cutting an xbox game studio that was already working on 3 games, as part of this: https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/microsoft-is-clos...
meanwhile revenue is up 15% YOY
Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs
161–170 of 215 posts
Re: Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure it would. There are way more employed tech people than unemployed. Imagine if every single person at a company like MS up and went on strike tomorrow. Could MS replace them all with scabs? Sure, with enough time and money. But it wouldn't happen overnight, and things would get very dire if not company ruining in the meantime.
A digital strike by all employees for a week to get a collective bargaining agreement in place to show companies just how far AI has to go as a replacement would be powerful.
I'd argue nothing happens if everyone go on strike. It's not an assembly line. No release? Great. Noone to attend meetings? Not a big deal! Cannot get a real person for support? Same as without strike!
Re: Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unions are not effective when there's such a surplus of labor and people willing to break lines. It wont work in today's tech labor market.
Exactly. What are unions going to do, prevent H1B workers from replacing them?
Why to bother with H1B workers if they are hiring directly in India?
Re: Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs
#164I do wonder if these trends continue (paired with the offshoring and H1B replacements they're all in on (otherwise mentioned in this thread), how this effects the local housing markets in places like, in this case, Seattle. If every third 22 year old isn't making 200K, how are you going to sustain a market of crapshacks "worth" 1M?
I predict many areas will eventually become like old mining/factory towns. Middle class jobs are being offshored at an astounding rate. Just doing some math - if a tech company lays off 7% of its employees for six years and sends the jobs overseas, nearly half of its American employees will be fired
I don't think it'll get that bad.
My mostly uninformed worse case estimate is a large portion of these companies become something like the "body shops" (I believe MS has some association with Accenture, so that'd fit) where they maintain a minimal US presence for (mostly) customer facing "sales"/"high touch" positions so they have someone to broker deals and contracts with the (often clueless, IME) F500s, and then outsource all implementation work offshore. Same goes for some large portion of "important" managers.
For the "deep"/important/critical technical work, there will likely be staff retained on-shore, while the "boring" CRUD-type work that comprises some portion of the FANNAGS (whatever) is done overseas.
It's unlikely, say, for Google Search or AWS EC2 or something critical at MS (M365 maybe?) to be totally off-shored, but lesser services/functions are a likely target. (I know this is already happening to some extent at these companies; I've heard from reputable sources there's some large services that were nearly entirely built by staffing firms)
Basically, I think it's two things: we've reached the end of stratospheric growth in "tech" (sorry I just don't see the LLM wave getting there; a million SAAS thingys to "vibe code" a React calorie tracker ain't it), there's a massive surplus from the ZIRP era paired with some sort of obvious recession happening (or that's been going on for a while).
It's also a reset of sorts--look I'm as "pro software" as the next commentator here, but it's pretty absurd to think that there's loads of people making 200K+ to write CRUD stuff. There's just not a "shortage" in any way for any of these skills, as anyone doing a job search can attest.
This type of pay is really only "rational" in the markets where the cost of living has skyrocketed in the manner it has (largely/entirely a function of the "growth" era in SF/Seattle/Austin). It never seemed sustainable, and I suspected there would be some abrupt end when the "learn to code" era really took off.
On a positive note, perhaps those cities would be more affordable, but the in-elasticity of housing prices on the "way down" are always a problem for buyers.
Re: Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
A digital strike by all employees for a week to get a collective bargaining agreement in place to show companies just how far AI has to go as a replacement would be powerful.
I'd argue nothing happens if everyone go on strike. It's not an assembly line. No release? Great. Noone to attend meetings? Not a big deal! Cannot get a real person for support? Same as without strike!
