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Microsoft Rumored To Lay Off Thousands Worldwide
nandemoari writes "It seems not even Microsoft is impervious to the effects of this increasingly painful recession. According to reports, the Redmond-based company is preparing to lay off about 17 per cent of its entire workforce in the coming months.
Despite its portfolio diversity — including operating systems, antivirus software, and video game consoles — Microsoft is clearly feeling the pressure applied by a tightening global economy. In fact, there seems to be a sense of emergency to the massive cuts (about 15,000 workers out of 90,000), which rumors suggest should be made official by January 15."
Lisa Brummel is a Microsoft Senior VP. She's in charge of human resources, and given some of her other decisions internally, I think she'll do the right thing and cut some weight from Microsoft.
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These are the kind of crappy rumors (like Steve Jobs is sick, OH NOEZ!) that cause stock to drop, and then Microsoft really will have to cut some jobs.
"There can be little doubt that union activities lead to continuous and progressive inflation." F. A. Hayek
that they are acting like other companies?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Specifically, layoffs are being used as a way of culling the bottom 10 or 20% of performers in order to improve the overall performance of the company.
That'll be interesting, then. By and large, every performance measuring I've ever seen has been flawed, and unless it was for very simple jobs, greatly so.
Especially in a development environment, performance is hard to measure. There are anecdotes en masse about people who contributed very little measurable output to a project, but when they were fired the whole thing went down the drain.
Cutting "low performers" has, in my experience, always been a sign of a company in financial trouble. One that desperately needs to save money in order to please stockholders, and employees simply are one of those "cutting costs opportunities" that stockholders love.
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Microsoft have enough cash in the bank that they could afford to spend around five years with no income (not just no profits, or a small loss, but not selling a single product to anyone). They definitely don't need to fire anyone to get past an economic slump. If they had a surplus of good people, the best thing for them to do is put them all on projects with a 3-7 year horizon, and then when the recession is over they'll be in a much better position than many of their competitors who actually did have to cut their workforce.
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When lots of people job-hop in a good economy, companies will intentionally overhire to compensate. In recent months moany companies have eliminated this cushion in "modest" (single digit percentage) layoffs. Serious layoffs may be around the corner.
At my work, if a ticket comes in at a certain severity, it's my task to close the ticket, and reopen it at a lower severity. THEN start working on fixing the problem. This doesn't help me serve the clients, but it does help improve our metrics. In fact I don't think I've once heard anything about improving customer service where I work in the past year, it's all about doing more work remotely.
In theory, a company could be investing for a major project, esp. if it has lots of money in the bank.
But those days, when you have (still) have to compete with hedge fund managers who can (could) generate gobs of money doing nothing, a real company doing some real work doesn't look serious.
Hopefully this will change as a result of the current financial crisis, but I'm afraid the right lessons aren't being learned when you see the Big 3 CEOs being lampooned for not taking a bus when they were asking for 20 billions, while nobody asked the bank CEOs how many dozens of millions they spent on blow, hookers and cocaine in the past months, and the fuckers got several hundred billions, for doing nothing but fuck the whole economy up.
I worked for GE during the days of Neutron Jack Welch. The company culture was fear and intimidation. My immediate manager cried in the office at least one a week. I attended meetings where the secret agenda was that the meeting would continue until somebody cried. In management training, I was directed to march in the hallways chanting slogans to the effect that "no one is irreplaceable." I was yelled at by people who didn't even know my name. I saw people spit on each other. Two people were killed in separate suspicious fork lift accidents.
Welch told his general managers that if they did not produce returns that exceeded the market average, the first thing to happen would be the dismissal of the manager and then the business unit would be sold. The business units then ended all R&D and cut overhead to the bone by eliminating every conceivable soft benefit including the water fountains, toilet paper, and bathroom cleaning. The businesses cannibalized themselves for short term profit while the managers waited out the clock for early retirement or a new job. The successors would just have to deal with the low moral, lack of investment, and empty husk of a business left behind.
Welch was great for share holder, but he was very bad for employees. It's debatable, but he may have been very bad for GE in the long term.