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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#471

Post by pwinnski »

adam_arthur wrote: post #279
_zzaw wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The level of nastiness in your comments here makes it very hard to take you seriously as an "objective" observer. Considering that you're using your HN profile to attract clients—"Hire me for your development needs!"—you might want to tone that down. I wouldn't want to work with anyone who thought it was appropriate to behave that way. (And I'll say your rosy impression of Twitter seems a little strange for a suppose…

Nothing nasty about my comment, its a factual response to the parent comment. Fortunately I couldn’t care less if somebody decides not to work with me because they disagree with my opinions. People who care about results will get ahead, those that don’t won’t

> ... small minded and intellectually weak detractors. ... Maybe use forethought and critical thinking ...

> Nothing nasty about my comment, its a factual response to the parent comment.

I called out your use of the word "obviously" without factual basis, and you responded with insults.

Insults and praise for the CEO of Twitter, which is irrelevant, since he still has not made any statement whatsoever on the subject, which was entirely the point of my initial comment.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#472

Post by 33955985 »

clintonb wrote: post #355
33955985 wrote: post #30

These layoff articles are incomplete without mentioning how many they hired and when. This brings Microsoft back to their staffing levels of when exactly? March 2021?

What’s the relevance of knowing a previous employee count? How does this information “complete” the story?

If your friend told you they lost $10,000 in the stock market today, would you feel bad for them? What if they then told you that they're up $500,000 over the past year? How about then?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#473

Post by thr0w__4w4y »

heleninboodler wrote: post #319
mgkimsal wrote: post #34

11,000 people - let's say an average loaded cost of $250k/yr. That's... ~$3b/yr these folks cost MSFT. Granted, it's per year, but ... keeping these people on for another 3 years would cost ~$10b. MSFT currently have $100b cash on hand. It's gotta be a little... frustrating to get be part of a 5% cut when there's so much free cash sitting around. I know, it's a narrow view of corporate finance, and I don't have the '…

Re: the "loaded cost", back when I worked for MSFT in the early 2000's, the rule of thumb for management was $250k per person total cost. This is when $125k was considered a pretty good SDE salary. So I'd double your $3b.

Yes exactly. There is much more than just "benefits". Cost of office space, computer equipment, office supplies, electricity, janitorial costs, heating, security, servers, IT overhead, etc. When you take ALL these costs and spread them over the company, the loaded cost of an employee is not "mostly" salary.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#474

Post by noisenotsignal »

simplotek wrote: post #461
pandaman wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Heck, I personally know a FANG who was forced to pay overtime for oncalls in europe while US workers only get the pager app and the shaft. It does not follow that it leads to greater disposable income. Retail workers in the US also get paid overtime yet their disposable income is nowhere close to that of exempt (no overtime) programmers. Basically, with the tax rates in most of Europe, one's disposable income would…

> It does not follow that it leads to greater disposable income. It wasn't supposed to. It was suppose to point out a concrete example of how stronger worker protection leads to being paid fairly for the work you do, while US workers are not. Meanwhile, feel free to check how any FANG salary for software engineers in places like Seattle compares with the cost of living, and how the salaries for equivalent positions i…

As someone who's always heard that US pays much better but never verified it, this was interesting to look into.

According to levels.fyi, 90th percentile in the Greater Seattle area [0] is $344-363k USD while 90th percentile in the Greater Amsterdam area is $162-170k USD [1]. Taking the mid point of both ranges, you make 2.13 times more in Seattle before tax. After tax, you get $244,933 in Seattle [2] and $118,078.95 in Amsterdam (with requisite conversions from/to USD when using the linked tool) [3], bringing the difference to 2.07x more take-home in the US.

The next step is to compare cost of living. I don't know which source is most reliable, and not all sources include international cities, but a Reddit comment suggested Numbeo so that's what I went with [4]. It reports that local purchasing power in Amsterdam is 18.1% lower than Seattle, while categorized prices in Amsterdam are anywhere from 18.8% (restaurants) to 39.3% (groceries) lower in Amsterdam. So it seems you would need to have to be paid quite a bit more than 50% of your US total compensation to achieve the same standards of living.

I'll spare the details because I didn't look too deeply, but I also did look into the cost of major purchases that people value - houses (3 beds) and cars (specifically the Polestar 2, which is an EV more on the luxury side). These things are definitely not half as expensive in Amsterdam as in Seattle.

