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Microsoft CEO To Slash 18,000 Jobs, 12,500 From Nokia To Go
DW100 (2227906) writes "Satya Nadella has taken an axe to Microsoft's 127,000-strong workforce by announcing a whopping 18,000 job cuts, including 12,500 from the recently integrated Nokia division. At least 13,000 jobs will go within the next six months."
It's official, Ballmer's layoff record has been smashed. From the email sent to employees: "The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce. With this in mind, we will begin to reduce the size of our overall workforce by up to 18,000 jobs in the next year. Of that total, our work toward synergies and strategic alignment on Nokia Devices and Services is expected to account for about 12,500 jobs, comprising both professional and factory workers. We are moving now to start reducing the first 13,000 positions, and the vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months."
Right, right? No way would they need anyone from overseas for any upcoming jobs, no sirree. Won't see any work of any kind going to other countries, nope!
revenge for the start button
CEO-speak.. "building the right organization" "work towards synergies and strategic alignment" gobbledygoop
I'm all for cutting out bureaucracy where it isn't needed but come on man..
The synergy will get you.
Translation: Slash 18K jobs, apply for 18K H-1B visas.
Just another puppet inheriting the stink barge. Nothing will change at Microsoft. Cuts, layoffs, and generally contribution to economic stagnation is all these clowns are about. Pay no attention to what they ever say. Watch what they do... and it's always the same...
Just remember that companies like Valve were founded by ex-Microsoft software engineers.
The article mentions where 12,500 of the 18,000 jobs to be cut are coming from, but doesn't account for the other 5,500 jobs. There was another article on this a few days ago that mentioned people being cut from marketing teams and people cut from the Xbox division, but I wish the article would go into more detail.
Words like "synergies and strategic alignment" and right sizing are right out of the Dilbert Mission Statement generator (which used to be on the Dilbert web site). Nothing can be as demoralizing as being managed by exec's so stupid that they have never read Dilbert.
I guess Nokia's platform really was burning after all. It's just that it was arson.
Wall Street is that free loader who somehow convinced you to let him into the house. Every time one of your family members dies, he celebrates because it means more food for him.
On a more serious note, the moment you compromise your mission statement as a company in order to make money a group of people who are using you as a racing horse, sometimes even betting against you, to make a betting number go up you've lost all sense of reality and its usually just a matter of time. If Microsoft was actually all about making good products that improve people's lives and not making money for shareholders then I imagine we'd have a much different opinion of them.
That's what IBM does: lays off thousands here in the USA and just hires overseas.
And they still charge an obscene amount for their products and services.
It's all about cost arbitrage now: really cheap technical labor overseas and charge like you have 100% American or Western European labor.
Our country and economy is being bled dry by the multinationals.
While we are distracted by cheaper big screen TV and other electronic toys, the things that really matter are becoming more expensive while our pay is declining - and it's not just inflation. I see jobs here in Metro Atl that are paying $60K+ that once paid $80K+ back in the late 90s. If you include inflation, that's a hell of a pay cut.
But in the meantime, fuel, medical, education, food, housing (rents are going back up) and essentials to living are going up.
We are in a spiral to the bottom because multinational companies are importing poverty from the Third World.
Solution? I stopped buying shit. It helps that retailers are becoming more and more obnoxious. No more rip-off cable or other services like that. Smart phone? Shove it.
Food? I cook and it's all unprocessed - no packaged shit with shit additives.
Car? 20 years old and counting. And I do the maintenance: clutch, head gasket, brakes, you names it. Sorry for the local mechanic, but that's the new reality of our country.
Right, because getting ah H-1B is /really/ easy!
No bureaucratic nonsense there!
And they are also a lot cheaper, because they can be lower than comparable US workers, right, right?
http://www.h1bwage.com/index.php /sarcasm
http://www.flcdatacenter.com/
Can we skip this useless blabber?
You hire someone on H-1B because they possess quality you can't find in the country.
