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Ask Slashdot: How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need?
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.)
42
64 should be enough for every company
If you have a business division that you want to maintain, then there's a limit to how many you can get rid of. But Microsoft are clearly closing divisions. They are closing their x-box spin off TV studios, so all those staff can go. Clearly there are large chunks of Nokia that they want to close, likely maintaining the hardware designers but if you're in Nokia marketing, or Symbian/Android software development your coat is on a shoogly nail as they say in Scotland. Similarly, it looks like Nokia manufacturing will also be outsourced, so there are thousands more jobs that will go.
Inside Microsoft is a bit different. From what I've read, it looks like there will be some streamlining of management, so some layers of management will be cut. Most people on here will have seen how management can breed more management, so this is a pretty typical corporate response. Unfortunately for the managers losing their job it may be harder to find a new job. Where a division closes there's always the possibility of a sale to a competitor or some form of management buy out.
How many H1-B visas are they requesting?
fire everybody hire contractors
What the fuck do you want us to do? Know every single details about that company and come back with a definite number of employees it needs? Nobody here can do that.
What a shitty submission.
64K is 65635
It would be nice if they just had one person in the company who can see that Windows 8.1 and metro are a piece of shit and is in a position to get rid of them.
Windows is currently unusable on the desktop.
About half of Apple's employees are retail employees (working in Apple stores). Only about 40,000 work as developers, testers, etc.
Apple's 2013 10-K Annual Report states
"As of September 28, 2013, the Company had approximately 80,300 full-time equivalent employees and an additional 4,100 full-time equivalent temporary employees and contractors. Approximately 42,800 of the total full-time equivalent employees worked in the Company’s Retail segment."
My son is certified as a Microsoft Architect and at one point in his career was a senior Microsoft executive. He described the upper levels as very political. There was little team spirit.There was a lot of jockeying for position, backstabbing and attempts to degrade people to to elevate yourself. He eventually left and started his own company (which is doing quite well. He just bought a 40' RV)
Unless you always leave the first byte empty, 64KiB is 65536 bytes.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
65535!
... enough to deprive potential competitors of necessary human resources.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
and scaling back XBox. The CEO more or less said he wanted to cut XBox because it wasn't profitable enough, and Nokia is a no-brainer. Microsoft lost the smart phone/tablet war big, and they've probably got redundancies to eliminate.
The part that I'm wondering about is with these new, ultra efficient companies that merge up like crazy how much work is there going to be for the rest of us to do? Between that an automation it just looks like we're running out of work to do..
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This week, I got a real WTF when dealing with Microsoft products and the amazing amount of redundancy that is possible in the company.
We have a robot product that we can communicate to using Bluetooth SPP and we are creating an application that can control it remotely. We originally went with a serial interface (after pairing, recording the "com#" of the device and then passing it to our application), this is somewhat cumbersome so we wanted to pair from our app and connect directly (saving the user from doing those operations manually).
Logically, this would be one set of APIs, but it seems there are five depending on the OS - the only ones that are common are for Vista/Win7. I would think that right here there are four teams that are redundant - pick a single, consistent API, add it in Service Packs for all supported OSes and assign one team to the job.
I would expect there are many more examples out there of similar inefficiencies that somebody within Microsoft should be able to answer with the ability to make things easier for developers and make developers available for squishing bugs.
Sorry about the rant, but standard IO interface APIs should be just that, standard.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
64KiB = 65536 Bytes
64K = 64,000
In no unit of measurement is 64K(anything) = 65635.
65535 is however the maximum value expressible by an unsigned 16-bit binary number.
Thirty four characters live here.
This guy can sell anything! Even Reversi and Windows 8!
Too bad he's gone now.
Because how would anyone here have a clue?
I work concurrently in a large company (45,000 employees) and a small company (50-ish, but for years we were in the 5-8 range). I am solidly convinced that the larger a company gets, the higher the number of excess employees.
How do I work concurrently in both companies? My primary employer is the small company, but the large company has subcontracted me via my primary employer to work in their HQ 3 days a week because a specific department (which my primary employer specializes in) is swamped, or so they say. So, 3 days a week I work at the big place with very little to do and end up doing a small amount of work and lots of web browsing or reading or working remotely as I'm able on tasks for the small company. And then 2 days a week I'm at the small company, swamped and playing catch-up.
Granted, this is but one example, but the contrast I see on a daily basis is stunning. Even in my smaller employer I see us getting more inefficiencies and "dead weight" employees. Back when our employee count was in the single digits, it was a whole different ballgame. We were small. We didn't have the resources to carry extra employees. When someone would quit, it was a huge deal because we'd be losing literally like a sixth of our entire workforce. And it was a fun environment! It truly felt like a tightly connected team.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I've been employed at the small company for 16 years and have no desire to leave. But to get back to the original question, the bigger a company gets, the more dead weight they'll carry until the times get really tough. Then, you'll see where they can cut the fat.
Here's an example. A few decades ago, the Rock Island railroad was a well-known railroad across the Midwest. They went bankrupt in about 1980 if memory serves. Leading up to their insolvency, they ended up leading the industry in getting down to a 2-person train crew because they simply had no money to pay additional crew members. From what I've heard, managers literally told train crews "Tough luck, you get an engineer and a conductor because we can't afford to pay for a brakeman." And now the industry standard is a 2-person train crew.
Aside from Microsoft, a FAR better question would be (not to turn this political, but it's a fair question): "How many employees does $government really need?"
Where am I going with this? I'm not sure. Maybe I'm rambling because I'm bored. :)
Omg! Off by one errors everywhere!
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
"The company is famous for its huge teams that don't work together well, and excessive middle management." Can you guess which one causes the other?
... For the given area, are they embracing, extending, or extinguishing the relevant technology? Embracing requires a few talking heads. Extending requires acquisitions and/or development staff. Extinguishing... well, we're seeing the final results of that here....
If you're gonna be pedantic, then do it right:
64K = -209.15 C = -344.47 F
64k = 64,000
The Nokia aquisition added 25k to their roster and they are cutting 18k. So why all the big hupla?
Just a rule of thumb I've seen in the lower end of the tech market to stay profitable. At $100B revenue (per year), that's 200K employees. At 110K employees, they're around 900K per employee, which is great.
Notice that the range 0..65535 is actually 65536 bytes. You can think of it as counting the 0th byte too.
does IBM have 400k employees? is the count ~300k for temp staff?
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I work concurrently in a large company (45,000 employees) and a small company (50-ish, but for years we were in the 5-8 range). I am solidly convinced that the larger a company gets, the higher the number of excess employees.
certainly large companies have more excess employees, after all the are larger and if only 10% of a company's employees are excess then, using your example, one has 45k and the other 5 excess employees. I suspect the percentage is larger at large companies because it is easy to hide employees and hire, rathe than layoff, staff.
