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Microsoft Lays Off 2,100, Axes Silicon Valley Research
walterbyrd writes with news of Microsoft layoffs. Microsoft Corp will close its Silicon Valley research-and-development operation as part of 2,100 layoffs announced on Thursday, as it moves toward its new CEO's goal of cutting 18,000 staff, or about 14 percent of its workforce. News of the closure of the Microsoft Research lab at the company's campus in Mountain View, California, was first made public on Twitter by employees. The company later confirmed the move and said it would involve the loss of 50 jobs.
Back around 2000 when Microsoft had something like $100 billion in the bank I said that with that kind of money, they could afford to make no income and still pay their 40,000 or so employees at the time for the next 13 years. I wasn't serious though.
Wow. They could pull it off like a bandaid. At least then MS employees would know they were safe. If those numbers are correct, they're through approx. 11.7% of the layoffs. Nearly 100% of those who remain will find reasons to think they might be part of the next round. The most capable will find other work most easily. I think MS (and their products) will get worse before this gets better.
Maybe Nadella got tired of hearing about the year of Linux on the desktop, and decided to finally make it happen? Anyhow, good luck without your researchers. I hope it was the ones responsible for Windows 8.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Any layoffs in Hyderabad? ... just asking.
The employees we could have paid with that 2.5 billion are a useless drag on our bottom line.
BREAKING: Microsoft will deliver version Windows 9.0, code-named "Jehova^3" in 2016.
"It'll be like Windows 3.0 meets the Trinity!" said Bob.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
When you say "intellect-nots" and talk of shortages of "smart employees", you mean there are too many people who don't want to code intrusive ads to sell sell sell, right? Maybe you're the one who's not so smart, looking for robotic employees you're too stupid to code.
"We desperately need more H1B's to manage the staff reduction! We cannot afford to retrain our existing employees in staff reduction management technologies." -MS
Table-ized A.I.
Has Microsoft gotten off the "we need more H1-Bs" bandwagon?
I guess the shortage of highly skilled workers is over.
Or, maybe only unskilled workers are being laid off.
When the announcement that cuts were coming I made a comment on /. about how everyone at Microsoft would be looking over their shoulder wondering whether their job would be cut.
Howling responses insisted that no, the only jobs being cut were going to be in Finland and tied to Nokia.
Now we find out that jobs are being cut in Washington, Silicon Valley, and Fargo. Hmmm, thats a long way from Finland.
Layoffs in the USA, and hiring increases elsewhere.
I remember a few years back reading how MS was proclaiming that they weren't increasing their H1B hirings. However, they were achieving the same results by doing it in Canada instead.
More recent layoffs
http://www.murthy.com/2014/05/...
I worked at a company that made multiple layoff cuts over several months. It was really demoralizing. I hope for Microsoft and its employees' sake that this is the last layoff, else morale will plummet and people will start leaving of their own free will. They should have done just one larger cut and moved on.
Somebody is doing it wrong.
Out of all of the campus locations, why axe silicon valley? This is where the headquarters for Microsoft's main competitors reside. This is where many (certainly not all) of the current and new innovations are taking place. Unless researchers are willing to relocate, MS will be passed over in favor of their competitors. Not to pick on the New England campus but outside of MIT what else is really going on research wise compared to California. SV has locally UC Berkeley, Stanford, and many graduates from Cal Tech, UC Davis, etc. close by. It's not even close to the number of graduate researchers available in the valley (and SF).
So they pulled everything back to Washington state where they can still force non-competes on their employees....
Super high cost of living (over priced bubble), and self rightous startup culture. Seattle is booming with Amazon, Google, FB, and MSFT. Critical mass to keep costs low in Redmond.
-Demotivation phrase-
Redemption: When you're a day late and a dollar short.
Life is not for the lazy.
Nada. We're in the middle of some of the worst right now. There's a piece up somewhere...can't remember if the link was on fark, gawker, or vice...but they gave a decent explanation of things are being run today (look for the Olive Garden piece) -> there is zero interest is keeping these companies alive, now it's about stripping them of their assets, and getting them to pay a hefty dividend. Feel me? Microsoft today is not the Microsoft of yesterday; Microsoft of yesterday made software; Microsoft of today is a corporate giant that could cut all of its employees, sell off then lease the buildings it currently occupies, sell off its name in certain areas (Microsoft ice cream, etc.), and so on. It's going to die only after it's been pimped out to every piece of gutter trash that the Street can find. And it's brain? Completely controlled by people with the worst intentions for it. It's like one of those zombified snails.
