talking to those advertisers had been fired, but those are all temporary.”

How is that temporary if — as it appears — the new management has fired the engineering teams which developed the ad tools, and also has no intentions of hiring more people to replace those ad sales teams?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#182

Post by opportune »

arwineap wrote: post #109
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

My understanding is that the way they converted to unlimited PTO was by paying out people's vacation time with a one time payout. In which case, they didn't lose benefit at all

They lost it going forward, and also lost any kind of arbitrage when paired with salary increases. Eg my accrued vacation is “worth” 10% more after a 10% salary bump than before it.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#183

Post by heywhatupboys »

yalogin wrote: post #177
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…

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.

> Elon's new "extreme right wing beyond conspiracy theories" stance

wow that sounds insane? I wish you would have had a source attached to this (an actual source btw, not some online journalist writing an opinion piece)

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#184

Post by bushbaba »

yalogin wrote: post #177
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…

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.

Doubtful. Especially when large clients of twitter have publicly stated the reason for their reduced ad budget is lack of support and bad, for brand, content next to their ads.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#185

Post by [deleted] »

yalogin wrote: post #177
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#186

Post by opportune »

aliljet wrote: post #21

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…

If you have 10k in your checking account and are saving an extra 10k per year, would you not cancel a $200/mo gym membership you don’t need?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#187

Post by chiefalchemist »

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…

In the current climate, layoffs are good for the share price and therefore the shareholders.

Sure leadership and deviation from the norm would be refreshing (and smart), but that's that the era we're in.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#188

Post by rewtraw »

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…

Anecdotally, over the past few weeks the quality of ads I see on Twitter has deteriorated sharply. I used to primarily get ads from well known brands, but now I'm seeing ads for random products like rat traps.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#189

Post by Arnavion »

arwineap wrote: post #109
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

My understanding is that the way they converted to unlimited PTO was by paying out people's vacation time with a one time payout. In which case, they didn't lose benefit at all

The payout will be in the April paycheck, but hopefully the layoffs will get it at layoff time.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#190

Post by hbn »

Apocryphon wrote: post #156
hbn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've continued to use twitter daily since the Elon takeover. If I wasn't in the loop about that I wouldn't have noticed anything. I think early on I heard there was a 2FA outage? That was resolved fairly quickly. The only issue is dumb changes, like the "no linking to other platforms" rule that was announced and then rolled back within the day, or adding view counts that add no value. But none of that is technical is…

Getting rid of their API so third party Twitter clients break was pretty big.

Copy-pasting my last comment on this:

> 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 don't think that was technical ineptitude, but rather a cost-saving decision from the business.

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