Microsoft to lay off 11k employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#291

Post by PragmaticPulp » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #277

pyrrhotech wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Generally layoffs include management cuts as well.

There are far more employees than executives, though. Think about how many employees are in the org chart under a single VP.

Numerically you can’t get appreciable cost reductions by reducing management alone.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#292

Post by mythhouse » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #277

pyrrhotech wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

prbobaly not a whole from the layoffs i've seen at 2 of my employers.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#293

Post by throwaway4aday » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

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!".

There's nothing indicating that they hired 11,000 people they didn't need. Many of the people being cut have probably been there for a while but may no longer be needed. The article mentions HR staff being laid off which makes sense since the hiring boom in tech has vanished. I don't think you can draw any conclusions about bad management or mistakes from this, the economy and the tech sector are in a slump with practically every large employer trimming fat. This is just business as usual.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#294

Post by tyingq » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

skizm wrote: post #269

Just some initial Googling shows they had roughly 144K employees in 2019 and ~221K in 2022. If you take out 11k, they still added 66K jobs in 3 years. I'd be curious to know the breakdown of the kinds of jobs they added vs the ones they're now eliminating. The article says this cut affects mostly HR and engineering, but doesn't give exact numbers, and it is hard to tell the breakdown for jobs added (unless someone sm…

I would guess there's some correlation to a boom in O365 because of the pandemic. Companies that only gave licenses to some employees expanding it to all employees to handle remote work, company-wide events, etc. And now a plateau in that reached sooner than MS expected.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#295

Post by gradstudent » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:42 PM UTC

ttt333 wrote: post #268

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.

Could you clarify what you mean about the dollar in your pocket worth more than debt at 3% interest? In corporate finance net cash or net debt is indeed standard practice (cash on balance sheet less debt on balance sheet). It sort of helps understand how much cash is ‘available’ to give back to investors, or pay down debt, spend on R&D, etc. Now since most of MSFT’s long term debt matures in 2027 or after, you could…

> In corporate finance net cash or net debt is indeed standard practice (cash on balance sheet less debt on balance sheet). It sort of helps understand how much cash is ‘available’ to give back to investors, or pay down debt, spend on R&D, etc.

I'm not a financier, but isn't "available cash" the amount left over after subtracting the amount needed to service (rather than clear) the debt?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#296

Post by pavlov » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:43 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #214

pavlov wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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?

Is it not obvious? Are you suggesting that Twitter is not going to have developers work on ad tools any longer? Are you suggesting that sales and customer relations for advertisers are just no longer going to be jobs that anyone does and Twitter is going to just hope and pray they get ad money? Yes lots of reorganization happens, lots of jobs were lost, but, duh, the work is still going to be done, even if there is a…

And when do you think that’s going to happen? The new owner seems fundamentally uninterested in selling ads or hiring anyone who knows how that world works. Instead he’s hoping to turn it into a subscription service that also gets a cut of user-to-user payments made on the platform.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#297

Post by Closi » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:44 PM UTC

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.

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

It's always hard to distinguish signal vs noise in stocks, but it has gone up 0.5% in 24 hours, which is a $8bn raise on the market cap.

Cutting $3bn in wages is never going to radically change the market cap of a $1.7T company (you hope!).

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#298

Post by dugmartin » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:44 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #212

tikhonj wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of this if you can justify them by economic conditions. I've heard people say this, but it seems contrary to how layoffs are run in practice: • entire teams or divisions are often laid off with no eye towards individual employees' tenure, experience or skills •…

I've never seen a cold and calculated layoff. It's always been exasperated irrational arm-waving risk mitigation. The "good" people aren't kept - instead it's the ones that can navigate the political waters. For every one competent executive there seems to be 3 deluded narcissistic idiots who will slash and burn people who are overqualified and under-utilized for the positions they've been incompetently assigned. Now…

Good advice. It reads like the start of a modern corporate version of "The Prince".

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#299

Post by mythhouse » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:44 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #212

tikhonj wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of this if you can justify them by economic conditions. I've heard people say this, but it seems contrary to how layoffs are run in practice: • entire teams or divisions are often laid off with no eye towards individual employees' tenure, experience or skills •…

I've never seen a cold and calculated layoff. It's always been exasperated irrational arm-waving risk mitigation. The "good" people aren't kept - instead it's the ones that can navigate the political waters. For every one competent executive there seems to be 3 deluded narcissistic idiots who will slash and burn people who are overqualified and under-utilized for the positions they've been incompetently assigned. Now…

you should write a substack or a podcast. Lots of ppl are oblivious to this stuff.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#300

Post by cmorgan31 » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

adam_arthur wrote: post #273

cmorgan31 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah you don’t value the outputs the same so you want to allow appeals to authority as long as it’s shown profitable outcomes. I’m on the same page now.