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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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
[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?
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
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.
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.
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.
I think in this case, it's to avoid lawsuits. "Buzzword Bingo" speeches are made specifically to be as vague and neutral as possible so that there's zero chance of a discrimination lawsuit from someone who gets laid off as a result of these job cuts. A friend of mine just recently showed me a good example of why executives do this. His company went through a round of layoffs, and his was one of the jobs that was cut. Rather than simply use CEO-speak and lay him off, they fired him in an attempt to dodge paying him unemployment benefits - they claimed he was sleeping on the job, but none of the statements the managers there gave to the unemployment office matched up. He brought this up in an appeal to the unemployment office, and they awarded him benefits because they saw through the company's BS.
Outside of that, though? I think it's a Jungian thing. The CEOs think that successful CEOs speak in buzzwords all the time, so they form their own CEO persona and start acting like that because they want to be successful as well. What they probably don't realize is that the truly successful CEOs don't actually do that unless it's absolutely necessary and just assume they're doing the right thing by using buzzwords all the time. Whatever gets them promoted, I guess.
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.
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...