Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 481 posts

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#331

Post by samspenc »

lsh123 wrote: post #287
shagie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Numbers here are significantly different: https://moneytransfers.com/news/content/meta-platforms-profi...

So this looks like true profit-per-employee ratio, the OP is revenue-per-employee ratio. I would expect companies to rank differently based on how profitable they are vs how much total money they are making.

E.g. one big outlier is Amazon, huge revenue income from retail, but close to zero profits.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#332

Post by luckylion »

dragontamer wrote: post #171
adam_arthur wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were an advertiser (and I have in the past), I would look at the metrics of engagement for my ads to assess their efficacy, not talk to a representative. Either you're happy with the revenue lift or you're not. To say that ad sales has to be a manual, high touch channel is simply wrong. Perhaps you have staff on hand for large accounts, but why would e-commerce drop shipping headphone company #7 need to talk to…

I'm talking about the $100+ Million advertisers, not small ones like you. Disney is most interested in making sure that Mickey Mouse / Winnie the Pooh / Zootopia is not accidentally shown next to furry porn. Southwest doesn't want its ads shown next to airplane disasters. Kellogs doesn't want "Itsssss GREAT" being shown next to the Ukrainian War. As I said before: you can't predict the "X is being shown next to Y, pl…

Twitter didn't have a keyword list to exclude after being in the business for like 20 years? They needed ad buyers to manually contact them and then needed someone to add that with a developer?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#333

Post by pjmlp »

smeagull wrote: post #235
bink wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!".

A company that can't figure out what do with employees is just as much a warning sign. It's a bad signal that Microsoft can't think of any development worth doing.

As customer of their tooling I can think of lots of stuff, but yeah management apparently not.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#334

Post by adam_arthur »

cmorgan31 wrote: post #300
adam_arthur wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, somebody building multiple of the world’s largest companies is a much higher hurdle than getting a degree or mid level manager job title.

By your logic we can’t consider any accomplishments from somebody’s past as a reliable indicator of their future results.

Which is obviously not true. “Credentialism” is giving far too much weight to low barrier to entry and easy to accomplish titles.

Ignoring past results, the fact that Twitter is functioning fine after 80% layoffs has already validated the decision to downsize. No need to look to the past.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#335

Post by Kon-Peki »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #224
KptMarchewa wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

In this context, "all-cash transaction" means that the Activision shareholders get cash for their shares and not some combination of cash and MSFT shares.

Where and how MS got that cash is not being addressed.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#339

Post by bmitc »

mikeg8 wrote: post #285
bmitc wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bloat can be all over the place, it’s not exclusive to the top of org charts

Bloat at the top, whether people, process, or organizational bloat, has an amplification effect that isn’t found at the bottom.
Post reply on HN