Microsoft's Pear Street office across the street houses at least two ACM A.M. Turing Award winners: Leslie Lamport and Chuck Thacker (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/lamport-031814.aspx). I wonder what the company will do with them, if anything....
(I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Lamport when he won: See http://vimeo.com/95177539 . Nice guy!)
Tom Geller
I cannot speak specifically for Microsoft but this has become a common theme at American companies; new CEO takes over, slashes staff, "profitability" increases due to "lower costs", shareholders happy and CEO leaves with bonuses for "restoring profitability", big shareholders sell, company then tanks as it has fired the people who were developing its future product lines.
Was it the Metro interface design team?
Please let it be the Metro design team...
... and traditionally, as everyone knows, evil lackeys go down by the thousands in every movie...
Microserfs, remember when we complained and you thought "haha! whiners!" -- well, let me give you an advice: now that some of you might see yourselves in search of a job, you might need to prepare a résumé or print it... you can do it with a free word processor called Libreoffice Writer, which is available for free (since unemployed people usually don't have any money); in case you need an OS on which to run it, you can always use Linux.
Good luck, you're finally free.
This really makes me want to give up my stable software development job and go work for you. No wonder why they say there are no qualified applicants....
I've been there many times for forums and talks by some of Silicon Valley's smartest people. MSFT is on its way down; it's a behemoth. Balmer knew that and that's why he flew the coop. In fact, it's Balmer's crummy management of MSFT that led to this. Probably the most overrated CEO in the last 50 years.
2,100 Human IEDs are launched in south Bay to hunt M$ managers and CEO.
War On Baby!
Smoke That?
We Smoke You!
But Windows 9 will have a Start button!
Would that be this article from Salon?
Yeah, I know we're supposed to hate MSFT and hate layoffs. Unfortunately, MSFT SVC had it coming and I am quite surprised that it took the company so long to figure it out, as the amount of overhead the company had in Mountain View was astonishing.
I came to the offices via an acquisition and I was amused by the amount of waste there. Everybody got an individual office and the usual perks and yet when you asked people about what they were working on, they could rarely produce an answer that was related to a meaningful product or a service. In fact, outside of the team that worked on online services like Hotmail the campus looked like a huge experiment or a room of has beens who "deserved" nice salaries because of their education. Many workers were immigrants with advanced degrees, so I suppose they looked good on paper. In reality communicating with the majority of those folks was a lot like getting a root canal. All the meetings I've attended were highly political, as everybody wanted to protect their turf and stayed employed. There was little if no oversight and you could pretty much slack all day long while drawing an incredibly comfortable salary. That or pretend to be important because somehow your recently purchased start-up devised a super-duper algorithm that needed just a touch of MSFT before winning the world.
With time it became apparent that the SVC campus was a dumping ground for the local purchases and many people simply did their time in order to get paid in full and then leave. I guess some of them stuck around, so it is natural that MSFT cleans them out.
If you are going to drag someone in from halfway around the world you are normally expected to not fire them at a whim. The problem here is not the guest workers, the problem is a management mentality of firing at a whim and local conditions that do not protect the locals fired at a whim as much as guest workers fired at a whim. Firing guest workers gets noticed on many levels. Kicking a local out the door with no reason given is just American business as usual in some states.
It's far too common to blame the people that are not being shafted than those doing the shafting.
A different question is why are these people getting dragged in from halfway around the world, which gets hard to honestly discuss because indentured servitude and driving down wages rears it's ugly head while "that guy from country X is brilliant" muddies the waters.
Bill Gates didn't do that great a job He produced MSBasic, convinced IBM to hand him a monopoly for software that he bought. They managed to write a few pieces of software for the Mac with support from Apple which they then ported to Windows. From there on it was mainly anticompetitive practices, until the internet came along at which point Gates totally ignored it. Until; it became too popular to be dismissed, then to make up for the huge blunder, they had to engage in anticompetitive practices so onerous the government could not ignore it. Which then handcuffed MS so badly they could not compete in new markets.
In the end under Gates they wrote more dog GUI OS's then they wrote good ones.
So really it's just they got a monopoly and sat on it till momentum brought it down.
