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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
321–330 of 481 posts
Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, it means that they didn't forsee the economy going down to the extent it has. Corporate finances work like any large investment company. How much cash do you have on hand, how much is it earning per year, what is your revenue. If you suddenly are getting 10% less from investments and possibly less from revenue due to a severe economic downturn, then you need to save 10% in costs somewhere, and for tech companies…
There's no recession, though. There may be one this year, but it didn't exist before all of these layoffs. It may not be a conspiracy, but it seems questionable to believe these companies are not willing a recession into existence through, charitably, pessimism.
The US economy shrank in the first 2 quarters of 2022, and is already forecast to shrink in the first 3 quarters of 2023. Whether it’s in recession or not is a technical issue for economists, but the reality for many companies is that they face a lot of challenges at the moment.
In tech particularly there was a boom as businesses moved online during the pandemic that’s shrivelled away with increasing interest rates and inflation.
Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Look at who elon has banned and who has has chosen to unban or not ban. It's pretty simple math.
Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
#324I'm wondering what data really drives the back-and-forth at big tech. We've seen google, amazon, microsoft, meta, etc.. do hiring freezes, then layoffs. Hiring freeze, then back open, or layoffs then more layoffs later. I would expect a longer term plan than just looking forward or backwards one quarter which seems like what has been happening the last year. I would assume they had better information and insights tha…
Well if you’re not hiring, your competitor is picking up the talent Plus the more people that you have, the faster you can get competitive products out to market Could be a damned if you do, dammed if you don’t situation
> Plus the more people that you have, the faster you can get competitive products out to market
This is not always true. Do you have citation to back this up?
Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they spend any amount much less $3b or $10b to keep people they don’t need/want?
> Why would they spend any amount much less $3b or $10b to keep people they don’t need/want? I understand that HN is a US-centric forum, where neoliberalism dictates the baseline and the interpretation of all things in life is reduced to a simplistic transaction in a theoretical free market. However, society is comprised of people with family and a personal life and hopes and dreams and aspirations. Hiring someone ha…
Dont know why this got downvoted. HN to toilet.
Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically (not sure if still true), Microsoft had top tier profit:employee.
They're likely still up there. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Microsoft+vs+Apple+vs+G... They're not the best best, but $919k/employee/year is impressive. Google is at $1.5M/employee. Apple is $2.4M/employee and Netflix is $2.7M/employee. (and to the dead comment reply claiming $10M/employee for Musk companies) Tesla: $158,613 https://csimarket.com/stocks/TSLA-Income-per-Employee.html SpaceX: $210,526 https://w…
Looks like for the tech companies this is revenue per employee, and not profit per employee right?
Then for Tesla, it would be $754K in an apples-to-apples comparison. I can't find any info for SpaceX though.
Meta is at $1.64M per employee btw, roughly similar to Google. Didn't realize Apple and Netflix ratios were so much higher.
Source for Tesla and Meta: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Microsoft+vs+meta+vs+te...
Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
#327This isn't a moral justification, but isn't laying off workers when other companies have layoffs a simple supply and demand response? That is, the demand curve is the same for these workers but the supply curve shifts to the right and prices for the same job drops. They're betting that the people hired in a recession will perform better per dollar than the people let go.
A layoff of ~5%, especially if it is the first one in a while, is usually (at large corporations) just a way to get rid of (perceived to be) non-performing staff without having to do as much paperwork as actually firing someone. This isn't to say they are correct about those 5% not performing, and even if they are it may not have been that person's fault, but the real motivation for a layoff of this type (first one i…
You’d wish, but in my experience individual performance is only a small factor in layoffs. In one layoff I survived, our GM (with 1000+ people) was told who was being let go a day before the event. That involved 100+ people. People with above average performance ratings were let go, some with below average ratings stayed. As best we can tell, HR went with laying off senior/expensive employees based on the lack of certain technologies on their internal resume. Of course, your best employees don’t update their their internal resume much, because they are busy with all the work being thrown at them. It was chaos.
I’ve also seen companies do layoffs by cutting entire teams. Top performer on a misaligned team? You are also laid off.
Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
#328So one 1 out of 20 are getting let go. Looking around near 50 employee company I work for I easily see 2.5 employees I would let go just because they're near useless. Hell, I'd say it's at least 5. I'd say unless you've got a good manager, really good hiring, and are keeping close tabs on the technical people (just to make clear, I'm one of them those technical people) I figure you've at least got 1 our of 20 you sho…
Eventually you'll run out of bad ones to sack and then the that's when the good ones leave because they don't want to play the ladder game.
You're left with middling who might have a hard time finding other jobs but could play the ladder game well enough - potentially with devastating consequence for health of the technical stack as more "features" get developed.
Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
#329Earlier 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
Not willingly:
Twitter to Devs: Don't Make Twitter Clients... Or Else [2011]
https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-api-clients
Twitter's API Update Cuts Off Oxygen to Third-Party Clients [2012]
https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-api-big-changes
(how could Elon do this!?)
Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
#330Earlier 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!".
You're thinking at a corporate efficiency level, which is why shareholders want layoffs.
To an individual manager, their pay is generally proportional to the number of reports, so the incentives are for them to hire.