Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff Microsoft will cut the jobs of 10,000 employees by the end of March. The move follows smaller rounds of layoffs at the software company last year as cloud growth slows due to the worsening economic situation. CEO Satya Nadella confirmed in an SEC filing just minutes before publication: "Today, we are making changes that will …
"That means every one of us and every team across the company must raise the bar and perform better than the competition" - Satya Nadella
“Today more than ever, I need your full energy and commitment to ensure we get back on the path to success,” - Yves Guillemot
"Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade” - Elon Musk
Did they go to a seminar at Initech or something? Not one of them ever thinks maybe their own decision-making needs to be re-evaluated.
A few years ago a tech company making lay offs signalled imminent bankruptcy and so a declining share price.
Now it's a fashion leading to lower costs and so higher stock price.
They will hire more new employees at lower rates and then pay through the nose for a few key people they accidentally let go. But in the short term it offsets any bad earnings numbers for last quarter
"A few years ago a tech company making lay offs signalled imminent bankruptcy and so a declining share price"
The loss of that many staff all in one go will also probably mean imminent even lower quality Windows 10 and Windows 11 updates.
To be fair, companies like MS are bloated as fuck. They don't just hire for productivity reasons. They hire to stop the competition hiring.
I know quite a few people that work(ed) at blue chip firms and their work load was tiny.
Some of them are fucked right now because they spent so long where they were they are essentially institutionalised. They cannot function anywhere else because they have been in a bubble for a decade or more. It would take a lot of training for them to catch up with another firm.
”They don't just hire for productivity reasons. They hire to stop the competition hiring.”
I wouldn’t object being hired for a position like that. Terms being that I can ’work’ from home, fixed 10 y contract and no need to report anything bar monthly report I’m not doing work for a competitor. I’d settle for meager 60k per year.
Me neither...but I'd want the invention clause and 12 month non-compete written out. I'd also waive a notice period clause if it worked both ways.
I would happily work for Microsoft et al for peanuts if I was allowed to keep my small business running at the same time. You know, a bit like a lot of CEOs do...such as Elon Musk and his multiple interests.
The race to the bottom on pay, skills and quality of outcome.
The last is irrelevant to the people at the top because they NEVER have to deal with the moronic stupidity or their decisions.
Because everyone in the sector is doing the same, it pretty much makes no difference.
A long time ago there was a picture of an Indian gentleman in rags peddling a bike connected to a dynamo. It was powering a laptop and the caption was "HP Support"
I cannot find it anywhere.
Not just Microsoft. I think this normal distribution pattern of laying off and promoting started with GE and was used at Dell too. It leads to all sorts of dysfunctional behaviour.
As does “hiring ahead of the curve” also used at Dell which resulted in one case of a senior manager starting one week and being invited to an off-site meeting the next week, when he was laid off.
Having been around the block more than a few times, I've seen this "automatic code generators so we don't need programmers anymore" movie before. It didn't turn out well...for the managers who tied their careers to this pipe dream. Don't see compelling evidence why this remake won't end the same way.
Of course, there will be collateral damage in this remake...just like the previous ones. Sad, really
I don't see AI code generation taking off too quickly.
If there were no developers to filter the worst ideas as well as to blame the messy end product on, all the managers, head honchos and decisionmakers with no clothes - the schmoozing, fuzzy thinking clowns with limited domain knowledge and frankly idiotic ideas - would be exposed for the world to see.
So there will be some attempts in the next years, followed by quiet reversions because "AI is not yet really ready for prime time for software development".
Here is code created by Chat GPT. While it's a simple example, I think there is a lot of potential here for the future.
ChatGPT Input > Write me code for a lambda function that takes JSON input with firstname, lastname and address and writes the data to a dynamoDB table.
ChatGPT output.
import json
import boto3
def lambda_handler(event, context):
# parse input
body = json.loads(event['body'])
firstname = body['firstname']
lastname = body['lastname']
address = body['address']
# connect to DynamoDB
dynamodb = boto3.resource('dynamodb')
table = dynamodb.Table('my-table')
# write data to DynamoDB
table.put_item(
Item={
'firstname': firstname,
'lastname': lastname,
'address': address
}
)
# return success message
response = {
"statusCode": 200,
"body": json.dumps({"message": "Data written to DynamoDB"})
}
return response
That's because they've always tried to fulfill the "lets make cheap non-technical people more technical" dream. This time round they know they can make moderately skilled people a lot more skilled and not have to have the expensive "experts" at the top.
I genuinely hope that this wave of AI massacre will scalp businesses rather than cut the legs off at the knees.
We got the same pep talk from our new CEO, although I understand the GM of the branch I work at pushed back with a list of ancient equipment that needed replacing 10 years ago and is currently preventing us us from "being the best we can be".
I think he asked for $10 million and he won't be getting any of it.
Time to adapt the old IBM joke....
Two lions escape from Redmond zoo. They go their own way but agree to meet up two weeks later.
When they meet up the first one is looking tired and thin and mangey, the second one looks pretty good.
What happened to you?" says the second... "It was awful" said the first, " I couldn't go out in the day they were hunting me with guns, there was nothing to eat, and I had to hide in the bushes. But what about you? You are looking great!".
