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Microsoft Plans Up To 3,000 Job Cuts In a Sales Staff Overhaul To Fuel Cloud Growth (cnbc.com)
Microsoft announced a major reorganization on Wednesday that will include thousands of layoffs, largely in sales. From a report: The job cuts amount to less that 10 percent of the company's total sales force, and about 75 percent of them will be outside the U.S., the company said. Reports from last week suggested this was going to happen, and that Microsoft was going to specifically focus on how it sells its cloud services product, Azure. Microsoft's cloud business has been booming over recent quarters -- Microsoft noted Azure sales growth of 93 percent last quarter. While Amazon has become a bigger competitor in the space, Microsoft's restructuring is to pivot to software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure.
If those 3,000 weren't doing a whole lot, then it might be -- and this is coming from someone who really wants more stable employment relationships in the world.
I've worked in big companies almost my whole career, both as an employee and a contractor. I've seen plenty of people who don't do tons of work and still manage to keep their jobs. The truth is that the bigger a company is, the easier it is for people to "hide out" and find a nice safe corner where they don't have to do a whole lot:
- It's gotten way faster in the last 10 years or so, but it used to be that if you were an acquisition hire, it would take a very long time to lay off the person they didn't need.
- Large organizations develop their own internal politics, and being a favorite of a well-connected executive or even middle manager is one way to get away without doing the best possible job.
- A corollary to this is the fact that those who really know how to work the system have studied every single rule, custom and exception to the rule. They know exactly how every single internal organization decision is made, obsess over things like pay grades and vacation entitlements, and will always come out on the right side of any reorg simply because their second full-time job is internal tea leaf reading.
- Large organizations also thrive on empire builders, and managers try to increase the number of employees they're managing by any means necessary. Latch on to someone who likes you, and you could get rewarded with the equivalent of a no-show job -- I've seen it happen.
- It's also possible for really big companies to "lose" entire groups of people, as in, we know they're on the payroll but have no idea what that department does these days.
- Fewer places allow this these days, but I've worked in jobs where there are levels upon levels of management for even the simplest tasks. What usually happens is the person doing a job gets promoted, then promotes the next in line so they don't have to directly manage the work, then on up the line. If a company has enough margin (like a consulting company for example,) this is how you wind up with a hierarchy of 8 account executives servicing the same customer.
Microsoft is kind of like an IBM or AT&T pre-breakup in that regard. I'm sure there are plenty of people just hanging on because there's just not a lot of pressure cost-wise. One-off software revenue was huge for them, and now they're poised to vacuum in billions a month in rental fees.
Exactly 100% correct. I keep pointing this out every time this topic comes up, and people act like I have three heads or something. They keep whining about how MS is "treating customers poorly", about how bad the update process is, etc., but any time I suggest changing vendors if they're unhappy with how they're being treated, they act like I'm insane, and that somehow MS has a duty to treat customers better and provide a better experience. They don't, and why should they? Customers will keep coming back for more, no matter how badly MS treats them, so MS might as well soak them for as much as they can. I sure don't feel any sympathy for them any more.