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Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

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Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

#131

Post by wintogreen74 »

mc32 wrote: post #40
galoisscobi wrote: post #15

Wondering how long it’ll take for other tech companies to copy this move and pretend that they independently arrived at these conclusions after their meticulous macroeconomic analysis.

Is it not better/preferable to freeze salaries than to cut more staff? From a morale PoV, from a human PoV, except maybe not from an individual PoV, overall.

Why would you think it's a "one of" situation? In my experiences the company lays off X% AND cuts salaries YY%. This is quite effective because the subtext is "if you still have a job you're lucky". I suspect you actually get less attrition from both at the same time vs. just a pay cut or freeze.

Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

#132

Post by throw8383833jj »

skrebbel wrote: post #33
Apreche wrote: post #8

Correct headline: Microsoft cuts salaries for 2023. Even in a good economy inflation and cost of living increases are a thing.

I never understood the idea that salaries should be expected to always be corrected for inflation, and that not doing so is somehow secretly a "salary cut". Salaries are driven by supply and demand, and individual companies (maybe not Microsoft though) can generally only afford to raise them by a given amount. If that amount is less than inflation then that's that, right? Most companies (again, maybe not Microsoft th…

It is a salary cut because the dollar is worth less every year. It's already lost well over 99% of it's value in the last 200 years (a time when the average house cost 800$). So, if inflation goes up by 10%, your salary is being cut by almost 10%.

Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

#133

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

mirekrusin wrote: post #76
pianoben wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The secret is, we've always been plumbers . It's not a terrible comparison in some ways - plumbers are highly-skilled, scarce, and command high prices for their services. Nobody mistakes them for Capital, especially not plumbers themselves. Engineers seem to have gotten the wrong idea about themselves lately.

The difference is that GPT won’t steal plumber’s job.

How exactly do you "steal" a job?

Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

#134

Post by didip »

tombert wrote: post #73
diversionfactor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having friends and former colleagues who work in the "yuppie Wall Street job", it doesn't pay the obscene salaries you think it does, even at the major hedge funds and investment banks, even in NYC and Chicago. The number of super-high NFT development jobs is vanishingly tiny. Most jobs at trading and investing firms for developers pay the same or even less than elsewhere. Sure, if you're a Calypso or Endur or Murex…

Fair enough, I was thinking about companies like Jane Street, paying starting wages of about $200,000/year for engineers [1], and I've seen a few other trading places offering similar wages. When I was at Apple, my base pay was $175,000 when I left, with about $60,000/year of stock. I've never worked for Microsoft but I assume that the pay is comparable to Apple Entirely possible that the quantity of trading jobs ava…

At its height, FAANG companies are dishing out > $500k total compensation to engineers.

You would have to be quant analysts themselves to beat that number.

Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

#135

Post by alephnerd »

tombert wrote: post #73
diversionfactor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having friends and former colleagues who work in the "yuppie Wall Street job", it doesn't pay the obscene salaries you think it does, even at the major hedge funds and investment banks, even in NYC and Chicago. The number of super-high NFT development jobs is vanishingly tiny. Most jobs at trading and investing firms for developers pay the same or even less than elsewhere. Sure, if you're a Calypso or Endur or Murex…

Fair enough, I was thinking about companies like Jane Street, paying starting wages of about $200,000/year for engineers [1], and I've seen a few other trading places offering similar wages. When I was at Apple, my base pay was $175,000 when I left, with about $60,000/year of stock. I've never worked for Microsoft but I assume that the pay is comparable to Apple Entirely possible that the quantity of trading jobs ava…

The total number of PropTrading engineers in the US is most definitely in the low to mid thousands at most. Most PropTrading firms are tiny from a headcount perspective

For example, Citadel has around 600-700 engineers globally and Jane Street only has around 400-500 globally. Both of these firms are actual behemoths headcount wise, and most other trading firms tend to be way smaller (total headcount in the high double digits or low 100s if lucky).

