431–440 of 481 posts
These layoff articles are incomplete without mentioning how many they hired and when. This brings Microsoft back to their staffing levels of when exactly? March 2021?
What’s the relevance of knowing a previous employee count? How does this information “complete” the story?
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This is an uncharitable take. The ability to fire at-will is the reason companies in the US are able to hire and pay as high as they do. As a dual-national Brazilian-American who has also spent years living in Europe, the social contracts are very different, and different people might value different things, but I'll take the downside layoff risk in exchange for upside in pay and mobility.
> This is an uncharitable take. The ability to fire at-will is the reason companies in the US are able to hire and pay as high as they do. I feel there is no rational basis for this belief, and it's mostly guided by wishful thinking to fool yourself into believing that all this penance leads to some kind of salvation. It doesn't. There are highly paid professionals in other countries who benefit from higher worke pro…
As a founder it's crystal clear: you quit your job, you start building a company with no salary, you get some traction, get some investment, and if you work hard and have a good dose of luck along the way you can be very successful (far more than any salaried employee), or you might fail and earn nothing.
Now you add employees, they are expensive and you don't really know what the business climate will look like over time. You know you need some to fulfill your growth potential, but where is the point of diminishing returns? There's no way to know. The Silicon Valley VC model is: if you get a whiff of product-market fit and think you have a potential category-defining product, pour as much money in as you can to maximize scaling—even if it is wasteful or risks flaming out, you do it anyway because otherwise someone else may do it and win.
Now, if you are in a country like France, worker protections mean that if you over-hire, you risk killing the entire company because you overshot your mark and you can't do layoffs. This absolutely plays into hiring plans, and if you don't acknowledge this then it is you who are engaged in wishful thinking.
Note that I don't have anything against worker protections, I liked living in Europe and there are a lot of things that are preferable to the States, but economic upside for programmers like me is not one of them. FAANG definitely broke through the old glass ceilings for tech folks, but A) that competition was introduced by American capitalism and B) even for FAANG it's still significantly higher total comp stateside.
How to interpret this? MSFT felt like stablest FAANG
FAANG isn't a very good acronym if Microsoft is in it. GAMMAN would would better.
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You'll say this until you are the one let go. Companies are irrational and layoffs of this scale are not capable of targeting the poor performers.
At least you have actual skills to find a new job.
The skills one develops on the job and the skills one needs to actually perform well at a job are not really tested well by the standard big tech interview loop (startups can be innovative here, but it can go either way).
Generally the competent folks reluctantly acquire the silly skills required to pass through the gatekeepers though.
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Why? What's wrong with firing people during other economic conditions? Why would the paperwork be any different, whether it's a small layoff or a big payoff? Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V is cheap, Microsoft implemented it many times in many products.
If you heard Microsoft just did 11k layoffs and then you got a job offer from them how does that sound to you ? To me it sounds like I could be in the next round if I get hired on the wrong team.
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It also serves as a nice buffer when you are switching jobs - you can take the PTO and still be employed (& so covered by health insurance for a bit longer, and stocks are still vesting), making for a nice break from work.
So you have unlimited PTO, what’s stopping you from taking a vacation.
Edit: props to Microsoft for not being scared to call the policy by its true name.
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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 vill…
How do you position yourself when looking for a job? Divergent background of this sort could be a liability. And then you have to be explicit about what you want in your next role. Do you have two different resumes?
No idea really
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> 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…
They haven't said so yet -- perhaps they'll clarify on the call tomorrow -- but they'll probably take down new debt to make this happen; it's a good time to go to the markets, and a lot of their cash is parked overseas. Fitch recently announced they're withdrawing their ratings for MSFT debt, so that's probably an indication they expect a significant amount of the purchase price to come from new issuances.
How so with interest rates that keep going up?
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> This is an uncharitable take. The ability to fire at-will is the reason companies in the US are able to hire and pay as high as they do. I feel there is no rational basis for this belief, and it's mostly guided by wishful thinking to fool yourself into believing that all this penance leads to some kind of salvation. It doesn't. There are highly paid professionals in other countries who benefit from higher worke pro…
I'm not sure why this represents a victim mentality or some kind of penance. I don't see it that way at all. It's simply risk/reward and understanding how the economic incentives work independent of moral judgements. As a founder it's crystal clear: you quit your job, you start building a company with no salary, you get some traction, get some investment, and if you work hard and have a good dose of luck along the wa…
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I think it is less pessimism and more realism. The fed clearly indicated that it will raise rates until the market cools
As far as the Fed is concerned inflation, unemployment & GDP growth are all definitely higher priorities than the stock market.
If the fed is shrinking economic investment until employment and inflation goes down, companies are preparing for slow growth.