Hiring H-1B for cost-reduction is idiocy! (better just ship your production overseas)
Sign the petition, lets get Obama to address why we still have H1B's
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/discuss-why-we-still-allow-h1b-visas-during-slow-economy/BxntX3JC
He might as well have written "Hey everyone, stop giving a shit about your job because you're probably fired." The same thing happened for the contracted/outsourced IT dept at the hospital where I worked. They told them 2 years in advance that they were not renewing their contract and were switching to a crew from IBM. So they stopped caring, didn't follow the dress code, outsourced internal support calls to Mexico, and their support response time rose to 3 months.
Nokia can only blame itself for letting Elop become their CEO years ago.
It's amazing that this guy can run the company into the ground and still have a job. How badly do you have to screw up to get fired as a CEO?
With 12,500 gone from the Nokia, is there going to be anyone left at (what was formerly known as Nokia) after this? Or did Microsoft just kill off their phone division?
[Posting AC because I'm talking about my own employer.]
Bullshit. H1-Bs save employers more than enough to pay for the bureaucratic overhead of hiring them. That's a one-time cost that's easily amortized over the three or six years of the visa, and if you hire lots of H1-Bs, the process can be pretty well streamlined. You can even outsource the paperwork.
The last time I had to hire two code monkeys, the company hired an agency in India to find H1-B candidates. We interviewed over 20 candidates, and made offers to ten. Two of them turned out to have misrepresented their work histories, we finally hired two, and the rest ran screaming the other way when they saw what we offered. It was infuriating, but the bean-counters wouldn't budge. Get people who will take what we offer or do without.
This is what companies do. Their employees aren't their greatest asset, they're their greatest cost center. In the long term, it's stupid, but the suits don't care. They only care about this quarter's (or this week's) results. Why buy socks at Nordstrom when you can buy them at Walmart?
We have buzzword BINGO in the first paragraph. Holy cow.
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-02-22/
Here's the thing.
We are moving now to start reducing the first 13,000 positions, and the vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months."
They are announcing layoffs that will not be implemented, in some cases for over 6 months in the future. That means, for over 6 months, Microsoft employees won't know for sure whether they will be laid off or kept. In management terms, that is going to result in dramatically lower morale and productivity for half a year for what? So that Microsoft can announce 5,000 more layoffs than they are actually capable of firing right now.
It really just shows how much more Microsoft cares about stock value than running a good company.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Microsoft from going to congress and crying that they need more H1-B's because they can't find workers with the skills that they need.
And when you had to present evidence of how much a US citizen earned doing the same job, and why the salary you were paying these guys was at least as high, how did you prove that?
MS already has a hideous management technique called "stack ranking" that killed morale (http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/03/the-terrible-management-technique-that-cost-microsoft-its-creativity/). Now some idiot in management decides to float the story about 5K jobs going away in 6 months and couch it in Dilbert weasel words. So everyone who is not demoralized enough by stack ranking will be terrified by this announcement.
>the vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months.
Really? With that one half of a sentence, you've just killed morale for 6+ months.
You're looking at it all wrong, from an employee mentality.
You need to look at it from a PHB mentality - telling people they *might* get fired in the next 6 months is incentive for them to work harder so that their job isn't the one that's cut (nevermind the fact that management decided who was to go a long, long time ago).
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
That's been true of most companies since the .com era.
Long term thinking is out the window in favor of short term increases to the stock, which increases the net worth of the CEO and makes them darlings of Wall Street.
That they might be actually harming the company long term is irrelevant.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The management is so bad at MS that I wonder if they have a Dead Sea effect. First there was "Stack Ranking", then the stifling of innovation, loss of market share, and now the looming huge layoffs in the next 6 months. You have to believe that all the best people have left or will leave shortly leaving just the salt. This will further stifle innovation...
Very true. How the board was misinformed to the point of doing a such clear suicide is still part of the hidden story. Even more strange is the constant support the board give to the CEO even after all the alarms was turning full red. The "No plan B" concept was the biggest mistake ever from a board.
That means, for over 6 months, Microsoft employees won't know for sure whether they will be laid off or kept.
Which means the most talented and valuable employees will find new jobs before there are layoffs, and Microsoft will end up keeping the ones that couldn't find a job elsewhere.
How does this make Microsoft better?