Meanwhile, Microsoft alone has around 70-75,000 engineers. PropTrading gets a lot of mindshare among TC chasers but is a very small industry.

Also, salaries are definetly comparable when factoring in hours worked, exit opportunities (PM/SE/EM/Entrepreneurship while working in Trading you deal with forced garden leave/potential litigation when job switching within Trading), and even the base salary itself. I remember IMC was offering around 100k base in Chicago in the early/mid-2010s when you could earn 90k-110k base at Groupon or JPMC as a SWE while working 30-40 hour weeks.

Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

#136

Post by wintogreen74 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #46
mc32 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not better/preferable to freeze salaries than to cut more staff? From a morale PoV, from a human PoV, except maybe not from an individual PoV, overall.

It might be better if you didn't over hire. I can't speak for MSFT. But a lot of tech companies definitely hired to banana town. Cutting would be better than freezing salaries.

They hired with someone else's money though, now they're looking to cut when it's their own.

Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

#137

Post by ronsor »

diversionfactor wrote: post #106

And yet, at exactly this time last year: "Microsoft to Nearly Double Salary Budgets, Expand Stock Compensation" https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio... So they are freezing after the doubling? This behavior seems skittish and an overreaction, especially given their continued profitability and high margins. Corporate executive behavior reminds me of interacting with ChatGPT: Exec: "What should…

Large corporations are arguably a form of "AI," so that's not too surprising.

Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

#138

Post by tombert »

nineplay wrote: post #113
tombert wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily disagree, but fundamentally I think this will lead to "anyone who can find a higher-paying job will find a higher paying job." Part of what's enticing about these "blue-chip" megatech corporations like Microsoft or Apple is that they pay good salaries. Most work at these companies is not interesting (at least it wasn't at Apple), but you stay because the pay is good. If the pay is shit, I'll take…

A lot comes down to what life stage employees are in. Someone with fixed monthly costs and kids in school is not going to want to a) move and b) deal with the anxiety of working at a start up. Probably companies are banking on that.

Yeah, that's fair, though I still think that's going to selection-bias towards employees who can't really find work elsewhere.

I don't know about Microsoft but certainly at Apple there were plenty of people who were pretty mediocre engineers...I certainly was the last 6-8 months I was there because I hated it so much and realized they probably wouldn't fire me.

Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

#139

Post by jselysianeagle »

tombert wrote: post #65
jandrese wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time a company is one day telling the employees that they need to take a pay cut to keep the company "competitive" (and this pay freeze is actually a pay cut), and the next day they're doing a stock buyback and the C-Suite is giving themselves enormous performance bonuses they need to worry about unionization.

Not to sound too much like a libertarian, and I'm not against unions, but isn't this something that can be more or less corrected by a lot of engineers finding work elsewhere? It's not like Microsoft has anywhere near a monopoly on the software engineering space anymore, and most of the engineers there can probably adjust to remote work without too much of an issue. Then we get the cycle of Microsoft complaining that…

> but isn't this something that can be more or less corrected by a lot of engineers finding work elsewhere?

In this market? I'm skeptical. I'm sure some fraction of them can do so at equivalent or higher pay, but the tech market at the moment is quite soft and I wouldn't be surprised this was taken into account and served as another motivation for this move from MS.

Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

#140

Post by oh_sigh »

slg wrote: post #104
mc32 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not better/preferable to freeze salaries than to cut more staff? From a morale PoV, from a human PoV, except maybe not from an individual PoV, overall.

This is worse from a corporate greed perspective because it is effectively saying that Microsoft can't afford to give out a pay raise to anyone. Meanwhile, they had a net income of $17.6 billion last quarter[1]. A layoff can at least be due to a change in direction or some departments, teams, or employees not delivering the necessary value to justify their continued employment. This is saying no one at Microsoft is d…

The company and its income is for the benefit of the shareholders, not the employees. Maybe the argument can be made that they should pay more money to certain people to improve their future income, but that has nothing to do with how much money they make.
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