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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#271

Post by quickthrowman »

dcolkitt wrote: post #246
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wanted 11,000 extra heads when the market was rewarding growth. Now that the market is rewarding bottom lines - they don't want 11,000 extra heads anymore. It's easy to "blame the Fed" for the market rewarding the bottom line. But we forget that the reason the market was so crazily rewarding growth 2 years ago was also... because of the Fed.

MSFT stock is barely moved on the announcement. Doesn't necessarily seem like the market is rewarding them.

If the stock isn’t moving, perhaps the news is already priced in.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#272

Post by dcolkitt »

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 '…

Also pretty disconcerting that they're doing this at the same time that they're pumping billions into OpenAI (a company with near zero revenue) at a $30 billion valuation.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#273

Post by adam_arthur »

cmorgan31 wrote: post #255
adam_arthur wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You just used an appeal to Elons other companies while telling others to not use credentialism?

Actions that drives results aren’t credentials, they’re evidence.

Saying you have a degree in this or that, or title X/Y without having any results to show for it is credentialism. Unfortunately far too pervasive in our industry.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#275

Post by randomdata »

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…

There was also the situation where companies were hiring simply so that the competition couldn't. Now that the competition isn't hiring, you can free the people you were hoarding.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#276

Post by belval »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #242
hirsin wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fantastic debt though, at presumably low interest rates. A dollar in my pocket today is worth way more than a dollar in debt at 3.0% interest or less. You can't subtract debt from cash on hand and get a usable value, they're different types.

[flagged]

Not really, it's financing 101. If the cost of borrowing money is low then it's worth taking on debt to finance your growth. Once the rates rise you can service that debt (likely at ~1.5%) and reap the rewards on extend yourself with those low interest rates.

You don't even need to be an MBA so see that value, even your dentist probably does it. If they can borrow 150k and increase the size of their clinic, they can then get more money from providing their services to more people.

If you comment was more aimed at the amount, $77B, then keep in mind that it's far from a bad ratio considering the assets of MSFT at 107B that's 0.7 which is high but not abnormally high considering that we are coming out of historically low rates.

Finally, there is such a thing as carrying too little debt, which is unsurprisingly a bad thing because it hinders your growth. Think about what MSFT did with that money. They hired people and developed new products to fight AWS and GCP if they hadn't done that, their rate of innovation would be lower and they would have fallen behind, slowing their future growth. Without cheap debt they likely wouldn't have given a ton of compute to OpenAI for ChatGPT which is now making MSFT look much better compared to Google and Amazon.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#277

Post by bmitc »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #68
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 '…

It's silly to mention the cash on the balance sheet without also mentioning the debt of $77B. In reality, the net cash position is on the order of magnitude of $30B which puts a much tighter perspective on the impact of this cut. 40% of all public companies created since market inception in 1871 have gone bankrupt including many of the bluest of the blue chips. Complacent thinking like this is often the reason. Addit…

A lot of the bloat is at the top. How many executives, VPs, directors, high level managers, etc. are part of this?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#278

Post by Amezarak »

occamsrazorwit wrote: post #176
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.

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’ve had this problem with Twitter since I signed up years ago.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#279

Post by adam_arthur »

_zzaw wrote: post #251
adam_arthur wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The level of nastiness in your comments here makes it very hard to take you seriously as an "objective" observer. Considering that you're using your HN profile to attract clients—"Hire me for your development needs!"—you might want to tone that down. I wouldn't want to work with anyone who thought it was appropriate to behave that way. (And I'll say your rosy impression of Twitter seems a little strange for a suppose…

Nothing nasty about my comment, its a factual response to the parent comment.

Fortunately I couldn’t care less if somebody decides not to work with me because they disagree with my opinions. People who care about results will get ahead, those that don’t won’t

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#280

Post by Kranar »

mgkimsal wrote: post #97
KallDrexx wrote: post #88

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 had seen someplace else that there's... $107b as of last quarter, but it was down 17% from year before same quarter, so yeah, it's draining some. But are they really putting $70b down in cash for Activision?

> But are they really putting $70b down in cash for Activision?

Yes it's all cash.

https://news.microsoft.com/2022/01/18/microsoft-to-acquire-a...

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