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Present evidence to whom? There is no oversight of the H1-B program. What country are you from, if you don't mind my asking? (not being snarky, I'm genuinely curious)
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
Bullshit, the forms you need to fill in when you submit your H1-B application require you to provide listings of similar jobs, and how much you pay them. I'm from the UK, but I live in the US, under an H1-B, hence knowing what you have to fill in on the forms ;).
In some (many?) countries, sizable lay-offs have to be announced well in advanced by law - they may just be trying to accommodate for this.
Sorry, but nobody checks any of that out, thus, there's nothing to stop any company from putting whatever they want on the form and then paying the employee much, much less. You didn't get fucked over because you're from the UK, congratulations. It's much easier to fuck over people, from third-world shitholes like India, who think $30k/yr is a lot of money.
I hope you're enjoying your time in the colonies, anyway.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
Yeah, my company escorted me out the gate because I was a network jockey and they didn't want me to sabotage the system.
Two days later they're calling me with, "How do we ...," and "What's the passwords for ...," and "Where are the ..."
I offered to respond by email:
"The Firm has made the decision to "right-size" its IT department to better align with strategies going forward. In support of that decision, I know the Firm has retained the very best-of-breed systems analysts and I think we should rely on those superior personnel to figure out what knowledge I departed with. I know you will agree that Firm policy prohibits sensitive communication with non-employees and it is with a spirit of cooperation that I decline to ever speak to any of you ever again."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Microsoft brought over 25,000 Nokia employees in the merger of which 12,500 are to be laid off in the next 6 months. Probably all that's left is the hardware engineers, with nearly all of software, marketing and management getting the boot.
Mergers & Acquisitions. It's a Wall Street Term of Art that describes the rape and murder of smaller companies by bigger ones.
During several rounds of layoffs I experienced in 2009, all of the workers laid off were non-H1-B holders. H1-Bs have better job security than their American counterparts (until they get their green card). I won't be surprised that the 18,000 are going to be either Western European or Americans. Hey at least in Western Europe they have better social services and losing your job won't be the end of your health care and other necessary services. America? Fuck it, you are out on the streets if you didn't save like a hawk. In this economy, finding a job will be very difficult, especially with that many hitting the streets at once.
Get rid of the dead weight and retrain the rest. You won't ever need H1-B to fill any jobs if your workforce is always trained and on the cutting edge.
Why are tech companies under the same quarter-to-quarter cycle as fast food and retail industries? You can't get anything meaningful done in a quarter.
I used to have a sign in my cube that read "The floggings will continue until morale improves." That seems to be the Microsoft strategy.
Your "fair share" is NOT in my wallet.
Don't you mean Stephen Elop? If Elon Musk had taken over Nokia, chances are Nokia would have ended up owning Samsung not being acquired by Microsoft.
India is a third world 'shithole'? Ouch, that hurts, because that is only one facet of the reality. I am an Indian here, who got his PhD in computer engineering from the USA and lived there for a decade before returning to my homeland. :)
You are right, compared to developed countries, India is yet a shithole going by the infrastructure, public cleanliness and rampant corruption. But methinks you have not been here yet
Do visit India! You will find many wonderful things here like the many schools of spirituality, Yoga, Ayurveda and the natural scenic beauty. Many different religions coexist here relatively peacefully most of the time. Its a culturally extraordinarily rich country with mostly mild mannered people who for the most part follow a philosophy of peace. We have never initiated war with any of our neighboring countries despite continuous provocations.
I am sure you know this funny anecdote: Around the time of the World War II, a reporter asked Mahatma Gandhi in London as to what he thought of Western civilization? Gandhi: "I think it will be a good idea."
Most CEO's and Executive Level types are sociopaths.
Perhaps not "Most CEO's", but the position tends to attract them: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ke...
You stereotypers are all the same...
I am a foreign worker under H1B and currently in the process of applying for PERM. I don't know how other places are doing, but where I work (a US university) all these forms are posted on the boards of the building. They are right there for anybody to see AND complain if they think something is wrong or the position is unnecessary.
I know many H1B and they are not underpaid compared to the other people in the same company.
In this story, they are mostly firing assembly line workers from nokia it seems. Do you really believe they will manage to get an H1B to do that kind of job? I hardly think so.