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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#411

Post by schlauerfox »

redtriumph wrote: post #324
thrashh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, effectiveness is something too in monopoly tech firms. The Mythical Man Month https://archive.org/details/MythicalManMonth Steve Jobs on product dev vs marketing teams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#412

Post by kristopolous »

ZhadruOmjar wrote: post #407
kristopolous wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Great write up and very useful in an industry where a lot of people seem to think "doing a good job" is enough to get recognised, lots of money and continuous promotions. The transition from IC into Management really needs a head shift and I think a lot of software engineers aren't prepared for the machinations of modern corps.

I've gone in between both roles. I can be a CTO of a $50 million company and just another senior engineer at a $5 billion one.

Probably the most approachable explanation of this phenomena is in Reid Hoffman's blitzscaling. I was looking for the diagram and I found it on some random blog https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*LDHDNGnfy2IJmIWE

Anyway, if we extend this analogy, I could be say, an important member of a village, but within a nation, I'm just another worker. His book is fine btw, get it used. He's just summarizing other authors who said things in more nuanced ways, whatever.

I think this is totally reasonable for people who are not egoists. I can handle about a $10 million budget, but a billion dollar one, I don't look at with envy. Excuse my french, but fuck that level of responsibility. I'm only human.

That's how you can know intuitively that the people who take it on are kinda special, and usually not in a good way.

I've had to deal with lots of capital management and investment groups in my startup days and people that are senior execs at large firms. There's a couple brilliant ones but most are what I could best describe as neurodivergent. Understanding how they process information is crucial in securing that round of financing (unless you're lucky and in a hot industry) and in being on the safe side of their executive decisions.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#413

Post by hiq »

bagacrap wrote: post #135

Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet are sitting on extremely profitable businesses and huge piles of cash. (Other megacaps like NVDA, Meta, NFLX, maybe less so.) So far we have not seen much in the way of the highly-anticipated earnings decline, and the current projection for Q4 GDP is around 4% growth, which suggests to me that Q4 earnings should be better than anticipated by the pessimists out there. I would see this as…

> I would see this as a relatively painless opportunity to cut out low performers.

As many other comments have pointed out already, that's not how mass layoffs work in practice.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#414

Post by ElectricSpoon »

anonporridge wrote: post #24
Xeoncross wrote: post #4

I'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…

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. There's also an effect of wanting to do smaller, pulsating layoffs over the course of many months or even years rather than one massive layoff of the size you actually need, because ultimately no one knows ex…

> Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers

That would be true for poor performing projects. Try a bunch of projects; many don't take off; cut the chaff all at once.

What I've seen in various companies were cuts of all kinds of employees, regardless of their individual performance. Large cuts weren't about the employees but about the projects or teams. I've also lived through a cut which was basically reducing headcount across all teams. Cutting 11k employees isn't a micro-management thing; individual performers get hit all the same.

The fallback of some such cuts was that it took years to later re-acquire competent employees, especially since they were offering work conditions average for the market.

TLDR don't stay too long on projects or teams which aren't lucrative for the company, unless they are fun and you don't mind getting ejected from the company when cut comes.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#415

Post by rakkhi »

marcosdumay wrote: post #365
akira2501 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing a monopolized labor market. Sure, there may not be felonious collusion, but many of the illegal elements of a monopoly are very much present.. as you essentially point out. I'm also not sure why you would be surprised to learn there is collusion, the size and timing of these blocks are certainly curious, and I think further investigation would reveal quite a bit more than you're imagining here. I al…

> the size and timing of these blocks are certainly curious The timing of the layoffs was exactly "as soon as all investors decided to stop their long-term deals". It's really not an evidence of collusion, except maybe of the investors. (But they too had an explanation.) People are confused here because MS doesn't care about investors timing, but they had a clear trend to jump into. That said, other evidence may be m…

No conspiracy needed just raise interest rates with this much debt, turn money printing into QT and cause a recession. Thin wedge is the most speculative areas: i.e tech.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#416

Post by luckylion »

dragontamer wrote: post #343
luckylion wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IIRC, those tools were in an incomplete state before the takeover... but at least they were somewhat working and Twitter's executives were prompt in responding to any issues. But the APIs have been degenerating rapidly after the takeover. When the tools aren't working as expected, the advertisers then emailed Twitter's API teams. All of those teams have been dismantled, the executives have been fired. With no one lef…

That's wild. Why is ad buying such a mess? Google's setup felt extremely outdated last I had to work with it. Is it just largely ignored because it's assumed that most buyers will work with some agency / platform that will integrate with the API and provide a better UI?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#417

Post by pwinnski »

adam_arthur wrote: post #196
pwinnski wrote: post #179

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…

I didn't say he was an incompetent buffoon, you did. I think it's more true than not, but those are your words, not mine. I said only that he was frequently certain while being wrong.

When he makes a pronouncement and then reverses that pronouncement, one or the other was incontrovertibly wrong. Whether he was wrong first and right later, or right first and wrong later, the list of reversals at twitter is a long one, starting before he bought the company.

He tendered an offer that skipped due diligence, then attempted to avoid doing what he'd agree to do, invoking the due diligence he'd explicitly skipped in the process. Then they day before he would have to open up his financial records in court, he reversed his reversal and closed the deal. Since then he's stated multiple times he regrets buying twitter.

However many times you count him being certain-but-wrong in that story, it's more than zero, despite the financial success of his unrelated companies, and despite your unwarranted personal insults.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#418

Post by solarmist »

im3w1l wrote: post #311
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 have an alternative theory. In bad times consumers no longer want to pay for a cherry on top. So you go back to basics and lay off the people putting it there.

I'd adjust this and say the execs believe that, so they do it, whether or not it's true.

I seriously doubt these layoffs are from actual, measurable consumer responses.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#419

Post by adasdasdas »

kristopolous wrote: post #346
adasdasdas wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, most mass layoffs are done without consulting the directly/skip managers who actually know who the strong performers are.

No. Most layoffs are done by the managers being given either quotas or burn rate caps and tasked with producing lists of people to layoff. The point of "many bosses" is if your manager knows you work on other projects, it's easier to leave you off the list. The point of "no bosses" is no manager is tasked with considering you. You're not on anyone's books. There's numerous ways of doing this if you're interested. If…

At least in my circle, I've found (for mass company wide layoffs)

1. Lower level managers usually find out them at the same time as IC's 2. Managers and directors can be part of the layoffs. 3. If a manager/director is part of the layoff, they are even less likely to be consulted in the process.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#420

Post by ipaddr »

redtriumph wrote: post #324
thrashh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you rephrased to say you have more opportunities to take more bets.
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