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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#191

Post by 0x5345414e »

flashgordon wrote: post #90
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 '…

You are also forgetting these people arent sitting on their asses! On average they are at least making the company that much in revenue no? Being unable to deploy them to good use is truly a leadership incompetence!

In aggregate, employees make a company money. That much is trivially true. At the individual level, one can be a net gain, net loss, or breakeven. I often wonder how skewed this distribution is at some companies. Ideally you trim the ones that are a net loss and thus on average aren't making the company money. Whether or not it's obvious who those people are isn't known to me. Anyway, I don't think it's a good assumption that the people being laid off are making the company money on average.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#192

Post by kfarr »

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…

For me it's the crypto bots. Out of control. Stopped looking at notifications for a while because it was always randos pumping air drops and nfts

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#193

Post by ReflectedImage »

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

The API benefitted power users primarily who are responsible for keeping their large number of followers on Twitter.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#194

Post by mgkimsal »

deltree7 wrote: post #151
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 '…

I hope you keep your Uber drivers, Landscapers and Cleaning Ladies on retainers because you have so much cash in your brokerage/bank account

I don't uber/lyft, and I don't have cleaning staff. I do keep the lawn company coming, without too much respect to the amount of savings I have. There was a time when I didn't, but... if keeping these extra services amounts to less than a single percent of my cash on hand, I'll likely keep them going.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#196

Post by adam_arthur »

pwinnski wrote: post #179
adam_arthur wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, Elon who made Tesla and SpaceX some of the largest companies in the world in just a few years, and likely many more over the next two decades is a totally incompetent buffoon.

I’d rather take his side than the small minded and intellectually weak detractors.

Just because things tend to be a certain way, doesn’t make it optimal or right. Evidence, all of history where bad practices were pervasive and common and later usurped by better practices.

Maybe use forethought and critical thinking rather than credentialism and groupthink

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#197

Post by fullshark »

matusp wrote: post #64
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".

In what regards has it deteriorated so much?

Advertising revenue

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#199

Post by voisin »

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…

> 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!"

In finance circles it is referred to as “taking a big bath”. When everyone is doing it, you write off past goodwill from bad acquisitions, lay off redundant employees, etc, all to emerge clean on the other side. Having used the cover of everyone doing it, you aren’t punished.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#200

Post by ctoth »

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…

> there's no reason why Southwest's advertisements should be shown in a negative light..

So basically there's been a team suppressing any really bad news about any company who advertises on Twitter? Am I reading that right? And you want them back?

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