What is the right number of employees? It depends; largely on their revenue generating ability.I've worked at companies where if an employee was billable 65% of the time everyone was happy. I've worked projects where I did 20 hours of work and 40 of free time and that was fine because we still had huge margins. Not having the staff to put on projects costs more than keeping them around so they can work high margin jobs. I've worked at big companies and small ones and in defense of big ones is when you need resources to throw at project they have them; whereas small ones often don't.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I bet you're working for the large company today :)
Nice flamebait, but let's make it an educational moment:
Every product/project-centric company builds up cruft over time, and not just Microsoft. Intel does periodic flushes as they dump R&D groups (I used to work for DHG at Intel). OTOH, let's face it - Microsoft's habit of counter-productivity between teams (coupled with their previous habit of stack-ranking employees) is frickin' *legendary*. MSFT seriously does need to clean house, and badly. They aren't the hungry company they were back in the '80s and '90s, and they've become about as nimble as a supertanker with a busted rudder. I mean, c'mon - who the hell else would sink untold billions of R&D money into a product (XBox/360/One) that still has yet to realize overall ROI, 15 years later?
The new CEO has a big job ahead of him. He's seen what happens to most tech companies as they reach middle age, and he knows that there's no crazy-ass visionary (e.g. Steve Jobs) coming to jump in and revitalize them.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If they really wanted to do what was right for the stock holders, they should acknowledge that they've got an incredibly lucrative income stream from a gradually dying product line. They should milk the Windows/Office franchise for everything they can, while cutting down development which only at this point enrages customers who have to spend big bucks on migration costs.
Cut everything way back, and send every penny you make straight back to the stock holders (i.e. an Income Trust).
MS Stock would instantly become the hottest income stock on the market. "Hey, we're *not* going to blow every penny we've made for the last 30 years in a futile attempt to stave off the end of our industry. We're just going to make you very, very wealthy!"
MS is sitting on the world's most profitable oil field. There's no shame in acknowledging that it won't last forever - just exploit it as profitably (i.e. cheaply) as possible and give the money to the stock holders.
Consider the history of major software projects, and how many employees were required. BSD unix was a university project, developed by faculty and students. Linux was developed initially by one person, and then a relatively small team. NeXT was developed by a fairly small team over a relatively small amount of time. Mac OSX was basically the NeXT system ported over to the Mac platform; at the time, Apple had about a tenth of the employees of Microsoft, and was under significant financial stress. iOS and the iPhone were developed by a very small team within Apple (20+ employees if I am not mistaken). The interesting thing is that all of these systems have displayed remarkable stability and security. This likely has something to do with the fact that these OS's are all unix derived. However I find it interesting that such excellent products did not require large numbers of programmers to develop.
Contrast the above with the offerings of Microsoft over recent years. Most especially consider Vista, Win7 and Win8. During the development of these systems, Microsoft had a huge number of excellent programmers. Why did it take them so long to develop these operating system versions? Why has MS had such difficulty porting over to different processor architectures, such as ARM? Apple has had no such difficulty, porting OSX/ iOS from PowerPC to Intel to ARM. I believe that a fundamental cause of the difficulties that MS has experience with Windows lies in the early stages of operating system development. Whereas the systems based on Unix were built on a solid and proven foundation from their earliest versions, Microsoft has from a very early stage shown a tendency to build its own early versions on its own unproven architecture, with the intention of fixing the significant problems later.
Early versions of Windows 95 had very limited networking protocols, that were intended for home networking only. Wide area networking was added as an afterthought. Contrast this with unix variants, which are based on an architecture that grew up in an environment of university main-frames with hostile tinkering computer science students vying to break the system.
Anyone who worked with Windows 95 can attest to the buggy mess that it was. I supported people using it, and I remember the problems. User says, "my system crashed so I rebooted it. It still didn't work so I rebooted it again. It still didn't solve the problem." Tech guy responds, "well there's your problem. Tap the computer twice, pray to the god of your choice, and reboot it a third time, and it should be fixed."
Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8 all originate from that same architecture, right down to the fact that they all share the engineering disaster that is "the registry". How can Windows ever be truly solid when it is built on such a bad foundation. I believe that the reason why Microsoft has had such difficulty building a solid OS stems from this weak foundation. It explains why it took MS many years and a staff 10x that of Apple to build the marvel that was Vista. As Mythbusters showed, it is possible to polish a turd. However it takes a lot of effort. And in the end, you still only finish with a polished turd.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
7.878... × 10^287188
we don't even have that many protons in the universe
It seems to me that anyone who says this, I synthesized our strategic direction..., is utterly incompetent at coordinating a large group. That is unthinking corporate-speak. It communicates non-verbally that he has no understanding of what is needed.
..."
More:
"... realign our workforce..."
"... work toward synergies and strategic alignment..."
"... drive greater accountability..."
"... become more agile and move faster."
"... fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways,
"... flattening organizations..."
"... increasing the span of control of people managers."
"... our business processes and support models will be more lean and efficient with greater trust between teams."
Comment: Corporate-speak does not build trust, it destroys trust.
"... more productive, impactful teams..."
"Each organization is starting at different points and moving at different paces."
Comment: That is utterly obvious.
"We will realize the synergies..."
"... align to Microsoft's strategic direction."
"... we will focus on breakthrough innovation that expresses and enlivens..."
"... builds on our success in the affordable smartphone space..."
"... aligns with our focus..."
I'm very interested in the sociology of this. My understanding is that the Microsoft board of directors is utterly incompetent, has little understanding of technology, and merely chose the person to be CEO who was consistently most pleasant and ingratiating.
A competent CEO would not announce a huge advancement until it was already accomplished.
The sweeping changes Satya Nadella is announcing require huge amounts of research and understanding. It is simply not possible to accomplish successfully a re-organization of a huge company as though it were one action.
A competent top coordinator would announce a little at a time and provide meaningful and detailed explanation about why each change was necessary, and how decisions were made.
A competent top coordinator would make it clear that much of the wisdom of ideas about changes came from other people inside the company.
My opinions.
Hmmm, how'd you guess? :)
A mass layoff would normally be a tragic thing for the employees. However, these are people with programming experience from a top tier computer company. With all the recent reports of the huge need for more coders, they should have no trouble getting new jobs. RIGHT?
They need exactly 63 999 employees
You must work in the marketing department of a hard drive company.
Because they don't need any of the former, but low and behold, a half million of the latter.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
just that last one to turn out the light. At least for the mobile division.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need?
