101–110 of 597 posts
It's kind of funny to see these announcements when their stock price is at a near all-time high.
It's still 10% below its all time high. 20% if you factor in inflation.
This is important because (a) economic performance is relative (b) the most likely thing (or at least the most advisable thing) for anyone who receives MSFT RSUs is to immediately sell them and use the proceeds to buy more diversified investments.
From a purely financial and management perspective, this is an EXCELLENT decision. It really is a _lazy_ method to handle layoffs with excellent perception from stock holders' viewpoint. We all know how bad it looks when management executes on a situation similar to Gavin Belson firing the Nucleus team. Perception is all that most management and financiers care about anyways as long as the money keeps flowing. The pe…
That's one way to see it. You could also see it as a tremendous blunder. The people who will "self-layoff" are not the low producing team memebers. These are the people who know their value and have competitive even better offers elsewhere. You just took anyone with a modicum of ambition, skill or talent who was already contemplating a move and gave them a big ol' nudge to do it. People who are low producing will put up with what they have to. They may complain but they won't self select out.
Wondering how long it’ll take for other tech companies to copy this move and pretend that they independently arrived at these conclusions after their meticulous macroeconomic analysis.
Is it not better/preferable to freeze salaries than to cut more staff? From a morale PoV, from a human PoV, except maybe not from an individual PoV, overall.
Wondering how long it’ll take for other tech companies to copy this move and pretend that they independently arrived at these conclusions after their meticulous macroeconomic analysis.
Is it not better/preferable to freeze salaries than to cut more staff? From a morale PoV, from a human PoV, except maybe not from an individual PoV, overall.
A layoff can at least be due to a change in direction or some departments, teams, or employees not delivering the necessary value to justify their continued employment. This is saying no one at Microsoft is delivering enough value to deserve a raise despite the company still being profitable. That is objectively not true. There are certainly people at Microsoft that deserve raises and the company can clearly pay for those raises with their billions in profit.
There is no reason to do this other than Microsoft feels it can get away with it.
[1] - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2023-q1...
"Microsoft to Nearly Double Salary Budgets, Expand Stock Compensation"
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...
So they are freezing after the doubling? This behavior seems skittish and an overreaction, especially given their continued profitability and high margins. Corporate executive behavior reminds me of interacting with ChatGPT:
Exec: "What should I do to retain people?"
GPT: "One possibility is to double your salary budget and expand stock compensation."
Exec: "All my golf buddies' are cutting compensation at their companies, what should I do?"
GPT: "In this situation, try freezing salaries and reducing stock compensation."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having friends and former colleagues who work in the "yuppie Wall Street job", it doesn't pay the obscene salaries you think it does, even at the major hedge funds and investment banks, even in NYC and Chicago. The number of super-high NFT development jobs is vanishingly tiny. Most jobs at trading and investing firms for developers pay the same or even less than elsewhere. Sure, if you're a Calypso or Endur or Murex…
Fair enough, I was thinking about companies like Jane Street, paying starting wages of about $200,000/year for engineers [1], and I've seen a few other trading places offering similar wages. When I was at Apple, my base pay was $175,000 when I left, with about $60,000/year of stock. I've never worked for Microsoft but I assume that the pay is comparable to Apple Entirely possible that the quantity of trading jobs ava…
And as you said, the number of high paying jobs (in the multiple hundred thousand dollar range) in finance is much less than the number of high paying jobs in tech. It makes sense given the heavily subpar performance of financial companies relative to tech companies in the last 15 years.
Wondering how long it’ll take for other tech companies to copy this move and pretend that they independently arrived at these conclusions after their meticulous macroeconomic analysis.
I wonder how much illegal back channel coordination there is going on between the big tech companies on this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The secret is, we've always been plumbers . It's not a terrible comparison in some ways - plumbers are highly-skilled, scarce, and command high prices for their services. Nobody mistakes them for Capital, especially not plumbers themselves. Engineers seem to have gotten the wrong idea about themselves lately.
The difference is that GPT won’t steal plumber’s job.
Same issue with GPT. It's generating low quality, poor performing, poorly designed code. Any company using it as a basis will be in trouble.