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Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

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Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#241

Post by 72deluxe »

ehaughee wrote: post #232
72deluxe wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Ballmer's reorganisation mean that there was a triad of developer, project manager and tester working together? That would mean one project manager for each developer wouldn't it? Or am I wrong? Has that changed?

We don't have one PM/test per dev, no. My team is currently something like 8 devs, 3 testers, 3 PMs. There was an internal shift to change the test/dev ratio to something like 2/3 or 1/3 (I can't remember exactly) instead of matching it. I don't know of a team in my division that has a 1:1 for PM or test to dev.

Thanks for the info. Very informative, considering I work in a tiny company and we have 3 developers, with 1 (me) working on the bit that people actually use daily (the entire GUI bit on multiple platforms).

I used to work in a larger team in a different company but we only had 1 PM who frustrated us all, sadly. How do they balance 3 PMs? Do they argue between themselves?

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#242

Post by outside1234 »

grecy wrote: post #238
outside1234 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If 80% of Marketing go, I'll eat my shoe. Actually, I'll be shocked if 10% of Marketing go. What you're forgetting is those are the people that are best at justifying their own existence.

Yes, I'm not saying this will happen, just that it should happen.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#243

Post by chubot »

sz4kerto wrote: post #104
pierreio wrote: post #94

So MS Bought Nokia and ~30k employees for ~$7.2 billion last April. 3 months later, MS may now be firing ~half of the Nokia group. The executives who drove that catastrophic deal stay. What a testament to how disastrous big M&A really is. Is there any large acquisition that succeeded in the last 10 years? I'd feel sorry if I was a Nokia guy there, they pulled out the best non-Apple phone hardware in the last years. P…

> Is there any large acquisition that succeeded in the last 10 years? Yes, many. Think of the Lenovo-IBM deal -- massive success. The Facebook-Whatsapp deal is 2.5x bigger than this acquisition, we'll see how that works out (financially). Google-Youtube is a big one that can be considered as a big success as well. Ebay-Paypal. FB-Instagram.

It does seem less likely for an acquisition of a large company to be successful than a small one.

The last three you mentioned are all tiny companies acquired for huge amounts of money.

YouTube had something like 60 people at acquisition -- definitely under 100. Instgram had under 20 I believe. Not sure about Paypal but I'm sure it was dwarfed by Ebay.

There is something to that. I think a smaller number of people can be integrated into a larger one, but when two massive companies like Microsoft and Nokia come together, there is bound to be friction.

Not sure what happened with Google and Motorola, but the companies were I think wisely kept separate, whereas it sounds like Nadella wants more "integration synergies".

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#244

Post by bnejad »

72deluxe wrote: post #191
discordance wrote: post #123

Some context Microsoft head count: 127k Apple head count: 80k Google head count: 50k Facebook head count: 7k

Facebook has seven thousand people working on one website? Admittedly a BIG website with many users, but still a staggering amount of people. (I joke only partially) How much PHP do they need to write each?

They aren't all developers.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#245

Post by Bluestrike2 »

pierreio wrote: post #112
untog wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any large acquisition that succeeded in the last 10 years? You might have the wrong criteria for acquisition success. I'm sure both Nokia and MS knew these layoffs would come before they agreed to the purchase.

Did MS? Including the cost of the lay off ($1.6b says Recode), Nokia price was actually $8.8b. What was their business case that was so easily scrapped just months into the purchase? It may be successful on a tax/accounting perspective since the purchase was made in € with cash that couldn't be brought to the US. Yet this does look like a gigantic waste of assets. Warren Buffett says that a successful business is all…

There's no evidence that the initial case for the acquisition was scrapped. On the contrary, it's almost a given that MS was aware of the post-deal costs. This is all quite normal for M&A deals.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#246

Post by outside1234 »

72deluxe wrote: post #195
outside1234 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's wrong with Terry and Kevin? 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). A…

Windows needs better leadership and frankly someone from the outside at this point. Every time I hear Terry speak I have no idea what he is talking about (and I get the sense he doesn't either).

Kevin's management style is to give everyone a scorecard, Walmart Style, on metrics like "top apps achieved" or "total apps achieved" that drives all sorts of terrible behaviors in our field organizations working with developers. This is why we have a Kindle application on Windows Phone that is terrible quality. Nobody has any incentive to help Amazon make it great because its not on the scorecard.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#247

Post by MrDosu »

headgasket wrote: post #225
MrDosu wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should really read up on what a driver is before waffling in on a subject -_-

I wrote a small driver for the NT kernel, a mini filter driver ( for a project named SyncDisk a thing that did the same thing as dropbox but windows only, in 2007), I was not a device driver per se but I do understand the concepts. What I'm implying is that the architecture of new computing devices such as the surface or ipad, imacs etc, is changing the nature of the interfacing with expansion ports; devices are gett…

What you describe is exactly what i am talking about. What you seem to fail to understand is that "without any driver" is nonsense and means "using the existing driver architecture".

You obviously dont understand the concept of a device driver or you would know that they dont "Live in a SoC in the device itself". What you experience with mass storage for example is a standardized abstraction layer for a very specific use case. Computers are used in broad circumstances with a multitude of devices which all require interfacing.

Let me try to simplify this for you: If you randomly draw a computer interfacable hardware device from a bag conainting one of each kind of these and plug it into either a Linux, OSX or Windows machine (3 of the most used home computers) the windows machine will get them working remarkably more often.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#248

Post by outside1234 »

ww520 wrote: post #149
outside1234 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In terms of PM - I think many PMs (the good ones at least) should actually be dev leads. So maybe the right way of saying this is that we should fold them into the dev org as leads where they have the skills to do that.

The rest we should release.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#249

Post by pasbesoin »

incision wrote: post #135
pierreio wrote: post #94

So MS Bought Nokia and ~30k employees for ~$7.2 billion last April. 3 months later, MS may now be firing ~half of the Nokia group. The executives who drove that catastrophic deal stay. What a testament to how disastrous big M&A really is. Is there any large acquisition that succeeded in the last 10 years? I'd feel sorry if I was a Nokia guy there, they pulled out the best non-Apple phone hardware in the last years. P…

>'So MS Bought Nokia and ~30k employees for ~$7.2 billion last April. 3 months later, MS may now be firing ~half of the Nokia group. The executives who drove that catastrophic deal stay.' My understanding, primarily from friends at Cisco which has its own history of acquisitions and layoffs is that this is roughly standard procedure, catastrophe or not. Basically, there's always going to be a lot of overlap when acqu…

Further, people within the controlling interest tend to prefer dealing with those they know.

Even if you are a high performer, being part of the now-controlled interest deals you something of the short stick, as they say.

If your company is acquired, be prepared to move on. Regardless of personal performance, they may give you no choice.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#250

Post by cwyers »

pierreio wrote: post #94

So MS Bought Nokia and ~30k employees for ~$7.2 billion last April. 3 months later, MS may now be firing ~half of the Nokia group. The executives who drove that catastrophic deal stay. What a testament to how disastrous big M&A really is. Is there any large acquisition that succeeded in the last 10 years? I'd feel sorry if I was a Nokia guy there, they pulled out the best non-Apple phone hardware in the last years. P…

I think that "we can run this unprofitable business with half its current headcount, thus turning it into a profitable business" is hardly an indication of failure.
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