With any luck, no more than is necessary to shut the doors and turn out the lights.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
4 levels? How many direct reports do you expect one manager to effectively handle? I'm at the 3rd level in my organization (we've varied between 80-120k employees over the last dozen years) with 5 direct reports, and and additional 58 below them at several locations in different timezones. And yet, I'm still 5 levels below our division president...not even the CEO.
I'm sure you could tell me how my time could be used more effectively managing many more people. I'm looking forward to your reference to where you've successfully implemented this strategy.
Just another day in Paradise
You understand that for a balanced organization EVERY manager would need 18-19 direct reports. That is crazy. I don't want the CEO having 18 direct reports, and I certainly don't want my boss having 18 direct reports. Doesn't work
Frankly, if you think 3 is a good idea - I would have you fired as most engineering departments NEED outside input - otherwise you end up with Linux/OSS in general where they think the best idea for a leading editor is either VI or EMACS. I don't even know why that is a debate.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
HP has over 317,000 employees, thanks in large part to acquisitions - Microsoft is no different here.
Lots of redundancies can be eliminated (unfortunately for those employees) - and in some ways, this is a very bad thing. As monopolies grow, they are able to be more efficient and eliminate jobs. We don't stop and think about the fact that in a massive conglomerate corporation place once stood several competing corporations that meant competition (lower prices, better service to consumers) and more jobs - but of course, less return to investors and less pay to executives.
This is a troubling trend, as the American Dream is snuffed and the middle class finds itself dwindling deeper into poverty, while the richest seem to work tirelessly to increase that gap. I'm no socialist or communist, but it occurred to me the goal of these assholes wasn't to get richer - that's something that happens when you are that rich anyway - it is to make the rest of us poorer.
... to close the door on the way out
mod me funny
How many employees does the US Govt really need.
I'm not sure including Amazon in the list is a reasonable comparison. Their numbers will be boosted by all the shelf pickers. Same with Apple and their retail stores - it's a different kind of business (OK, perhaps MS have some stores, but I doubt anything like as many). Some tasks are just more labour intensive (at least until Amazon perfects their robot pickers!)
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
In modern corporate thinking, the answer is two - the CEO, and a flunky to fetch coffee and do any actual work the CEO should be doing. Every other position should be either automated or outsourced.
I like to think of it as "Silting up"... big companies with little apparent strategic direction tend to lose their most talented employees to 'churn'... The least talented employees have fewer options so they stay put marking time.. They become silt..
I work for a medium-large organization (a few thousand people worldwide, nothing like a Microsoft or IBM.) Both very small and very large organizations have problems. Small businesses are usually run by a tyrannical owner and their family, and all others are treated like "the help". Large organizations develop their own political infrastructure, and yes, they collect a lot of unnecessary employees. I'm not sure which is the bigger problem.
When things get too big, there are some people who get very good at either (a) hiding out and not doing a whole lot, or (b) taking advantage of the size of the organization and slowly building empires around themselves. I'm on a very small (way too small for the amount of actual, real customer work we do) product engineering team and am sometimes amazed at how easily some other groups within our company can just ask for and receive more headcount. Good politicians do very well in large organizations. In addition, there are simply a lot of jobs that involve processes that could be automated, but for whatever reason they're not. How many large-company employees do you know that simply take an input stack of work, perform some sort of transaction on it, and pass it on to the next person in the chain? A lot of this is probably holdover from when companies actually did have thousands of people manually processing paper and requests.
Also, in large organizations with long-term employees, it's very easy for the employees to get wrapped up in the organizational procedures themselves. I have a lot of friends who work for the state university system and in local governments, and they tell me all sorts of stories about people throwing fits over the number of sick days they have banked, etc. just because it's a very important part of their work culture. There's a lot of bureaucracy just for the sake of it, and long-term employees use "the system" to maximum advantage. The problem is that it distracts from the actual work that needs to be done.
I'm not really sure we _should_ get rid of every single inefficient position, for one simple reason...these office jobs keep a huge chunk of middle class with reasonable skills and medium levels of education employed. Take those out everywhere and suddenly millions of people start defaulting on their debts and the economy collapses. In that case, either (a) the economy reorganizes around a Star Trek The Next Generation model, or (b) we start seeing some really bad stuff happening in the near future. Losing manufacturing was bad -- imagine what happens when millions more have nowhere to go and nothing to do.
That said, try to get a bug fixed or feature added in Windows or Office...it's not easy and I think I know part of the reason. :-)
I am not a business expert but agree that MS probably has a lot of dead wood and poorly managed employees.
Mass layoffs are one way to deal with this problem and this is what most companies do periodically.
However, it seems to me that it is a sign of a poorly managed company if they need to do mass layoffs. A well managed company would be continuously evaluating employees and their work and making adjustments to personnel requirements every month. It seems supremely stupid for a company to suddenly wake up one day and discover that it has an extra xx thousands of employees.
If a company is continuously adjusting personnel, it is also much easier on the employees since there are more opportunities to move employees to more appropriate jobs, re-train them for new tasks, or, failing that, provide comprehensive out-placement service. This would define a company which values human resources.
Unfortunately, these MS employees are likely to be unceremoniously dumped with minimal chance of re-employment.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Pedantic fail^2
64K = -209.15 degrees Celsius = -344.47 degrees Fahrenheit
This because the much loved /. editor doesn't allow the degree symbol nor the & deg; html entity which I have to write with an extra space.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
64KiB = 65536 Bytes
64K = 64,000
In no unit of measurement is 64K(anything) = 65635.
65535 is however the maximum value expressible by an unsigned 16-bit binary number.
No, that is not even being pedantic. That is just wrong. Please stop.
Stephen Elop is somehow hanging on and getting promoted, despite turning Nokia from a one time cellphone powerhouse into a shell of an IP holding company, and finally into MSFT's redheaded stepchild. See Om Malik's take
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
You realize they just bought most of Nokia and added 25,000 jobs from there right? This IS part of the evaluation of that - and lo and behold 12,500 of those Nokia people are out.
As far as unceremoniously dumped - NO. They will get a package of some sort. For those that don't qualify or don't take it, they will still get something like 90 day notice so that many of them find another job and don't hit Microsoft on unemployment money.
Source: http://investors.redhat.com/fa... Disclaimer: I work there.
It makes it a lot safer. "We laid off 18k and you were one of them" is more defensible from lawsuits than having to individually justify 18k layoffs.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Apparently it does not take much to impress you.
As has been pointed out already, the "How many employees does MS need?" question is ridiculous, as there's no way ANY of us here is qualified to give even an approximate answer that's not just a complete guess.
That said, it *is* possible to talk specifics and point out areas where improvement is needed.
