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Massive Job Cuts Are Reportedly Coming For Microsoft Employees
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes with news that Microsoft is reportedly planning a major staff reduction that would top Steve Ballmer's record 5,800-head layoff in 2009. From the article: The reductions — which may be unveiled as soon as this week — will probably be in areas such as Nokia and divisions of Microsoft that overlap with that business, as well as marketing and engineering, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public.
Domination in the desktop eroding. Products not making a big splash in the market. Shareholders restless and right after an announcement by the new CEO about agility and business realignment. All of these things add up to reductions in force in areas where they're not profitable. It'll be interesting to see if the cuts will be across the board.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Microsoft has collected too many employees. They absorb them into a corporate culture of ineffectuality, ensuring that they will perform below expectations.
Pity that corporations like this always seem to want to lay everyone off at once, though. Why can't they do it gradually?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They have to pay for microsoft licenses for each employee. Of course they are going bust.
...when you are using linux.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I know when Ballmer resigned as CEO, there were members of Microsoft's board calling for them to drop the Xbox division entirely because it wasn't profitable enough. The article mentions that people on the marketing teams for the Xbox are among those being cut, and I'm wondering if this isn't MS taking the first steps to selling off the Xbox division to someone else.
merica
RIP Nokia.
Not surprising at all. When a company buys another company, there's going to be a lot of jobs that are duplicated with the efforts of the buyer. Sure, there's an increased workload but nowhere near enough to justify continuing to pay people when you already have people able to do the job. And, when you have two people able to do one job, one of whom works for you and one of whom works for that other company that you just bought, the vast majority of time it's the outside who is let go. Sad reality of consolidation of companies but it isn't surprising at all.
In other words, if your company is ever bought out, you need to ask yourself if there's already someone at the buyer who's able to do your job. If the answer is "yes", you need to start polishing off your resume and getting in touch with head hunters because there's a high likelihood of you being out of work soon.
One has to be careful about demoralizing effect of these huge layoffs. Employees you most want to stay will perceive the company as a thinking ship and quit or start slacking off in disgust. A company like Microsoft has enough money in the bank to go through a slower and more transparent process. Offer everyone who is performing well a six month contract and a chance to find a permanent position in the meantime. Above all, explain to remaining employees exactly what is it that they gain for sticking around. Raises? Stock grants? New perks?
here.. Satya Nadella said that he would "reduce time it takes to get things done by having fewer people involved in each decision" and this poster translated it:
"reduce time it takes to get things done by having fewer people involved in each decision = layoffs"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Or at least sell off the group. Who knows maybe they could even make a little money and give them a fighting chance of survival. But I suppose salting the earth is better for everyone all around.
If mini microsft was one of the ones cut as he/she has been vocal about the need to cut "dead wood" as they see it
and now we see how incompetent scabs are destroying another company.
How much you wanna bet that they continue to ask for H1B candidates after the next round of layoffs?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I would look at this a boon for other companies trying to find good people. One company's waste is other company's gold.
Ship: "We are sinking! I repeat: We are thinking!"
Coast guard: "What are you thinking about?"
I wonder how this will affect Microsoft's stock price? If you cut a lot of heads you might lose some productivity and the quality of your product might drop. But it seems like everybody already hates what Microsoft is selling, but they have to buy it anyway. In that kind of situation, lowering their costs to expand their profit for no change in revenue doesn't seem like a bad idea. This is, of course, assuming those layoffs aren't coming out of key R&D departments (though the company is already seen as primarily a dividend stock with limited growth prospects). They've got a ton of cash and steady profits, this certainly isn't a move forced by necessity.
The article suggests that the cuts are primarily hitting ex-Nokia employees that serve redundant functions with the pre-existing MS departments, as well as marketing and engineering. Should they have been kept on? He did mention his future focus would be in mobile. Anyway, I hope these people land on their feet, maybe in a better job and in a better work environment. A lot of people's lives get upended when big layoffs hit, more than just the employees laid off.
Problem is they are that slow with dev for Windows Phone they could easily do with double the staff just to get something done in a timely fashion.
it's about time that any one useing any h1b's must lay them off first.
