Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Will Close Its Skype Office in London, Nearly 400 Jobs To Be Impacted (techcrunch.com)
Microsoft is closing Skype's office in the UK, according to the Financial Times. The move is likely to affect jobs of nearly 400 people at the London HQ. Commenting on the report, Microsoft said it will "unify some engineering positions," but that it "will be entering into a consultation process to help those affected by the redundancies." From a TechCrunch report: The London office is a key part of Skype's history, since it was the primary engineering site and headquarters of the company before Microsoft acquired it, and it also survived Skype's strange interlude under the ownership of eBay before it was acquired by the big M. While the move is no doubt a blow to London's tech scene, some former insiders told the FT that it's also not a surprise to see it go, largely because a steady stream of executive departures over the last few years have foretold a shift in the locus of power at the company. Post-acquisition, Microsoft has also done a lot of product work on Skype, with plenty of integration with Office 365 and a number of feature introductions that bring it closer in line with Slack.
over time, my sensations and feelings about slashdot have certainly changed.
back when i first joined, it was kind of like recapturing the closely-knit social net that bbsing used to provide. except instead of being largely net by geographical proximity, *cough* we were net by intellectual capacity. "news for nerds", right?
and today i would say my feeling towards or sensation about slashdot is more like, sitting down at a dinner table that's so old and worn it largely resembles found wood, and i'm wearing raggedy, hobo clothes and so is the teenager sitting down across from me, and we have one old iron pot to scoop our food from with disgusting wooden bowls, and i make sure that the teen ager gets the greater portion of food because it's a growing child, but every last thing that comes out of the teenager's mouth just makes me want to kick it down the worn out dingy stairs right into the stupid fucking horse drawn buggy traffic. and it leads me to posts like this which are basically apropros of nothing suddenly standing up and spitting directly into the teenager's fucking soup pot.
That's because they have to by law. https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/consultation
It makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to pull out of Europe, including the UK. The taxes are ridiculously high, to pay for absurd and unnecessary social programs, so I don't blame companies that don't want to pay them. Compared to Europe, the US is basically an offshore tax haven.
Can anyone think of a single MS purchase where the employees did well out of the deal, leaving out the original owner?
"Microsoft is buying us" should convince anyone employed by the firm to update their resume.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Not that there's a riot going on, but it was a family affair.
London office is now useless for trade too.
Skype is one of those few programs "from" ms that actually work rather good. Yes I have Skype4bussines at work and it's good for screensharing and voice. So we use it for meetings.
But for day to day communication using chat it's useless, no only does converstions got stored in some meeting logic so you are unable to see what you last talked to a contact about. And you can never be sure if you get all messages as they are only sent to one of your devices so if you expect a message from work during the offhours, don't trust S4B for it. The message might end up on you computer at work and not your mobile and you be none the wiser.
The firing company. Last one out turn off the light. This means you, Satya.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How the fuck do you run your organization so badly, that you get to the point where you have 400 "redundant" people in the first place? And how the fuck something like Skype is using all those people? It's a fucking VOIP app, it's not rocket science. I'd expect the _total_ size of the org to be smaller than that.
to outsource to India or obtain cheap labor through work visas. That's why you see this pattern repeated so much. It's also why small business is the only real source of (net) job growth in most modern economies. You just can't compete with the likes of India, China and the Philippians. It's useless to even try...
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Remember that under Microsoft's control they centralized it to give the NSA the ability to more easily monitor all Skype calls. All the advancements that the original Skype had in its decentralized architecture were removed and to Microsoft these technologies and advancements are not of value. Microsoft is clearly being paid off.
Microsoft said it will "unify some engineering positions,"
"Nearly 400 Jobs To Be Impacted"
"Rightsizing", "downsizing", "compressing employee counts", "unifying positions", "jobs being impacted"
FFS you fucking weasels, just admit you're going to fire a bunch of people. You're not fooling anyone with this manager-speak. Whoever came to work and rejoiced when they heard that their position was being "unified" or "impacted"?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
MS already has (probably better placed) people to deal with regulatory/tax collection agencies than Skype had. Or they would have moved those people off Skype to a more core function.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
It's a tradition to make this software worse and worse and worse on every version, so it's only natural that they have to cripple the development team.
'jobs to be impacted'
Slashdot's use of English gets worse by the day. Are there no proofreaders available?
London was not the primary engineering location. Tallinn was. Before MS acqusition, anyway.
"all original users still miss what you were!"
Having one ID digit less than you, I have added the OT to the subject simply out of netiquette nostalgia.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Nice to finally meet someone who understands the reason for the acquisition. That being said, Skype is the AOL of VOIP now. Grandma's use Skype now. The rest use WeChat.