The last I heard, Microsoft had an internal structure where those developing new applications weren't the ones responsible for debugging them. They just spit out the code, and another team would have to fix/clean it up. To me, that makes absolutely NO sense, as the people best qualified to get a program running right are the ones who wrote it in the first place! I've heard that's one of the things that's going to change to improve efficiency, and if true -- I sure hope so, even if it means laying some people off.
I also understand that finally, the Mac and the Windows Office developers have been instructed to work as a team -- vs. treating the Mac Office developers as an isolated group in the company. (That *may* have been originally done based on a silly interpretation of the financials, vs. any true benefit to the development of the code? I remember the Mac division of Microsoft once bragging that it earned the highest profit margin of any division in the company, per employee hired -- simply because it was such a small team.)
I will say I find it telling that even Intel corporation has over 20,000 fewer employees than Microsoft does, right now. I can't really imagine that chip development and sales by the world leader in that area would require less manpower than Microsoft needs to sell and support some of the code people can run on those chips?
I was a network manager at a large-ish company and took a job at a smaller consulting company.
I work much harder at the small company than I did at the large company. The only time I worked harder at the large company was when doing large, time-sensitive projects (ie, get to pause/finish stage or network is broken).
The upside of the large company workload was that I think I my knowledge was much higher resolution, because I had time to focus and dig into details. At the consulting job, I have much more experiential knowledge but very little time to focus on details.
I think there's an old joke:
Q: "How many people work at Microsoft?"
a: "About 20%"
Granted, this is but one example, but the contrast I see on a daily basis is stunning. Even in my smaller employer I see us getting more inefficiencies and "dead weight" employees. Back when our employee count was in the single digits, it was a whole different ballgame. We were small. We didn't have the resources to carry extra employees. When someone would quit, it was a huge deal because we'd be losing literally like a sixth of our entire workforce.
I think you answered your own question in a sense. When your company was small, the culture was that every employee was very valuable and getting rid of someone just wasn't an option. People were accountable because they didn't want to let the team down. They could see how important they were. It was obvious every time a coworker took a week off for vacation.
When a company gets bigger, it has to shed the notion that every person is absolutely valuable and needed. Equally important is spending effort on making people feel important and cultivating a culture of "I don't want to let down my team". If you don't do something about it, that small-company culture will erode, and it seems like that is exactly what is happening.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Unfortunately, these MS employees are likely to be unceremoniously dumped with minimal chance of re-employment.
It depends. It could very well be that the main reason for this mass layoff is not that Microsoft carries more deadweight than another company, say Google or Apple, for example. Many of Google's employees are not necessary, but it can afford to pay them due to its money spigot. Financial metrics, such as operating profit or more importantly projected stock price appreciation, quickly turn non-deadweight employees into deadweight. It's obvious that Microsoft (or any other company) does not execute layoffs in response to an appraisal of the quality or necessarily even the usefulness of employees but rather the financial implications of the cost centers that these employees represent.
One advantage of being laid off by Microsoft. When the crappy job ad asks for the impossible, such as "5+ years experience with Windows 8", a former MS employee can actually claim to have that experience!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
"Tough luck, you get an engineer and a conductor because we can't afford to pay for a brakeman." And now the industry standard is a 2-person train crew.
The industry standard is a 2-person train crew because of FRED, who dates approximately from the 1980s. Another case of automation eliminating jobs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because 64k is enough !
Sadly, it was 640k, and that k was KiB in the modern parlance. You came so close to leaving the best comment in this thread. Only the CP/M crowd ever said 64k was enough, and where are they now? Just clutching their Z80s in the dark.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Perhaps Slashdot needs some new blood so they stop posting the same MS bashing stupid troll posts in order to milk pageviews. It's a major turn off on this site.
And yet, oddly, it seems to have turned you on to the extent that you squirted your senseless little comment out onto this thread. Thanks for helping make slashdot grate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Most people just call that the Dead Sea Effect.
I worked for some time for one of the largest companies in the world during its biggest growth period. We had about 40,000 employees when I joined and about 15 years later we had about 120k. Honestly, we didn't really do anything significantly different production wise at the end that we weren't doing that the beginning, perhaps 10k of those extra 80k employees contributed to an actual increase in delivered products and services.
At the beginning a department was generally a manager who reported to a VP or GM, they had 5-6 managers under them and each manager had 6-12 employees. Those first line managers were responsible for making decisions and accountable for the results. About half the company was in manufacturing or customer support of some kind.
What we had at the end were lots and lots of meetings with lots and lots of people who all wanted a vote. Ownership and accountability were all over the place. Perhaps 3-5 people were all doing the job that one FLM was doing at the beginning. We had a ton of process and paperwork. Lots and lots of middle management. There were now as many as 7-8 layers between a first line manager and a GM or VP. That's another thing. I think we had about 9 or 10 VP's at the start and we had about 50 of them towards the end. We spent millions, even billions on things we really had no core competency on and then abandoned them when the people running them realized the quagmire they were in was about to go over their heads. We got further and further away from profitable products and services.
Then we took a seriously wrong turn innovation-wise (like we didn't do any for a while, just insisted on doing the same stuff we'd always done, the way we'd always done it) and we almost had our lunch eaten by a far less capable competitor. We lost or laid off about 30,000 employees in just a few years. Unfortunately many of them were the talented people who just didn't need to deal with uncertainty or bureaucracy anymore. Miraculously, a small group of employees coughed up a major innovation and we got back into the game and came back gangbusters. The company has such a commanding lead in the market they're in and are so efficient at manufacturing that really nobody else can profit in the segment so they'll maintain inertia for at least another 3-5 years, maybe more.
The company is still doing well, but frankly even at current employee levels you could take another 20-30k of the middle management and redundant "stakeholders" out to the parking lot, tar and feather them and not allow them back into the building ever again and absolutely nothing bad would happen. As long as you held onto the manufacturing, IT, customer service, engineering and about 50 marketing/PR people, things would go at least as well.
We worked with Microsoft a lot and I met regularly with their execs and senior management. They have pretty much the same disease. A long in the tooth cash cow that turns out money like a broken ATM and management that's sure all of that is due to their guidance and genius. Extreme narcissism and an ivory tower that goes to the moon. Most of the key decision makers and innovators are probably mired down in 7.5 hours of meetings a day and spend the other hour and a half doing e-mail and writing progress reports. Once they wander too far away from the cash cow, they burn through money and get nowhere. They absolutely fit the saying "when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Its all about "how do we stuff Windows into it, and lets just try to do the same things that others already squeezed the profit out of, whether there is a real strategy there or if it even fits into anything we have any competence in".
