111–120 of 251 posts
There is a lot of great news at Microsoft these days - great place to be - hope I'm around after tomorrow!
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Exactly. Every layoff i have seen personally or through close friends at other company's the ass kissers survive and those t hat threaten them get laid off. Those that threaten them (the competent ones) are always painted as non team players because generally the competent ones are unhappy when the teams gain so many slick talking ass kissers but few doers.
Competent people need to know the political basics, it's like defensive driving. http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/04/politics-101-chapter-3-... http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/05/politics-101-chapter-3-...
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I work in silicon valley and it seems like there is a huge shortage of people with software development skills. I am not talking about geniuses, just people with skills. I work at a company that isn't the sexiest (but a good stable employer) and man, it is hard to find people.
if you're having trouble hiring people at the market rates, you need to revisit your assumptions (at minimum, the one about paying market rates)
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Sometimes, as was the case with Zynga for example, I get the sense that layoffs are an indicator of imminent demise. For some reason, under Nadella, I get the feeling that these MSFT layoffs are an indicator of an imminent rise. Maybe it's just a story I'm looking for after watching Mayer at the helm of an increasingly relevant Yahoo. Similarly, I really get the sense that MSFT under Nadella is going to be an excitin…
If people look beyond desktop, specifically to enterprise software and cloud computing it should be pretty clear that Microsoft is not in decline. If anything they are more in control and cohesive than ever..
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Facebook does indeed have a very efficient corporate structure (whether that will last is another question). Perhaps 7,000 to 7,300 employees (assuming some pickup the last quarter or two), and $8.9 billion in sales. Microsoft by comparison had roughly 15,000 employees when they had that level of revenue (adjusting for inflation), circa 1993 / 1994.
I still think about FB spending 3 billion on that app?
Interesting how this will impact the job market on the West Coast. You'd think that 5-10k people in IT would quickly fill a lot of the currently open positions.
I work in silicon valley and it seems like there is a huge shortage of people with software development skills. I am not talking about geniuses, just people with skills. I work at a company that isn't the sexiest (but a good stable employer) and man, it is hard to find people.
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Layoffs are fairly regular occurrences, and don't necessarily represent the end of a company. In fact, even if it wasn't just 5% of their workforce, and not mostly Nokia staff, it wouldn't be a concern — its just business as usual. Companies often experience a raise in share-price after a layoff.
It's true this doesn't represent the end of a company. But layoffs of 1/20 of a large company's entire workforce are not regular occurrences, and are a cause for concern. It's the kind of thing you can do once, but not again for a long while; two layoffs of that magnitude within a short period, and you trigger a death-spiral where anyone who's left is looking for the exit.
I wonder how much of Nokia is going to get rejected. A friend of mine is a former Nokia employee who was really psyched to be working on the Surface team now — that would be pretty rough if that team got laid off just after getting settled into the company.
Any company that has been around for as long as Microsoft, has a huge amount of dead weight in its mid-level management. I mean people whose main skill is mastery of the internal political process. Lest people think I'm singling out Microsoft specifically, this same problem is present at Google as well, but is less of a problem because Google has not been around long enough to pick up the same amount of dead weight p…
Its good in theory, but in practice it doesn't work. Those guys who mastered the political process. They don't get fired. Not getting fired is what they do. Thats the thing they're really good at.
And man, it gets cut-throat. You know, when I traded, I used to think that was the most cut-throat work environment. Then the firm I was trading for got acquired by a bigger (much bigger) "traditional" bank. I quickly realized the trading floor was a picnic compared to mid-level management (at a bank they are called VP's) politics. At least a trader, you know the score. Make a profit you win. Don't you leave. Working at this bank; I had to learn to watch my back.
It was at that point I decided to leave banking, and NYC.
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At Google, if you don't make it to level 5 sweng within a certain amount of time(2 years from being hired at level 4), you will most likely get fired. After that you can relax more. So the fluff in software engineering(including managers) is minimal. Facebook though... Ask their employees how that build system is working out for them. There's a lot of doing, agreed, but sometimes you need to just take a chill pill, s…
> At Google, if you don't make it to level 5 sweng within a certain amount of time(2 years from being hired at level 4), you will most likely get fired. Don't know where you get that idea from. I have a lot of anecdotal evidence to the contrary.