51–60 of 338 posts
"Following the Nokia acquisition, completed in April, Microsoft had roughly 127,104 employees[...]" I don't have knowledge about managing a company, but is it at all possible to efficiently lead 127000+ employees? Has MSFT become a non-manageable behemoth?
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Do you care to explain more why you think he can't see clearly? I'm curious about your reasons for the statement. From my limited outside perspective, these layoffs are a good idea since there's bound to be a lot of redundancy and inefficiently in a company of this size
His writing is shit. Compare his writing to anything from Bezos or Cook.
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His writing is shit. Compare his writing to anything from Bezos or Cook.
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And now, every day for a year, everyone gets to wake up and wonder if this is the day that they will get laid off. Why can't they wait and make the announcement once they know who they will eliminate and do it in one swift action? Why put people in limbo for a year?
Look into co-determination in Finland for an example. Finland of course is also a big part of the news from Microsoft today.
Too many words. He needs to drop the self absorbed thought leader babble and communicate in a straight forward manner.
Indeed. None of the words in his company wide email meant 18000 job cuts to me. Just a neutral line of babble in that email. Terrible leadership to start with
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Layoffs aren't always about profit though. In this case, it is more about streamlining and making MS more agile
How does laying off 18,000 people make you more "agile" ? Products that sell make you more "agile"... Its more a case of, we bought Nokia for their market, but we don't need their staff!
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That's plausible, but also plausible is that the drawn-out process causes the better performers to leave while they can. It's easy to say from the outside that the layoffs will hit underperformers and people who are just coasting, but the fact is that layoffs of this scale inevitably involve politics. We're talking about an organization that had so much trouble getting the Office people on the same page as the Mobile…
> That's plausible, but if I were at Microsoft I'd be sending out my resume right now. No -- most people who work at a big company know _exactly_ whether they're in danger or not. We're speaking about 5% of the original (pre-Nokia acquisition) workforce. You must know whether you're in the bottom 5%, or if your product is in the least critical 5%. Of course there are surprises and some good/productive guys will be la…
Sometimes. I used to work at RIM (BlackBerry) and they announced huge layoffs for August 2012. I knew at that time that my whole team was gone. The rest of the team just talked about how valuable they were and how no one could do the job we were doing. I think they honestly thought that. A lot of people have a tendency to over-value their work and roles.
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It's just typical big-company-CEO babble, which I think they must teach you when you do an MBA. (And yes, Satya Nadella has an MBA.)
Can HN lay off the MBA hate? It's getting really old. It's abundantly clear that no-one even knows what an MBA is.