So I'd say that with their current reasonable and profitable product set, they probably need around 65k-70k employees. I don't think at this point that they really have any valid position in the hardware business. The mobile market blew past them 3+ years ago. They might make 4th or 5th in the ecosystem business if they tried hard. They could easily be pushed right out of business in under 5 years.
As a side note. The announcement of the huge Microsoft layoffs come one week after Bill Gates calls for more imported labor.
Break the Immigration Impasse
By SHELDON G. ADELSON, WARREN E. BUFFETT and BILL GATESJULY 10, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/opinion/sheldon-adelson-warren-buffett-and-bill-gates-on-immigration-reform.html?_r=0
BINGO!!!!!!!
I win. Too bad a bunch of ex-Nokia folks and Microsofties had to lose though.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
I've also found that sadly enough, there are plenty of people around a big company who are really good at appearing essential, while really doing nothing themselves and in fact are very good at creating work for others. Unfortunately they also tend to get retained through job cuts, because they appear so essential.
Though I work in a big company we generally manged to have a small, well-focused team. That makes it a good place to work, as long as you can keep your head down, have fun, and not see the chaos and decay around you.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It makes it a lot safer. "We laid off 18k and you were one of them" is more defensible from lawsuits than having to individually justify 18k layoffs.
That's exactly backwards. In the US at least, you can lay off anyone without cause at any time in most states. However, a layoff of this size triggers the WARN act (originally written to soften the blow of closing The Factory in a factory town), requiring jumping through 17 flaming legal hoops to keep it all legal.
OTOH, I have no clue about Finland. Maybe you're right there.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
not a weakness. Microsoft does this is a) to maintain backwards compatibility (which locks businesses in since they'd have to re-purchase or re-write tons of software) and b) to fix bugs and work around limitations in other vendor's software ( again, lock in ).
:).
In office there's something called the 80/20 rule. 80% of your customers only use 20% of your features, but it's a _different_ 20% for just about every customer. There's always 1 feature a customer can't live without. That's what keeps 'em locked in
The danger from dropping rarely used features and picking just one way to do things is that you'll force your users to spend lots of money switching over to the 1 way you picked, and they'll start asking if they should look for alternatives.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I can grok the ideal you have, but honestly, I think that it would be a huge morale-killer.
Think of it this way: You get hired on, and you do great work. But then, you have to always be mindful of company politics, and be sure to kiss the right asses (and stab the right backs), else the next periodic review may well see you on the street in spite of your contributions. I've worked for companies that did that, and everybody was constantly either worried about keeping their job, or were busily trying to sabotage their buddies in order to secure their own careers.
It would be akin to working on a renewable contract, truth be told, and if that's the case, then you may as well work for them free-agent and pocket the difference. Another analogy would be that it's like stack-ranking, but more aggressive in parts - each department would have to constantly justify everyone in it, and they'd have to fall to something like stack-ranking in order to keep tabs on who stays and who goes when word comes down to jettison someone.
Now I've seen the opposite as well - Fiserv (the web banking software company) has a nasty habit of doing layoffs every two years -- often with no rhyme or reason other than to make the numbers look good. At the appointed time, they demand that each department chop x% off their department headcount no matter how over/understaffed the department may be; it's become so routine that many employees term it the "bi-annual layoff lottery". Again, total morale-killer and team-killer.
With an eye towards all that, I propose something kind of radical here: I propose that companies look to hiring with an eye towards adaptability. That way, should a product or project either go sour, or should times change, odds are good that unless the company is hit/hurt overall, you can start moving folks to new projects and/or new product lines, giving existing employees priority for those slots. It wouldn't hurt to have solid mentoring and training cultures (and budgets) in place to help your good employees stretch out a little in their careers, so that they can more easily adapt right along with the company. But that's kind of a pipe dream, I know...
Personally, I've decided to become just as professional, mercenary and ruthless as the employer who I work for. If they're awesome and caring about their people, I'll be awesome and caring about them, and go above and beyond for them.
If they're a bunch of back-stabbing and self-serving asshats out to chase the Almighty Dollar with no regard for their employees' morale and careers, then I have zero problems with doing only what is required, moving to a better job elsewhere with only a 2-week minimal notice, and not really give a damn if my departure leaves them in the lurch for anything critical. I've happily done so before, then watched months later (via the grapevine) as they spent a massive amount of money not only paying for my replacement, but in cleaning up the damage from failed projects due to multi-month disruptions from having to find someone and then getting that someone up to speed.
Until that large awesome company exists that you would give an arm and a leg for? Well, you have to look out for yourself, and in the tech industry, there isn't exactly a lack of jobs for those with the skills and the drive to take them, you know?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Not really, lame MS bashers like the one that ruined the site with stupid hateful comments full of logic holes and partisan moderation and turned it into a ghost town worth nothing by turning away people with half a brain cell. Reading 'lol M$ sux' over and over again becomes extremely boring. Even obvious flamebait posts like this are attracting less and less comments. It's dead and thanks for killing it.
Want a gem of the lame Slashdot campaign to bash MS? Read this and the comments.
http://slashdot.org/story/09/0...
This space for rent.
The "zero" is the CEO which is to illustrate the amount of useful work done.
Anybody else they layoff is just gravy after that.
New blood??!! Seriously?
Slashdot cut its teeth on basing MS. From the very beginning. Especially during the anti-trust dustup of the late 90's.
Reading 'lol M$ sux' over and over again becomes extremely boring.
I think you need to work on the filter logic in your parser. It doesn't seem to be kicking in before you get all emotional. You likely want to filter out the things that you don't care about that don't matter before emotional engagement.
Also, Microsoft does suck, and replacing the letter S with a dollar sign has a long and hallowed history which in computing dates back at least to Compu$erve. Whinging won't change those things. Microsoft is a convicted criminal. If it were a person, even or perhaps especially a person as rich as Microsoft is, it would be imprisoned and its ill-gotten gains seized.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>That's exactly backwards. In the US at least, you can lay off anyone without cause at any time in most states. However, a layoff of this size triggers the WARN act (originally written to soften the blow of closing The Factory in a factory town), requiring jumping through 17 flaming legal hoops to keep it all legal.
The legal department won't be downsized then.
OTOH, the US legal system never ceases to amaze me. And many people choose to think that the unions are evil instead.
Steve Jobs had nothing to do with CP/M.
You're going to have to draw me a map as to how you arrived at the conclusion that this response somehow addressed what I was saying.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How is this post bashing Microsoft? It seems like a simple enough question to me.
None.
I wish they'd just collapse and die already.
> 64K = 64,000
> In no unit of measurement is 64K(anything) = 65635.
How the hell did this ignorance of computer history get modded up??