So, I can only conclude that US workers do end up with higher purchasing powers despite less worker protection. While European workers do get a lot of benefits, many I probably don't even know about as I don't live there, Big N-tier companies (besides Amazon) usually have generous benefits like employer-paid health insurance that lessen the gap in benefits somewhat.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[2] - https://smartasset.com/taxes/washington-tax-calculator#L3MFa...

[3] - https://thetax.nl/?year=2022&startFrom=Year&salary=900&allow...

[4] - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#475

Post by KptMarchewa »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #224
KptMarchewa wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really, really doubt that acquisition is 100% cash.

It is all cash. > As announced on January 18, 2022, Microsoft plans to acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00 per share in an all-cash transaction. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230111005882/en/Act...

Interesting. Still, large parts of that cash could be financed. I doubt Microsoft would just spend 70% of their war chest on a single transaction like this.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#476

Post by applejacks »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #465
applejacks wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it neoliberalism specifically, or even just generally living in a capitalist society? (Which hey, I'm happy enough to live in a capitalist society, it has been good to me, but I definitely notice myself evaluating nearly everything through a financial or transactional lens).

Its a tragedy of public education that people do not realise that there are different kinds of capitalism. After all, slave trade was capitalism too. We just went through a massive transition from Kenzian to Neoliberal system, and nobody realised. The underperformance of Neoliberal system compared to its predessesor should be the biggest discussion point in all news. Noone has even heard of shumpeterian theory.

Is the implication that some but not all kinds of capitalist societies would encourage or cause people to view many "normal" things (not just inherently or clearly transactional things) as transactional?

What would be the kinds of capitalism that would or would not cause a transactional mindset to seep into all parts of life?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#477

Post by heleninboodler »

throwaheyy wrote: post #426
heleninboodler wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my company switched from accrued to unlimited PTO, the way they did it was to tell everyone that until their balance got down to zero, they needed to report their time off. So if you quit before you got your balance down to zero, you had it paid out, but most people probably just burned through their balance within a year or so and the liability was gone.

Wow, that’s shitty. Because you could simply have taken the same time off under unlimited PTO as by burning down the accrual, the company effectively zeroed out accrued vacation time. I’d be pissed that happened to me.

I mean, in real terms, I've come out way ahead since I get a lot more PTO now and probably wouldn't have cashed much (if any) out when quitting regardless. If the alternate was to keep my measly PTO allowance but still get the possibility of cashing it out someday when I quit, I am definitely happier this way.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#478

Post by andromeduck »

ZhadruOmjar wrote: post #409
spacemadness wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we spreading the “poor performers are the ones let go” trope that hurts anyone laid off? That’s a very dangerous assumption to be spreading around blindly.

It's simply not true and very observable if you've ever been at a company that does layoffs. Plenty of good teams get let go or entire groups in the company from management down are let go, it just doesn't make sense that they would all be "low-performers". Some low-performers will be caught up in layoffs, sure, but plenty will remain at the company too.

Might be conflating groups with individuals. The teams/orgs that tend to be hit the hardest tend to be not the most productive/cutting edge except when they're research teams way out on the horizon.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#479

Post by executesorder66 »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #403
floxy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple

Glad to see people put those others in the list. Too many people assumed that Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, and related companies weren't matching offers and were somehow "worse" to work for. It was exactly the opposite. They were matching offers, and even poaching engineers from the other FAANGs. Yet they never got any respect.

> They were matching offers, and even poaching engineers from the other FAANGs. Yet they never got any respect.

Matching offers is not the only thing that gets you respect.

Microsoft = asshole company

Oracle = asshole company

Yahoo = cringe company

Many people don't want to work for them, no matter what they are offering.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#480

Post by jaza »

AtNightWeCode wrote: post #168

Is it the staff of the Teams team? Worst product ever. One can't even as a logged in user click on search results within the app without going into login hell.

Yes, Teams sucks. But (from my anecdotal observations) it's pretty popular. And in my opinion that's mainly because many companies decide: "meh, it's good enough, and it's easier (for accounting dept) and safer (for risk dept) to go with Microsoft, than to go with Slack / Zoom". Plus I'd say quite a few companies migrate to Teams from WebEx, which sucks way more, so hey, it's all relative.

So, in conclusion, Teams is probably a decent revenue earner for Microsoft at the moment, therefore I doubt that the Teams team will be hit too hard by this round of layoffs.

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