How can you fire 18,000 people without seriously disrupting your business (not even considering loss of morale, angst, good employees running away or getting their resumes ready). But just logistically. How do you decide who those 18,000 are? Just random? How do you know which are 'expendable' or the 'bad Apples'?
When you are talking this size, I doubt that is even possible.
Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs
261–270 of 338 posts
Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs
#262they're also doing internal restructuring. a friend who works there tells me they are doing away with the QA department and instead relying on unit tests & developers to do the feature testing themselves. IMHO that's a good move. QA departments in MS have moved to a position where every developer hands them the dll to even test that it works at all.
Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks for your reply.
Can you provide a sample of what would be contained in that bag that an average computing device user in 2014 would have a chance of owning?
My TV has it's own OS. My fridge as well. My house thermostat too. The drivers for the toy I bought for kids (sphero) are inside the thing, it also has it's own os and interfaces via tcp/ip to an userland app on the ios device. Same does the parrot drone. There are drivers for the subsystems, you are 100 correct. But they are part of the distro, ie they are not 3rd party maintained plug ins.
What I'm pointing out is that the OS model seems to have changed. There's less and less third party code in drivers kernel side; the plug in stuff is getting smarter and interfaces via client-server approaches to other userland processes. There's less and less standalone HW that needs to be driven directly kernel side.
And I earned another downvote! Maybe I should go post elsewhere as my comments are clearly not hacker news- valued? Would any downvoters be kind enough to let me in on why these comments are not valid discussion?
TIA!
Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the reply! (I also assume you are not my downvoter:-) I see the value of replacing the NT kernel by a bsd variant as this: you free ride on a lot of work done by other people. Us software heads have decided we wanted the hard core kernel and compiler engineering to be open source, circa 1990. We've won philosophically, albeit we've lost economically, as the 18000 layoffs and the death of SUN, and transform…
No I am not your downvoter! I do not have downvoting powers yet, sadly! Probably because nobody agrees with me either haha I can understand some of your arguments. But I would not be too hasty in believing that everyone wants open source or would agree that open source kernels are better. I don't dispute it! But, a lot of Windows developers wouldn't touch Linux with a barge pole, nor would they even know about any of…
And in any case, if Microsoft were suddenly to chuck 30 years of their work in the bin and go all open-source, wouldn't that just transform them into a services company?
Isn't that exactly what they have said they are trying to do? Become a "Devices and Services" company instead of a software company?
Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs
#265And 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…
In my experience with our last acquisition some of the best performers ended being cut just because they were in the wrong area. So if MS actually evaluates each employee I would be surprised. It usually just comes down to numbers. We need to save X and that means eliminate Y people. Here's a list.
For example. We got acquired. New companies decides we need to cut some of our staff. They get rid of a co-worker who is solely responsible for training companies to work with our product. His pay was way under market anyway so they didn't save much letting him go. Then he goes and gets a job making double with better benefits doing training. Then a few weeks later our group is scrambling to find someone, anyone, capable of delivering customer training....
Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really "being political" since both statements are true. Congress didn't act on the immigration problem, so he acted on his own with the limited power of the Executive. This isn't a good example.
Well, one could argue "he is not acting" since thousands of kids keep flowing in, and one could argue "it's not the job of Congress to act." Lies don't have to "sound political" to be untrue.
People are downvoting you because this quickly became blatantly off-topic and distracting from the subject at hand, not because of your political views.
Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs
#267Subject: 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.
A great blog post on this topic:
http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_right_way_to_lay_people_off
Though it's advice aimed at much much smaller companies than Microsoft it still resonates. Also I bet HN readers are much more likely to have to one day lay off 18 people than 18,000.
Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cisco does buy a lot of companies, but only about as many as google has bought. Though Cisco has has more billion $ or higher deals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_S... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...
Cisco has a very different M&A strategy than Google. They add product lines through acquisition, in preference to building internally (if you're on a Cisco team and you're ever given an MRD for a product, the joke goes, quit and start a company to do it instead). As often as not, Google acquires companies to absorb the people. Google typically buys much smaller companies, and more selectively. I would be very surpris…
What does "MRD" stand for? I've been searching for a definition but I can't seem to find any, that makes sense in this context.
Given the context, I guess it's some kind of product development order?
Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs
#269So 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'd feel sorry if I was a Nokia guy there, they pulled out the best non-Apple phone hardware in the last years. They have almost no marketshare in the US. So is it really the best non-Apple hardware, or does being the best not really even matter?
That could be changing and the US is not the only market that matters. There is a reason Google, Tinder and other companies deny perfectly working apps on the Windows ecosystem and its not because Windows phone is irrelevant.
Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cisco has a very different M&A strategy than Google. They add product lines through acquisition, in preference to building internally (if you're on a Cisco team and you're ever given an MRD for a product, the joke goes, quit and start a company to do it instead). As often as not, Google acquires companies to absorb the people. Google typically buys much smaller companies, and more selectively. I would be very surpris…
What does "MRD" stand for? I've been searching for a definition but I can't seem to find any, that makes sense in this context. Given the context, I guess it's some kind of product development order?
Marketing requirements document; the set of features for the next release of a product.