Developers, developers, developers?
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
This is a normal cyclical occurrence in companies such as Microsoft, they'll have skimmed off the kids who can actually write C++ compiled binary and assembler software well, and thrown the rest out. I know from years of experience, you'll think you are in a room full of programmers but in reality there will approximately two brainy kids amongst 200. This is the nature of human intelligence, it's a rare commodity and MOST people are “wannabes.”
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Buuuuuttttt - it's also an excuse to clean house. There will be layoffs at Microsoft itself.
AND you will see some quiet hiring overseas in some Third World country.
MS is going to go all IBM, Oracle, HP - cheap Third World development; First World prices.
The big margins go into the CEO's pocket.
But hey! Any one of us can do that, riiiighhht?!
All we have to do is make the contacts to get those CEO jobs and we too can have a job that pays outrageously regardless of our performance!
You don't need consumer products to be successful, relevant, or profitable. Nor does one need business products for those results. Just look at Apple, which has transformed itself from a "computer company" to a "consumer products company," with its emphasis on phones, tablets and residual income from providing the infrastructure for delivering music and applications *created by others*.
Oracle continues to be quite profitable (and hated, I guess) while having nearly zero visible presence among consumers. Business markets are worth a lot, and demand a different sort of expertise as compared to consumer markets.
"said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public"
Well, I guess who know who is getting fired.
This is probably just about MS laying off all the useless middle management from ex-Nokia divisions. Nokia failed because they had practically unrestricrted growth of middle management at the expense of R&D. This diet is necessary. Under the original Finnish management Nokia had no balls to lay off anybody. Finland is unfortunately still largely a 1960s-style socialist market economy where layoffs mean labor union strikes and the emloyer being deemed socially irresponsible.
Isn't Microsoft a big proponent of the H1B program? This smells like them cleaning house of old expensive greybeards.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
... stocks.
They sell stocks. They cater to the shareholder and that's a money-grubbing bunch of folks.
Look at Facebook. They are making decisions that are radical departures from their pre-IPO culture. It has to be.
Facebook, too, sells stocks.
Knowing that explains the business model and strategy of public corporations.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Eroding? Hah.
The number of offices (of any kind) that I've seen running non-Microsoft software on end-user systems can be counted on one hand. Offices -- which is to say, businesses -- are what counts. They don't just get software that comes with the computer. They pay for upgrades ("maintenance") and technical support. They pay for their actual usage, because they agree to be audited for license compliance as part of the deal. I don't remember the last office I saw that WASN'T an academic institution that wasn't running Exchange. Exchange/Outlook make the world go 'round at these places. After 20+ years of effort, it mostly works. Why would companies get rid of it in favor of an inferior solution? Just imagine the hell of migrating all that old email, required for all sorts of compliance, to another solution.
Maybe you don't have Microsoft software running your phone or tablet, but it still powers employee desktops and servers all over the place. All of that is quite high margin. An Intel-based Windows tablet can run an awful lot of software that is STILL unavailable for the other mobile platforms.
And, frankly, while I don't use the Modern UI on my Win8.1 desktop (in favor of Classic Shell), I quite like Windows Phone 8. I like it a lot better than iOS, in fact. I didn't think I would, but a missing smartphone had me using a $70 Windows Phone for a week. (There is no Android phone selling for under $150 that's worth using.) I was hooked.
Once again the employees pay for managements mistakes. Everyone could see, clear as day, what Microsoft was doing wrong. Hell, it's still obvious, and anyone with an ounce of common sense could turn that company around. Instead they just keep firing off moonshot after moonshot hoping to rediscover the next product that will be as successful as Windows was. How many more billions are you going going to waste before you realize people aren't willing to pay for an OS anymore?!?! You still have a dominate position in the desktop OS market, use that to make "Reasonable" profits and be ok with that! If you continue with the belief that anything less than double digit growth is failure you'll be bankrupt before the end of the decade. Ever read that Tortoise and the hair story? Oh... nevermind.
Oh, if we're going to joke about a typo... obviously iamacat worked at IBM. (Good age test). (Yes, they really truly actually had little signs that said simply "THINK.")
