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Ask Slashdot: How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need?

Posted by Soulskill on from the might-be-time-to-reevaluate-the-Clippy-department dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday, word came down that Microsoft was starting to lay off some 18,000 workers. As of June 5th, Microsoft reported a total employee headcount of 127,005, so they're cutting about 15% of their jobs. That's actually a pretty huge percentage, even taking into account the redundancies created by the Nokia acquisition. Obviously, there's an upper limit to how much of your workforce you can let go at one time, so I'm willing to bet Microsoft's management thinks thousands more people aren't worth keeping around. How many employees does Microsoft realistically need? The company is famous for its huge teams that don't work together well, and excessive middle management. But they also have a huge number of software projects, and some of the projects, like Windows and Office, need big teams to develop. How would we go about estimating the total workforce Microsoft needs? (Other headcounts for reference: Apple: 80,000, Amazon: 124,600, IBM: 431,212, Red Hat: 5,000+, Facebook: 6,800, Google: 52,000, Intel: 104,900.)

7 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. the answer is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    42

    1. Re:the answer is by Junior+J.+Junior+III · · Score: 5, Funny

      640 employees ought to be enough.

      --
      You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
  2. Re:They need exactly 63 999 employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you're gonna be pedantic, then do it right:

    64K = -209.15 C = -344.47 F
    64k = 64,000

  3. Re:How many? Hard to say by osschar · · Score: 3, Funny

    I bet you're working for the large company today :)

  4. Re:Shitpost is shit by Noah+Haders · · Score: 4, Funny

    If they care about their customers (HA!) they should put at least half the employees they're letting go into expanded testing and security divisions.

    good idea! if they sic a bunch of HR drones on to testing and security issues, the problem will be solved in weeks.

  5. Re:They need exactly 63 999 employees by Dzimas · · Score: 5, Funny

    They need exactly 63 999 employees

    You must work in the marketing department of a hard drive company.

  6. Re:Binary prefixes: Use them by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 3, Funny

    > Yes, RAM has been traditionally been measured using prefixes that imply powers of 2, but the errors have been getting worse and worse as the numbers get larger.

    Total nonsense. You never buy 16,000,000,000 bytes of RAM. You buy 16 GB = 16384 KB of RAM, because the address line is always in base 2, never base 10.

    Likewise hard disk drives are intentionally marketed to confuse people. Sectors have always been 256 bytes (Apple ][), 512 bytes (MFM) or 4096 bytes (modern HD)

    Clock cycles were measured in MegaHertz, so powers of 10 are natural.

    Getting bent out of shape because of some theoretical definition of perfection is a waste of time.