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Microsoft Lays Off 2,100, Axes Silicon Valley Research

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the end-of-the-line dept.

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.

20 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. No more cash in the bank? by suso · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:No more cash in the bank? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I do wish it didn't involve reducing the size of their research operations.

      Why? Microsoft has a long history of hiring many top researchers, and then doing very little with the results. It is much better for those researchers to be more productively employed elsewhere. The researchers will have little trouble finding new positions in Silicon Valley, where talent is in high demand.

    2. Re:No more cash in the bank? by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

      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.

      A basic fact of business is that when a company has no income but does have assets, the time has arrived to liquidate those assets and distribute the proceeds to shareholders. A minor variation of that reaches the same conclusion in the face of low, as opposed to zero, profitability.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    3. Re:No more cash in the bank? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Google tells me they have $84 billion dollars and spent $37 billion in the past year.

      Google also tells us that Microsoft is one of the heaviest lobbyists for increases to H1Bs. That should tell you how ethical this plan to layoffs workers really is.

    4. Re:No more cash in the bank? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Why? Microsoft has a long history of hiring many top researchers, and then doing very little with the results.

      Well, as long as they publish papers, who cares if they're doing very little with the results? Someone else is going to do it for them.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    5. Re:No more cash in the bank? by bingoUV · · Score: 2

      Since they are employed by Microsoft, no one will be able to do much with the results for 14 years. Microsoft unable because they are generally inept, and others unable because Microsoft will ask their soul in return for patent license.

      --
      Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
    6. Re:No more cash in the bank? by RabidReindeer · · Score: 2

      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.

      A basic fact of business is that when a company has no income but does have assets, the time has arrived to liquidate those assets and distribute the proceeds to shareholders. A minor variation of that reaches the same conclusion in the face of low, as opposed to zero, profitability.

      What a quaint, antiquated idea. More likely, management will do something like use those assets as leverage to buy another company, lay off thousands, collect bonuses, then sell off the second company, rinse, repeat.

      Or sell itself to some other company, collect golden parachutes and/or high-level positions at the other company (with golden parachutes), award themselves bonuses. lay off thousands, etc. etc.

      Modern business can be so depressing.

    7. Re:No more cash in the bank? by DuckDodgers · · Score: 2

      Excellent point. Except of course that Microsoft is currently wildly profitable, 22 billion in net income this past year. If the total cost of each employee in the layoff is a quarter of a million dollars, the layoff boosts Microsoft profitability less than 3% when profits are already tremendously high.

      Now, I'm an open source software fan that is becoming more and more aligned with the GNU FSF fanatics as I get older. So part of me is inclined to think a move by Microsoft to sacrifice their chance to be relevant in 2030 in order to boost profitability 3% today is wonderful.

      But I think the reduction of pure researchers is a sad event for the industry as a whole, and the world as a whole. By definition, most pure research divisions don't come out with anything useful to a company. But every once in a while they do, and that's the point - you accept the 500 projects that give you nothing of value in return for the few that make the difference between staying ahead of other innovators and being left behind.

      Among other things, Microsoft Research pays Simon Peyton Jones, one of the lead developers on the Haskell language specification and the most popular implementation, the open source Glasgow Haskell Compiler. Haskell may never become a popular language, but it strongly influenced the design of languages like F# and Scala and had a lesser but significant impact on many others. Now that research occurs in Microsoft's Cambridge Research center, so maybe Peyton Jones did not or will not get the axe too. But there are hundreds of other publications and projects in a number of fields to come out of Microsoft research, and whether we like it or not many open source projects have been positively changed by the influence of those ideas.

      Seriously, I consider keeping Microsoft Research one of the few things that Steve Ballmer clearly got right, and the first thing that Satya Nadella unequivocally got wrong.

    8. Re:No more cash in the bank? by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 2

      do you live here (bay area)? I do. been here several decades.

      the valley does NOT want talent. what do they want? CHEAP LABOR. quality is not important, insight is not important, even code quality is not important. speed and price is all that matters.

      I wish I was kidding... ;(

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  2. Let's spend 2.5 billion on Minecraft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The employees we could have paid with that 2.5 billion are a useless drag on our bottom line.

  3. Re:Employer says Thank You by blue+trane · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  4. Wait for it in 3...2...1... by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.
  5. Hmmmmm by JWW · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. The more things change, the more they stay the sam by pkinetics · · Score: 3, Informative

    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/...

  7. Re:Solution: Financial Independence by DivineKnight · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. What about the Turing Award winners? by tgeller · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  9. Re:How many H1-Bs are they trying to get? by guruevi · · Score: 2

    This year alone they have hired 2985 H1B's

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  10. Re:How many H1-Bs are they trying to get? by callahan2211 · · Score: 2

    New law: If, in your district, there is a net gain in H1-B visa hires over net gain in non-H1-B visas hires. Then you cannot run for re-election. Problem solved. This would give the incentive to representatives to make sure Americans are being hired/retrained as needed. The status quo system we have now -- crony capitalism -- is geared toward looking after business and not the voter.

    --
    "There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and
  11. They are not axing the Silicon Valley campus by Eric+Green · · Score: 2

    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.
  12. Do Not Protect The Incompetent - Darwin FTW by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 2

    "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.