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Give Microsoft a break. How are they supposed to replace all those over-priced American employees with more H1Bs and recently amnestied illegals if they don't clear out the current liabilities first?
Blame Julie Larson-Green.
She's responsible for this and the awful Office ribbon: perfect examples of graphic design stomping all over useability
Why she's still around: I think this is a case of people being swayed by her personal "charisma" and not facing the fact that Windows 8 "metro" is a gimmicky circus act that literally gets in the way of using Windows. Just terrible!
Pity that corporations like this always seem to want to lay everyone off at once, though. Why can't they do it gradually?
Because doing it gradually is a Really Bad Idea (TM). If you have to let people go you need to be able to tell the staff that is left that their jobs are safe and mean it. Otherwise morale goes in the toilet with people constantly wondering if they are next on the chopping block. I can show you tons of case studies where companies did layoffs a few at a time and the result was a staff that never was sure they'd have a job tomorrow and performance suffered accordingly. People start brushing up their resumes instead of doing the work they were hired for. Nobody likes layoffs but doing them gradually is far worse than doing it all at once.
they have a marketing department? Yeah, they probably deserve to be let go.
Only if you keep it a big secret why the people were fired.
Explaining why someone was let go is a great way to get yourself sued if you aren't super careful. Particularly if the person terminated is a member of a protected group like a minority. Terminating employees is (almost) never good for morale but if you have to let a lot of them go then you want to do it all at once, explain in general terms the business reason why but no specifics about a particular person and explain why you will not have to let anyone else go after this. I've seen first hand what happens to companies that try the slow band-aid removal method and the results are not pretty.
If they were fired for an actual business reason, that reason should not need to be kept a secret.
The reasons usually aren't a secret (office gossip might be the only thing that travels faster than light) but unless it is something like "we are getting out of this line of business" you have to be VERY careful about what you say. Any competent HR pro will tell you that terminating employees can be something of a legal minefield if you don't do it right. This includes employees that were terminated For Cause. Some of this caution is unfortunately absurd but it is equally necessary.
Layoffs raise the stock price.
Sometimes, sometimes not. The effect of layoffs on stock price is not causal. You can easily find cases where the stock price drops when layoffs are announced when investors take it as a signal of deteriorating strategic position.
Most stock holders are short term, so buy low, sell high.
Depends on what you consider short term. Average length of share holding is somewhere between 6 months and a year depending on the exchange and considerably less frequent for privately held companies. Bearing in mind that this is heavily skewed by high frequency traders you can make a pretty good argument that the majority of shareholders hold stocks for well over a year which our taxing authorities consider long term.
Linux O/S in cloud vs Windows O/S in cloud. It can be a big difference. MSDN vs other IDE costs. Sure they bundle lots of benefits that are free to them but only used by some small percentage of those that want VS Ultimate features.
Who will buy the phones now?
I think the new CEO has been somewhat transparent and straight forward. He has an developer, problem solver background. He understands Signal to Noise ratio.
Marketing and Testers are insulation for Developers, to filter out noise and blanket them in isolation.. it also dulls their senses including the sense of responsibility.
In a vacumn people tend to find other things to do with this new found freedom, that doesn't focus on their Job and usually turns to family.. work takes a back seat.
Anyone given that luxury would defend their position as an earned entitlement. But the company doesn't propser under that model.. it slows.. gets more insensitive to customer needs.. becomes irrelevant.
The new CEO is unwrapping their producers cocoon.. and making them responsible... or giving them the opportunity to go elsewhere. If they feel entitlement more important they are already too far gone to save as employees.
A company can't exist just to serve the needs of employees.. it must also exist to serve the needs of customers.. and to produce a profit. That's just how the world works.
As for HB1 and outsourcing, I think he understands the downsides better than any person from the US. In fact in recent moves he seems to distrust the Foreign Government involvements in SSL Cert CA issuance and making moves to bring that back on shore. The playing field is not level across the board and near term and long term producing product outside the country is much more expensive than a superficial observation might make it appear to be.
The crux of the issue is he appears to be looking for good employees and not "Lifers" and will unfortuantely be upsetting the Apple cart for a little while.
