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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

221–230 of 481 posts

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is table stakes for ad platforms. You still also need to be reactive to new events.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#222
post #9
post #3

"Engineers not affected! /s" Like I said before, no-one is safe. not even the FAAMNG companies.

Agreed. As an aside, these tech sector acronyms have gotten ridiculous.

The G should really be another A, and the F should be an M... pretty soon will be MANAMANA

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#223

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…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MSFT currently have $100b cash on hand. Fwiw, unless cash on hand already accounts for it (I don't think it does), then $70B of that is tied up in the Activision acquisition. Thus we really only have $30B cash on hand, which in a higher than previous interest rate environment is probably not great (though afaict Apple has $48B). Likewise, our cash on hand has been drastically dwindling the last few years, making th…

I really, really doubt that acquisition is 100% cash.

It is all cash.

> As announced on January 18, 2022, Microsoft plans to acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00 per share in an all-cash transaction.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230111005882/en/Act...

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#225
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t do it expecting love in return - we get a paycheck every two weeks

I get my paycheque for showing up. For dedicated work rather than mediocrity, I need extra.

so what seems to be the problem?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#226

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…

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.

Interesting. How do you see ads on Twitter?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#227

What sort of system exists for these monster layoffs that they can just (relatively) quickly patch the hole left by removing 11,000 people? I can't comprehend what that looks like logistically.

My understanding is that this is a ~5% decrease in employees? Pretty easy to imagine losing 1 person in your 20 person department. Really depends on the "who", which tends to get lost in headlines consisting of large numbers.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

If Elon is mismanaging Twitter your post would be a good example of the cognitive bias called the Halo effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

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