Outages would not be picked up
Re: Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is they are laying off US workers and then importing Indian workers to replace them via 3rd party contractors. I saw a post on X today which essentially said "Ai will not replace your job, an Indian with Ai will replace your job" - this was posted by an Indian and he was completely right. Microsoft is actively laying off people with 150k salaries and replacing them with offshore workers earning a 10th of th…
> Microsoft is actively laying off people with 150k salaries and replacing them with offshore workers earning a 10th of the salary. I know the talking points on HN like to portray Indian developers as cheap, low quality labor, but contrary to popular belief, they aren’t getting workers for $15k. A Median senior developer earns almost $90k in India in Microsoft. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/microsoft/salaries/soft…
You can see the Microsoft H1B Software Engineer salaries at the HQ in Redmond.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=microsoft&job=software+eng...
What do you think the salary would be for a US employee that those $101k H1B Software Engineers replaced? They obviously aren't saving 90%, but maybe 50% 33%?
Re: Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs
#167Given I’ve been trying to use some of Microsoft’s various productivity SaaS tools for a new job lately, and well, they need those workers. Teams is sort of tolerable now, but still feels terrible and lacks many of slacks niceties. The rest of their productivity stuff is terrible and slow. It’s embarrassing really. From what I read Azure is a border line dumpster fire. Then what LLM integration do they really have in…
Here's what i learned: the person buying software/services at many enterprises cares very little whether the thing being purchased is actually any good or not. They either pick based on some brand awareness (who doesn't know who IBM used to be, and who Microsoft is nowadays?), or they defer to someone else in the org...and that "some other senior leader person" in the org may or may not be the proper person to make t…
This is also how the contracting firms maintain business.
Accenture, Deloitte, et al are some of the only businesses that are "trusted partners" for the big F500s* or the only firms that are sufficiently capitalized/insured etc etc such that they can "win" the big jobs. Quality and such doesn't matter much--if you and I could spin up and LLC tomorrow with the ability to deliver something at 10x the quality in half the time, it literally wouldn't matter, for exactly those reasons. It's an identical situation to buying services/software from MS.
*the amount of work outsourced at these places is staggering, speaking from experience.
Re: Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I predict many areas will eventually become like old mining/factory towns. Middle class jobs are being offshored at an astounding rate. Just doing some math - if a tech company lays off 7% of its employees for six years and sends the jobs overseas, nearly half of its American employees will be fired
I don't think it'll get that bad. My mostly uninformed worse case estimate is a large portion of these companies become something like the "body shops" (I believe MS has some association with Accenture, so that'd fit) where they maintain a minimal US presence for (mostly) customer facing "sales"/"high touch" positions so they have someone to broker deals and contracts with the (often clueless, IME) F500s, and then ou…
This assumption is a pretty Western view, in that you assume that SV/USA still has technological primacy. I believe this to be generally true, but leadership has no incentive or reason it should. And if I'm being frank, there may be some bias here because it seems like companies with indian CEOs are offshoring at a much faster rate than non indian CEOs (e.g. Google vs Netflix). And non core roles could effectively be perceived to make up the majority of the company. So some cultural fondness for India plus a somewhat low view of the bulk of employees could result in most jobs being offshored.
Re: Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm indifferent to layoffs. I dislike layoffs these days because it directly fuels the "AI is replacing our jobs" brainrot and then fuels the "AI is the future" hype train. It's not impossible for this to be Microsoft's way to keep the AI flywheel spinning.
I think we can all agree that the real damage caused by layoffs is their effect on the publicity surrounding AI, not their effect on humans and their well being.
Correct, people can get new jobs. We are all forced to live through this AI hype for the next decade.
Re: Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs
#170For the most part, I'm indifferent to layoffs. Companies over hire and then course correct. It's part of the game. But for MSFT, it rubs me the wrong way. In the past 5 years, their stock has soared (150% on stock and doubled in valuation). They are insanely profitable ($82B profit). They are diverse (no existential business risk). The fact that they are unceremoniously laying off 30K of the people that helped them g…
the first responsibility of any company is profitability. they have no economic, moral or ethical obligation to keep employees (no matter how well they performed), if it doesn't help them be more profitable. this should not be news. I think "low performance" is typically just a scapegoat. the real reason is they simply don't need that many empolyees to maximize profitability.
General financial health is a better goal.