191–200 of 338 posts
Some context Microsoft head count: 127k Apple head count: 80k Google head count: 50k Facebook head count: 7k
How much PHP do they need to write each?
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Subject: Important Company-wide Announcement Dear Employees, For our business to continue running, we must reduce the number of staff. This is an unfortunate but also inevitable reality. [insert details of layoff here] [insert honest platitudes] Senior management wishes all of you the best of luck, and has every confidence that you will be even more successful at your next job.
The only bit I would disagree with is, "For our business to continue running..." Last year, Microsoft made over $20 billion profit on almost $80 billion in revenue. The truth is that Microsoft has accumulated many useless employees over the years, and they could be even more profitable by laying off those people.
Is it me or this guy is trying hard the SteveJobs look in that picture? Simple solution to all of microsoft's woes: Drop the WINNT kernel and replace it by a unix based variant. Is there any value in keeping the kernel closed source ? Hasn't that fight been lost a long time ago? Windows is going byzantine fast; there's no value in compilers and in os kernels anymore, the open source ones are better but MS still think…
Is there any value in keeping the kernel closed source ? It prevents forking. MS doesn't want to compete against its own kernel. Even Android doesn't want to compete against itself, hence the manufacturer agreement(s) that make it effectively closed.
Subject: Starting to Evolve Our Organization and Culture Body: Last week in my email to you I synthesized our strategic direction ... Christ.
Instead of writing "Christ", you should consider posting an email as if you were the one newly responsible for a $364B company and a reduction in 18,000 jobs. I'd be curious to see other people's management style from their armchair.
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?
Microsoft employee here: I took this exactly the opposite way. I know I'm valuable, I know many others aren't (sorry: being honest) and this is a good thing from my perspective because at Microsoft we are finally facing reality and getting the right people in place. My only gripe is that the layoffs are not larger - we need about 20% of the marketing folks and 20% of the program managers that we currently have. I wou…
Was Terry responsible for the compartmentalisation of Exchange to permit it to spread across different machines, each with different roles? Good idea but I found 2010 bloated compared to 2003, I skipped 2008 (and NOBODY tested 2010 SP2 did they???? That bust everything for me, and on an Exchange instance on one machine only; I can only imagine how it was for spread installations).
Are there really that many little projects? How big is the Office team?
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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…
It's even less true when you are talking about merger layoffs. Even if you are good, the Nokia guy might be better.
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Microsoft employee here: I took this exactly the opposite way. I know I'm valuable, I know many others aren't (sorry: being honest) and this is a good thing from my perspective because at Microsoft we are finally facing reality and getting the right people in place. My only gripe is that the layoffs are not larger - we need about 20% of the marketing folks and 20% of the program managers that we currently have. I wou…
Letting 80% marketing and PM go? Wow. I thought PM are pretty good in Microsoft.
Or am I wrong? Has that changed?
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> 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…
People can become illogical when faced with emotional scenarios. "If I loose my job my family/friends will think that I'm a failure". I was at IBM during a similar situations and it was people that were in the top 40%-20% that were the most worried.
microsoft employes some brilliant people but maybe in the future they should actually think about what they products are trying to push on people so they stop fucking themselves over constantly?