He might not survive the transition.. but he has a history or moving on when the job warrants it personally. And at his salary he could probably afford to retire comfortably.
If you meant it, you'd give them contracts.
Not realistic and at the end of the day probably less valuable to morale than company management that actually does what it says it is going to do. Believe it or not, it is actually possible to promise that you will do everything you can to prevent layoffs and mean it. I would be happy to introduce you to quite a few company owners who actually care a lot about the people working for them.
Anyone who feels like their job is safe without one is a blithering idiot. If your employees are so easily pacified, you must be riding herd on a gaggle of morons.
A contract won't save your job if the company goes under. In bankruptcy court contracts often become null and void. Anyone who thinks a contract will secure their job in tough economic times or against bad company strategy is a blithering idiot.
That said, these mass layoffs only become necessary when people aren't let go when they actually deserve it.
Only sometimes true. Sometimes the company just runs into unexpected or unavoidable trouble. A lot of companies had to wield the layoff ax back in 2008-9 for reasons that had nothing to do with retaining too many bad employees. My company was one of them. Our revenues dropped to 1/3 of their previous level almost literally overnight thanks to the financial meltdown and because we run a tight ship we didn't really have many crap employees to let go. We had to let some good people go through no fault of their own or that of management. It was just a bad beat as they say in poker.
So you don't need to make or sell products.
Baghdad Bob, is that you?
Now, this might be a coincidence but LinkedIn's email just informed me, today, for the first time, that Nokia is hiring in Athens.
I'm sure there is a big demand for those folks with MCSE certifications - Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Right now, MS is loaded with some of the worst coders in the world. They continue to produce loads of crap. And like IBM, they have been following the path of finding cheaper, rather than better.
If they let a lot of trash go and start hiring GOOD coders, they might actually finally produce a decent OS.
But thankfully, that has not happened in nearly 50 years, so....
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Look out, M$ is firing in the US and EU and hiring in Vietnam and India or anywhere else where employees can be had fora bag o' beans.
I wonder how people hiring for software jobs will view Microsoft experience on someone's resume. Undoubtedly, Microsoft once held an enormous pool of very high talent, but their products seemed to have reached local maxima, where new versions are merely different, not better, and sometimes worse.
Would you hire someone who was used to making software knowing their customers hated what they did to it?
that the ones who made Windows 8 are among them....
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Wow. Prepare for some serious employee dissatisfaction once everyone is migrated to Bloated Goats.
Daimler switched from Exchange to Notes in 2008, just before the economy crashed. The ensuing deep hatred of Notes (at the frontline employee level) never, ever subsided. Some suit with a clue finally realized that Notes was a mistake and 6 years later (Q1 2014), the company switched back to Exchange and Outlook.
I really hope the start getting rid of those outsourced and/or talentless Indians, especially those who know FISH all about their job and rely on creating drama and pushing their responsibilities on others to fix their problems for them.
As an engineer who works with MS, I'm sick and tired of getting nothing but misery from them...
If Office were really on Linux I think you'd see Windows practically disappear.
Either you're wrong, or people don't know that Office runs just fine under Linux. I was a bit surprised too, but I have it running under Wine & haven't had any problems with it.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I agree with this, AMAZING build quality for a sub-$100 phone, which I own. But yet again, I will have to switch platforms since Windows Phone is being abandoned. Thanks Microsoft!
I would start with the person responsible for the debacle known as Windows 8. It's doesn't make sense to ignore the feedback that people didn't want a phone interface on their desktop computers. Not only that MS made the same mistake in reverse with Windows CE when they tried to force the desktop interface on the phone.
Google "Companies ruined or almost ruined by Indians".
Casteism
This reminds me of Chrysler before Lee Iacocca. The CEO before him was an accountant and fired the engineers to make the bottom line look better and improve the stock position. It worked for a while until Chrysler ended up with no new product and no one bought their cars. How much more so with software and Microsoft
I don't think Gary is a great example of design defeating purpose.
Gary's design is somewhat grotesque and awkward: but that's exactly the kinds of things he highlights about the human experience. So it fits.