Pretty impossible to respect a CEO that takes a 10% bump but cuts off raises for everyone else.
Honestly, just disgusting.
Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
271–280 of 597 posts
Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
The company and its income is for the benefit of the shareholders, not the employees. Maybe the argument can be made that they should pay more money to certain people to improve their future income, but that has nothing to do with how much money they make.
We’ve broken our society to think this. Shareholders should be third, after customers and employees. Or at the very least we need to ban the phrase “job creators” for the rest of time if employers are just supposed to stomp on their employees whenever possible.
Herb Kelleher (Southwest Airlines cofounder) wrote that employees were #1.
Good and happy employees make for repeat customers.
Shareholders come third because they will drop you for minor swings and stock price.
Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
#273just buy the stock, which keeps going up....this is effectively the same as a raise. Profit that would go to employees goes to shareholders. It's like a conservation law.
Generally speaking, holding (significant to you) stock in your employer is a bad strategy. Because if the company goes under you lose your job, and your savings at the same time. In other words it consolidates risk rather than diversifies it. But honestly the idea that you don't need a raise but rather invest and wait for a dividend return is bonkers. Those are to completely unrelated things. By all means invest. The…
Theoretically you can short the stock to offset the risks, though this creates a conflict of interest and can be considered insider trading. Alternatively maybe invest in a fund that invests in a competitor and other industries.
Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
#274just buy the stock, which keeps going up....this is effectively the same as a raise. Profit that would go to employees goes to shareholders. It's like a conservation law.
> just buy the stock, which keeps going up....this is effectively the same as a raise.
No, its not. Its “effectively the same as” using some of your shrinking-in-real-terms salary to buy stock; if you can afford to do it at all, you could afford to do it more if you had a raise, so clearly the two are not equivalent.
(OTOH, if Microsoft undershoots the market on salary and has stock worth buying, if you are good at your job you can get a job someplace that isn’t undershooting and use your additional salary to buy Microsoft stock — which is equivalent to both getting a raise and using some of your salary to buy stock.)
EDIT: Of course, if leaving for places not undershooting on salary becomes popular with the competent, buying Microsoft stock based on past performance may turn out to be a suboptimal idea.
Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
#275Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
#276Wondering 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.
It will likely be both. Why not have your cake and eat it too? Zuckerberg already set the precedent for an additional large round of layoffs after the first, so I'd be extremely surprised if Microsoft, Google, etc didn't follow suit.
Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
#277just buy the stock, which keeps going up....this is effectively the same as a raise. Profit that would go to employees goes to shareholders. It's like a conservation law.
Buying individual company stock is a worse strategy than sector ETFs, especially if it's your own employer.
(Individual stocks have more returns because they're riskier, not because they have more alpha. And you're accepting however much risk you get instead of planning for it - just borrow someone else's money if you like it so much.)
Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think they said that. They said that as an employee you can buy the stock and see yourself a slight raise in that regard. If an internal raise isn't on the cards.
And with Microsoft's stock purchase plan you are incentivized to buy stock anyways.
ESPP isn't exactly like buying stock, it's more like lending the company your paycheck for a few months in return for a free 10-15% return. Which is pretty good!
Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
#279And yet, at exactly this time last year: "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…
Not skittish or reactive. They simply don’t need to give raises, so they won’t. What are their devs gonna do? Go somewhere else?
Unionize.
Re: Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that's what people tell me, though the Jane Street interview is pretty tough; I've interviewed with them three times, and also been declined three times...so maybe I'm disproving my own point here.
How were the interviews like?
I mean, they were honestly fairly typical interviews, just a few pretty tough CS problems.
In one I remember one problem asked me to implement a hashmap, which wasn’t too hard, and then the second one had to do with some sort of latency prediction thing, where cleanups had to be done after certain numbers of milliseconds. I am afraid I cannot remember the details, but I remember that the second problem was quite difficult.
I suspect I could do much better now (or at least I hope I would), but I have not interviewed for them in like five years.