In the context of [binary] computers, 64K = 65536
In the context of Science, 64K = 64,000
There were many ads showing 64K and there was never any confusion over it. Hell, Microsoft never adapted the KiB notation either.
The retarded term KiB wasn't EVEN invented until 1998!
A good point about the WARN act and similar statutes. I do not agree that my point was backwards, though, in fact you made my point for me. The WARN act and its sisters are a much safer situation since it is well defined. If the company lays off people in dribs and drabs, they are leaving themselves open to all sorts of wrongful dismissal and discrimination lawsuits case by case. I understand the "at will" employee, but by no means is any company free to fire anyone at anytime without cause. I've seen plenty of cases where someone was fired with a whole heck of a lot of cause and the fired person STILL sued. They must have known there was a huge pile of documentation. Anyway, that is one of the barriers to simply firing people piecemeal since you need to document everything six ways from Sunday to defend against the lawsuits. If you are making a global decision to lay off some percentage, it is a lot easier.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Unions aren't evil but sometimes they go a little overboard. Nobody needs to make $20 an hour to make cupcakes. My ex works in a medical profession that requires a college degree and extensive training. Her uncle worked his whole life as a cashier in a grocery store. He made more an hour than she did and retired in his 50's. He didn't even graduate from high school. All he had to do was say "HI!", smile and pass boxes over a barcode reader.
I mean, c'mon - who the hell else would sink untold billions of R&D money into a product (XBox/360/One) that still has yet to realize overall ROI, 15 years later?
Xbox isn't a product. Xbox is a marketing campaign in your living room.
Like giving away copies of excel to MBAs or Office license discounts for schools, the xbox project is about projecting mind share. The entire Microsoft console effort may never bring in cash, but it reminds everyone in the game industry for a PC or PC-like platform whom they will deal with for their OS layer. It also continues to cement the idea in the minds of the public that a profitable non-mobile gaming environment equals a Microsoft environment. The only real risk to that in the last twenty years has been the rise of casual mobile games. That mea cupla by Apply is only because Microsoft completely dropped the ball on the iPhone and iPad era as bad as they did on the whole 'Internet' thing a generation before.
For a company of Microsoft's size in terms of market penetration the mindshare is more important than the profits. Overhead like Xbox to Microsoft is like IT or HR to most other large companies: just a cost of keeping up their billions of dollars per month in income. Things like Desrua or Steam on Linux and wine are currently fart air in comparison to this Xbox "marketing" effort. Just the effect of the Halo exclusive - turning a why-care into a must-buy for a market measured in millions - should have made this obvious.
MS bashing has been a core Slashdot content since before I created an account. If anything it's slackened off significantly since MS lost their complete dominance of consumer computing.
For a moment I was worried that Dilbert cartoon craziness was falling behind real-world craziness. I'm relieved that Dilbert is still ahead:
Most of us are only pretending to work while secretly hoping the project gets canceled after you get fired by the board.
Dilbert is not accurate, I think, about Microsoft. For Microsoft, the 6th panel,
"I expect the decline in morale to lead to violence"
should be
"I expect the decline in morale to lead to more decline in morale."
Sounds like your ex's workpace needs to unionize.
There are fewer than 90,000 US employees. The vast bulk of all IBM employees is in India. And as far as those 90K US employees is concerned IBM is phenomenally overstaffed with middle managers and 'program managers' who's only job is to report on the status of status reporting reporting via enormous spreadsheets and multi hundred slide Powerpoints. IBM is a company that wants to cut costs to prosperity and eventually they will have no workers and only a few hundred lawyers and accountants reporting to executives and they will finally get their way.
64k is 65536 and don't let no fuckwit anal cunts try and impose some arbitrary bullshit standard with a stupid name on you.
I read KiB as a bad abbreviation of kibble. My cats eat kibble. They're enjoying some of this stuff as I type:
http://www.orijenpetfoods.co.u...
My cats know that 2 to the power of whatever is the important number.
Firing employees is demotivating. A company with a revolving door policy is continuously demotivating its employees.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
...that Bill Gates says we desperately need .
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
This is absolutely correct.
As a manager, I look forward to layoffs because it is so much easier to get rid of mediocre performers with much less risk of lawsuits and months of Performance Improvement Plans". Although, my teams never have had to contribute anyone (I'm always asked "is there anyone you would like to contribute to the layoff?" and if the answer is "no", that's the end of it). YMMV though because I'm pretty good at getting rid of my own hiring mistakes quickly (and I rarely make them but the downside is I take longer, on the average, to fill open positions than my peers) because they usually decide to leave in a few months under their own power (albeit with a bit of "coaching"). Unfortunately, when taking over a group that's been in existence for some time and prior manager(s) were wimps, it's not as easy because the mediocre performer has too often bonded with the team.
Interestingly, layoffs often make it easier on the employee - it's much better to say you were let go because you were 'redundant' than because you were fired. It also often has less negative impact on team morale (although, not company morale probably) because the PIP stuff, over the months, usually leaks out to the team and often they feel sorry for the targeted employee and, when they employee is finally let go, they often let their emotions get ahead of their objective opinions.
Most team members know who the mediocre employees are and would often prefer that they had never been hired, but are wimpy when it comes to getting rid of them via targeted actions.
They probably only need just TWO employees, a CEO to get the money, and a secretary to collect it.
Every single action Microsoft makes is met with incessant criticism. This makes a lot of sense as for two decades the Microsoft marketing machine has firmly established this universal notion that anything different than Windows is scary, different, and OMG, *incompatible*. That worked very so well as no Windows user wants anything different than what they have right now.
So, all Microsoft should do is just keep printing copies of Windows XP, since that what everyone wants, and just keep collecting the money. Users would be a LOT happier as they would never have to worry about any change, and the CEO would be happy as he can just keep collecting the money with no effort.
I am not a business expert but agree that MS probably has a lot of dead wood and poorly managed employees. Mass layoffs are one way to deal with this problem and this is what most companies do periodically.
If this is what most companies do, then why is it evidence that Microsoft is poorly managed? (Other than to say, most companies are poorly managed.) Even if they are poorly managed, layoffs may still be the right decision. Say you wake up one day as the CEO of such a poorly managed company. What are you going to do? Change the culture from the inside? Promote radical change among set-in-their-ways engineers and middle managers? Hardly. You're going to stop the bleeding and deal with the problem in the most direct way possible - cut costs.