In fact, they are expanding it -- they are putting in a brand new data center on the site that was the former Counterpane Security, on LaAvenida across from their SV HQ, and they also have leased a huge building a couple of blocks away on Pear Street. There's also rumors that they're behind the demolishing of an entire block of tilt-ups between LaAvenida and Pear to be replaced by six-story office buildings. In any event Microsoft isn't leaving the Silicon Valley, just Microsoft Research is leaving -- all fifty employees. Every single one of them who can have a job tomorrow by walking down the street to the Googleplex. Not a single one of whom have ever created a product for Microsoft, because Microsoft doesn't create products anymore, they just re-invent other people's products (or their own previously-good products), badly.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Satya is an Indian. He'll probably cut costs by hiring more of his cheap kind from India.
I see you had a meeting with the Bobs. Good for you.
Look at Apple, they have no research department where actual scientists work (who publish).
If you're unfamiliar with it, check out research.microsoft.com, and you'll see what I mean.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
> as it moves toward its new CEO's goal of cutting 18,000 staff, or about 14 percent of its workforce
Which is 86 percent short of our goal.
I think you mean economies get more oppressive over time. That kind of efficiency can go to hell.
However, your advice is good because besides providing some personal protection it hurts the "job creators", and they deserve it.
It is way, way past time that we start talking about whether the economy should exist to serve people instead of the other way around. That is, if the libertarians around here can join the rest of us in reality of course.
Guess that's how they planned to start paying for Minecraft.
For one week I am getting multiple calls from job consultants that Microsoft is hiring for lots of positions in Bangalore.
"The researchers will have little trouble finding new positions in Silicon Valley, where talent is in high demand."
This is a complete falsehood that people need to stop parroting. Research work is VERY difficult to come by. Microsoft was one of the few places actually employing researchers.
So what will they do now? There are absolutely no jobs left in academia, so forget that. They could in theory become programmers, but that field is overcrowded too as people on slashdot regularly point out.
The fact is, if we want to maintain our jobs and standard of living in the USA, we're going to have to band together and force politicians to stop letting immigrants into the country to take our jobs. It really doesn't help matters when certain propagandists keep lying about how "plentiful" high-tech jobs are and how desperately we need more STEM graduates.
If you replace this sentence:
letting immigrants into the country to take our jobs
with:
letting incompetent immigrants into the country to take our jobs, but letting competent immigrants take the jobs of less competent people, citizens or otherwise, and we force our programmers to become more competent (because the quality of work we do here is pretty crappy)
Then I'm on board. I'm not in favor of protectionism to protect the incompetent. And if we were more competent, we wouldn't be so worry about immigrants competing with us.
To be honest, I would like to see our government throttle immigration of engineers into our country as a function of unemployment and other economic indicators (make rate of immigration in field X inversely proportional to unemployment in said field) coupled with actual examinations (classified by years of experience) of migrating professionals, to truly ensure we only get the best junior, mid and senior professionals that we can get. Also, we should do for all regions (LATAM, Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, etc) and not just for China and South Asia.
That I would like to see.
Open-ended migration, or closing immigration just to protect us from competition? No. I don't want to see that. Screw that. Bring the best, from as many parts of the world as possible and let the chips fall where they may. Let the competent rise regardless of origin. And let the incompetent adapt or sink, regardless of origin.
CEOs with no imagination do layoffs. Nayda is a terrible CEO, nothing he has done so far impresses me.
did you forget to take your meds?
The employees will be replaced by creepers and the office will be kept under 10 light levels at all time.
I'm not the biggest MSFT fan, but that's really giving MSFT the short stick, by saying they were done after MS-Basic and MS-Dos...
For example, Bill managed to recruit David Cutler for WinNT which really allowed them to take over the server market and kept their desktop windows franchise alive for another 15 years (do you think it could have had WinXP legs by limping along with WinME as a code base?)... Of course you can't be at the top of the hill forever and I suspect the Nokia acquisition won't be as transformative as WinNT...
This is your punishment for your sins against humanity. "following orders" is the same excuse the nazis used so don't pull that card.
So basically like any other megacorporation:
Focus on real estate, licensing, and M&A. Bunch of suits, maybe, just maybe keep a small group of tech folks to work on CEO's pet projects.
Oracle maybe going the same way since Ellison is now CTO.