61–70 of 338 posts
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Sugarcoating mass layoffs with "evolve", "culture", "synthesized", "strategic direction"...
Or alternatively explaining the reasoning behind the layoffs. But nah, let's assume they lay off just because they want to.
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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.
You should write a post on this, I'd be interested to hear the MBA's perspective. Like the OP, I'm jaded towards MBAs due to my personal experience, but I recognize that's limited experience. I'm genuinely interested in the benefits a company gets from hiring an MBA, especially an early to mid-stage start-up company.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/jul14/07-17an...
tl,dr;: - Nokia X is dead - other Devices departments are not affected/the effect is limited
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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.
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I'm assuming that an announcement like this could effect stock prices. I have no knowledge of stock trading at all, but I would assume they would announce something like this if they expected it to have a positive effect.
Stock is up over 45 now . . . Getting rid of dead wood is a great idea. Tons of middle management there, just sitting for years and causing obstructive damage.
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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!
> Products that sell make you more "agile" Uh, no, being capable of designing things cooperatively rather than playing political games and supporting status-quo is what makes you agile. Products that sell are the effect, not the cause. It's much easier with a smaller company, though I doubt that's the primary motivation for the layoffs. More likely, they want to re-evaluate their internal culture, fire people most ou…
you can't tell me there are not some seriously good staff among that 18,000. Microsoft are a huge company, and very few are more successful than them. Microsoft have the environment to allow things to flourish. IMHO Microsoft are still ahead of the curve and agile, especially with Azure. Microsoft are massive ultimately because what they have done to date has been hugely successful. So its really a case of consuming Nokia.
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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…
Has anyone been inside the process for determining the number of layoffs in a situation like this? Is the goal to cut payroll to a certain number, or what?
In that particular case, which may or may not have any similarity to this incident, layoffs were determined in 2 ways
A) if you had 2 redundant or similar operational centers you got rid of the most expensive one unless there was some compelling reason not to (huge client demanded they stay, or they were more expensive but dramatically more efficient)
B) technology centers the goal was to integrate what had to be integrated as fast as possible. 80% of the time this meant literally telling people they wouldn't have the same functionality after the acquisition and getting rid of the entire support team. Occasionally, you would find some piece of technology that was great and easily integrated into the rest of the systems and that support team would be given good terms to stay until that was done. Very rarely you would find some piece of technology that was newly vital and hard to integrate, in that case you'd keep a skeleton crew to keep it operational, but you knew that it wasn't going to get any new resources and if it ever become non-vital that team was gone as well.
For point A) above, I've literally seen the decision come down to the cost per square foot of the office space. I've never been in a situation where they had a predetermined number they had to get to though. The number was a natural calculation based on the above.
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I'm assuming that an announcement like this could effect stock prices. I have no knowledge of stock trading at all, but I would assume they would announce something like this if they expected it to have a positive effect.
Stock is up over 45 now . . . Getting rid of dead wood is a great idea. Tons of middle management there, just sitting for years and causing obstructive damage.
Regarding the "tons of middle managers" (another dehumanizing expression imo.) - I haven't met anyone just "sitting for years" and happily "causing obstructive damage" yet. I have however met quite a few where it took me some time to appreciate their work (looked like nothing/trivial from the outside) and realize their failed struggle with organizatorial constraints on their work.
Apologies if I am reading too much into your post. However, there seems to be pervasive contempt for the people affected by layoffs in threads like these that's unnecessary and unwarranted.