It seems supremely stupid for a company to suddenly wake up one day and discover that it has an extra xx thousands of employees
Of course that's not what happens. If they laid off each employee the second that they identified that employee as redundant or not needed or underperforming, then all 125,000 employees would feel like their head is always on the chopping block. The chaff builds up over time and eventually you trim it. Large companies really only know how to do two things: hiring people and firing people. It's much more efficient to axe entire divisions than it is to reassign everyone. Microsoft's responsibility is to its shareholders, not its employees. If you want to work for a company that is loyal to its employees, then work for a private company, or better yet, an employee-owned company. By this point, people should know what they're getting into when they go to work at Microsoft. They get a very competitive salary and the prestige of working at a Fortune 100 company. In return, if they have the misfortune of working in an unsuccessful division, they might be let go. Even then, I'm sure that top performers are reassigned.
5 employees, after Microsoft transforms itself into a roofing company. They will do less damage that way.
To their credit, Microsoft's hand has been forced by their acquisition of Nokia. If they didn't take on 25 thousand employees, they wouldn't have to shed as many.
Chairman, CEO, CFO, CIO, Executive VP of Sales and Marketing and Executive VP of something to do with engaging the outsourcing suppliers with the starving peasants working 80+ hours a week for a pittance in undeveloped countries.
Stick Men
640K ought to be enough.
Any more than that would make it Megasoft.
By standard and by law, a "k" is x1000, an "M" is x1,000,000, and so on, and NOTHING else. Standards groups like IEC and IEEE are unanimous: they ALWAYS mean a power of 10. There have already been a number of court cases where someone used "K" etc. to mean binary prefixes, and every time they have had to concede (and typically end up paying up in out-of-court settlements). Examples include Willem Vroegh v. Eastman Kodak Company and Cho v. Seagate Technology (US) Holdings, Inc.
And don't tell me that computers "always" use base 2 measurements. Hard disk drives, clock cycles, and bandwidth are typically measured using base-10 prefixes (multipliers of 10^3). 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.
Technologists should care about being precise. If you can't tell what a number means, that is a problem. The binary prefixes are a nice solution to a widespread problem. If you don't care about precision, use whatever term you want. But when you want to measure accurately, use the right units.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
everybody who thinks it's a great idea to make the desktop function like a cheap-ass $99 phone with 8 gig of memory... OUT! OUT ON A RAIL! INTO THE FLAMING PIT!!!
not that I'm biased or anything, but HULK HATE 8!!!!!!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
They need 3 employees
1 To cancel the recurring pizza delivery order
1 To hit the start button to stop the computer.
1 To turn out the lights
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
LOL, you're so cute. When the employer RIFs the employees, does it give them a "2-week minimal notice," or does it show them the door (with possibly a small cheque to keep them quiet)? Remember, without an employment contract, you don't owe them anything—which is why smart companies have employment contracts.
I give them the two weeks' notice for one important reason, having nothing to do with the employer: Networking. The metro area I live in doesn't have a massive tech market, so out here you end up seeing a lot of former co-workers and managers in other jobs (and more importantly, you stumble across them in other job interviews).
Now if I lived in SanFran or Seattle (or even LA or NYC), I wouldn't give a flying damn and just pull the D-Ring if they deserved it. But, I don't, so I have to look after my future as much as I look after my present.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
When wages/cost-of-employment get too high (from union or obamacare or whatever reason), that cashier will find himself replaced with a self-checkout lane. The medical-profession employee, as long as she doesn't cost too much, gets to keep her job.
Zero, as they close up shop.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
At the time Bill Gates made that absurd comment he was right.
Much as I dislike Gates, I have to point out that it is generally accepted that he never said that particular gaffe.
[it was enough] For the applications people were making at the time.
It was still stupid, even if it was enough for apps at that time, because it was an architectural limit. The architecture put stuff like display memory and BIOS extensions in fixed areas above the 640k instead of leaving it open ended. The tacky XT/AT addressing scheme was 20-bit and could actually reach 1024k, but only the lower 640k was working RAM, with that fixed stuff above it.
Would not have been so bad if the PC makers and Microsoft had not been so slow to abandon this primitive architecture.
I wish
You: 65535
In no unit of measurement is 64K(anything) = 65 6 35 = (64K+99).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
> You: 65535
Incorrect. I said 65536. Please quote properly.
The op probably transposed the the last 6 and 3 as you point out, however his argument is completely invalid as I demonstrated with my followup.
Two aspects of Unions are evil:
1. All public Unions.
A public union can't drive the gov't out of business, they can just get promised benefits from elected officials who won't be around when it comes time to pay the piper. Private unions I have minimal problems with, if you demand too much, you'll kill company and the union will die right along with it. They have a clear counterbalance in that context.
2. Unions which enforce the collection of union dues from all employees. Let each individual decide if they'd like to pay the dues and get the union benefits or if they'd prefer to negotiate their own. Once in place in a private union shop, if you feel the union is corrupt or overreaching, it is impossible not to support them with your funds short of quitting.
In many places, unions are wonderful and great (and historically, unions have done great things, I think they just accomplished the vast majority of the useful stuff long ago, and have since gone looking for things to do with the power they've accumulated). In others they are merely another set of hands collecting money and power to use in a self serving manner, while talking a great game about how they're going to improve things.
tysonedwards said "In no unit of measurement is 64K(anything) = 65635.", almost certainly commenting that 64K+99 isn't within 1 of being a power of two (especially since he goes on to point out that 65535 is. He was correct and probably agrees with your position.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Long and hallowed history of computing? Oh please, give me a break. It only has a place in the useless hot air of a couple of message boards haunted by people in their parents' basement who don't matter.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/co...
People of substance who actually make things don't bother with such nonsense, while message board fanatics like you just hate on people like Miguel de Icaza who actually did more for FOSS than all the lame haters like you on Slashdot.
As usual, Linus says it best:
http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...
And you suffer from that affliction. If half the effort in posting and modding up MS hate was actually used in looking at FOSS code, maybe things like Heartbleed wouldn't happen. Well, I wouldn't count on that, because it's usually people who lack the real technical chops who write the logicless nonsense, and they're intellectually lacking and cannot contribute anything substantive.
This space for rent.
Nah, they're just "right sizing" them to make room for the greater numbers of H1-Bs they're lobbying for... because there's a lack of "qualified" people.
I hate that word "dead wood". Anyone who did have a degree, pass the informal interview, the technical tests, and team interview for a company, as well as continue to work in an Agile/Scrum environment isn't a piece of dead wood.
If a company discovers they have extra employees, then it is is usually because two or more products have been merged together, or all the development for one large project has been completed. Maybe they now share the same core libraries or features of one application duplicate another. But what to do then? Nobody is going to stay long at a company if they have relocated 1000+ miles for their dream job (say designing new applications) and then suddenly a month later, a PHB decides they want the most qualified engineer to move onto repairing broken widgets, and optionally advertise the original vacancy several months later because they realize they really do need someone to write new applications. So you need to keep people hanging around until you are sure all the problems have been fixed.
Some companies have internal vacancy lists where a job is advertised internally first. This gave employees a chance to move around if they saw something more interesting. Other companies just keep staff "frozen in place" where the only option is to leave.
The problem for Microsoft is that retraining isn't possible because they want workers who can bring in new ideas. If they had someone to train up someone for that vacancy, the trainer would be the person they are looking for.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
And what effect will that have on the local or regional job market. When Philips in the UK closed a research lab back in 2001, that led to "thousands of engineers sending out thousands of CVs to thousands of agencies."
I guess some people don't forget what Microsoft was doing 20 years ago. They were literally bashing everything and anything. They were bashing UNIX with slogans like "UNIX is legacy, NT is the future". They were doing the same with DirectX vs. OpenGL. Even now they still claim OpenGL is legacy. Then there was the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer war where Microsoft was pre-installing Explorer onto their systems and nothing else. If you wanted to read Email from a server, you needed to have Windows, even it is was a hardware board inside a workstation. If Microsoft announced they were entering a particular niche market, venture capitalists wouldn't fund anyone to enter that market.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
So you mean that justifies posting bullcrap like this?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Company slags competition. News at 11.
Netscape atleast could be installed on Windows, no proper alternative browsers even allowed on iOS. No wonder no one takes the haters seriously.
This space for rent.
See the chart here: http://automattic.com/work-wit...
Granted there are many people who contribute to the WordPress ecosystem who don't formally work for Automattic given the FOSS nature of WordPress and related plugins. It's just a very different 21st century way of doing business compared to the 20th century Microsoft model, and is doing a better job of bridging the exchange and gift economies (like I talk about on my site).
Automattic, which shepherds the core of WordPress, sounds like a great place to work for people like me who are comfortable working from home. The future for WordPress looks pretty amazing, especially given ever better JSON/AJAX RESTful support for JavaScript-powered frontend apps. See also: ..."
http://inside.envato.com/the-f...
"For those willing to ignore the prevailing opinions in the programming community, Tom Willmot says that WordPress presents developers with incredible opportunities, and a wonderful sense of community:
I've been looking at shifting my own "Pointrel" and "Twirlip" projects, my wife's "Rakontu" and "NarraCat" projects and other similar work (stuff related to participative narrative inquiry, civic sensemaking, public intelligence, social semantic desktop tools, educational simulations, and more) to have JavaScript frontends that use WordPress as an application server backend (rather than have them run stand-alone). That would make it easy for millions of WordPress users who might want such tools to install them as a WordPress plugin with a couple clicks. As Alan Kay said about Squeak, getting people to install anything to try it is hard. Other benefits would include easy authentication support. I expect more and more projects by other people will be moving in that direction. I'm tempted to apply to work at Automattic myself at some point given their FOSS focus. They are also hiring as they got a bunch of venture financing recently. But I would want to make at least a demo of that integration first. I plan on putting such a demo here when it works: http://twirlip.com/
Of course, JavaScript has problems (globals by default), PHP has problems (such a long list..), and WordPress has problems (no doubt), with many problems coming from their historical roots and a need for backward-compatibility. But I can't deny all three won some battle for mindshare for whatever reasons (especially ease of initial use), and when you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? :-) Like Manuel De Landa wrote in "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces", a uniformity on one level can often in turn support a diversity on a level above it.
See also on the value of having a diversity of programmers of a variety of experience levels in an organization:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
What I especially envision is that all those millions of WordPress sites could start talking to each other in interesting ways... See also Theodore Sturgeon's 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" for where it all might lead...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
https://archive.org/details/pr...
Or as I reprise here:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org...
"Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against [that]?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
And here is the problem in America. Your kind can rot in hell....
What for? Do you think no employee should ever be let go for performance reasons?
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Sounds like your ex's workpace needs to unionize.
No, sounds like her uncle worked for one of those grocery stores like Dominicks that are dropping like flies because their costs are too high.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
A well managed company would be continuously evaluating employees and their work and making adjustments to personnel requirements every month
Microsoft used to be very picky of whom they hire
A legendary (remain un-named) programmer that I know was interviewed by Microsoft back in the mid 1980's but was rejected because at that time Microsoft puts a lot of effort to hire people who can contribute to what they had in mind
That legedary programmer later went on to join Id Software and developed some awesome pixel routine for them, and what he did in Id impressed Intel so much that they hired him to help them in their Larrabee project
But Microsoft changed into a totally different company after Bill Gates stepped down --- and it started to take in all kinds of useless code monkeys (and many more who can't even code!) under their payroll
I have been in the industry for decades and have witness how the companies changed after the founders have left
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If anything it's slackened off significantly since MS lost their complete dominance of consumer computing.
And since Windows has become less painful to use. Remember when threats like Nimda and Code Red spread around the internet freely, without any user interaction? In those days, Windows was an open door to malware, when it didn't crash on its own.
As much as I prefer Linux, I recognize that Windows has improved a lot.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
43
Do you how you calculate how much you 'NEED' to make. You don't bloody look at the job being done and think well the worse the job the less we'll pay them. You look at life costs. So how much to buy quality food and groceries, have a place to live, transport to work (bound to quality city planning), health costs, retirement, clothing and because workers are not animals to be beaten into submission some leisure spending. Now add on that breeding costs because that has to happen otherwise your community will collapse. So add it all up and you can figure out why some people need more than one job with both parents working.
Don't be an evil little git and define what people should be paid by how crappy the job is, always reflect on how much they need in order to live properly and honestly the more crappy the job the more they should be paid not less.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Lol. What fucking county are you living in buddy?
Lake, in California.
You probably meant country, though. In this one, if you're not part of an established cartel, you will often get slapped by one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You need to be careful about pulling the D-ring in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Many recruiters will ask for references from your last three jobs. You don't want to burn too many bridges. Your coworker might become your future boss, your boss might become your future employee. According to LinkedIn, It's a small world.
Explained at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
1 employee + thousands of wage slaves
Casteism
Bullcrap? The application developers there deserve to have every ounce of bullcrap that is lying on the field thrown at them before being given a hot jacuzzi in pig swill. Punching a hole in someone's system network firewall, then putting a steel cage and door around that hole so it can't be closed?
I have enough grief with various Linux packages that create their own VPN's, offer "built-in" ftp and email functionality as a "feature". Every time I install something, I have to check to to see whether any new servers listening on network sockets have been set up immediately, as well as see whether there are any daily or weekly crontab settings which do the same.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Unions once played an important role, and maybe somewhere today they still do, but what I see more often is that unions are used for extortion -- every time there's a strike at Boeing because laborers aren't making >100k this is crystal clear.