The second replied, "Oh, I hid out in the Microsoft car park. I ate one middle manager a day, and nobody noticed!".
This is essentially the same situation that existing about 40,000 years ago ... we kicked those hunter gatherers out and started farming ... we see that as an evolution but we're now sitting on the sofa, posting on social media, "my doctor says I weigh too much (only 450lbs) and I have weak legs so the idiots are saying I should exercise"
So much technology is destroying our world because of what we are doing and failing to do - did we evolve just to post on Facebook?
We sit around on couches piling on weight, posting to social media because everything else is far too expensive / has to be done when you aren't in the salt mines...essentially meaning you can't do what you want when you want. You have to do what you can afford, when your boss says you can.
You can post to social media from your couch basically for free, but if you want to play squash, you need a gym membership and for that you need to work, especially if you want to play in the nicer courts...the problem mankind has is that it isn't meant to work a 9 to 5. We've finally started breaking away from that and the result is businesses fighting back with layoffs under the thin guise of "saving costs"...when in actual fact it's because they set everyone free during the pandemic and those people don't want to come back...they've tasted a better lifestyle, and they liked it and won't give it up.
These mass layoffs are just another demonstration of how weak leadership has become. If you won't play by my rules, with my ball then I'm taking it home. Trouble with that strategy is that the snotty kid that goes home with the ball ends up by themselves with only their ball...the other kids just go and find another ball...or even a different game to play.
Does that mean we can expect even more testing laid at the feet of the public?
Then again, going by their recent track record, I didn't realise they had any QA staff left to get rid of!!
If it meant they avoided putting in, taking our or ignoring the things I don’t like/are idiotic/missing from Windows 11 then great. Sadly I very very much doubt that’ll be the case.
And theres no chance of the UI design team being sacked
Although they are actually quite cheap to employ.... box full of crayons, some paper, and some decent care nurses.
What about marketing? surely now that win updates itself regardless of the users intentions, they dont need a marketing department....
"What about marketing? surely now that win updates itself regardless of the users intentions, they dont need a marketing department...."
But then who would organise that Ignite thing? That used to be quite informative but last year's appeared to have been handed over to the marketers and consisted mostly of breatheless people telling viewers how EXCIDDED they were to be here, and lots of use of meaningless phrases and words such as 'helping people to do more', 'performant', etc.
But Q&A is a direct cost to the business and in the eyes of manglement adds no value.
Remember that with all this agile shite you just fix all the bugs (coding cockups) as you go along in the next iteration, or just ignore them because nobody in the development teams gives a stuff that a piece of functionality is broken.
Early 2000s I was working for a US software company. They axed about half our folk and expected the rest of us to pick up the slack. Sent a VP across the pond to tell us that this was a "stretch opportunity" for us, to show the company how well we could perform. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to offer him a neck-stretching opportunity ;-)
Microsoft always follows IBM, with a 10-20 year delay. To know what happens to Microsoft next, one need only study IBM history. Gates and Ballmer learned how to be cutthroat monopolists by watching IBM, and everything Microsoft has done was built from that playbook. Lock-in tactics, treating the rest of the industry like garbage, lying cheating stealing, the whole nine yards.
Microsoft is only relevant now because their cloud has permitted them to turn into a "services company". Just like IBM did.
Now, Microsoft is following in Big Blue's footsteps by mass-sacking employees on their home turf. Those jobs will magically re-appear in India and other dirt-cheap labor markets.
"Microsoft is only relevant now because their cloud has permitted them to turn into a "services company". Just like IBM did."
If only it were so. Microsoft is relevant because: a) Windows (still) dominates the desktop/laptop market, b) they own a killer-app (Excel - 3/4 of the world is run on it), c) inertia and comfort-zone thinking ("Nobody gets fired for buying IBM Microsoft"), and d) they bought up/eliminated most of the competition in the personal productivity software market (realistic alternative to Office anyone?).
The real worry is the increasing market dominance (and consequential lack of choice, service quality, etc) of Microsoft 365. The integration with the Microsoft desktop is too compelling an offer for a large number of businesses. MS Teams is crap but employees in Microsoft-dominated customer companies have to use it.
At least with Azure, they still have a strong competitor in AWS, plus the myriad of smaller and/or specialised cloud players (GCS, Linode, Hetzner, Databricks, etc, etc).
eh...about that "Windows dominating the desk/laptop market..."
Data point: I recently met several tech workers from a major US defense comtractor. Asked them what kind of PC OS they used. Answer was "Microsoft for corporate email, paperwork, etc, Linux for real work", which I thought was interesting.
Don't count Linux out yet.
"Those jobs will magically re-appear in India and other dirt-cheap labor markets."
Is India a dirt cheap labour market? Last time i looked into it, it was more expensive than you'd expect, difficult, and with a work culture that required a lot of management time. But that was pre-COVID...
That means every one of us and every team across the company must raise the bar and perform better than the competition to deliver meaningful innovation that customers, communities, and countries can truly benefit from."
Besides being the obvious tiresome management tripe -- the stuff of Buzzword Bingo cards -- I for one don't know what "bar" these wankers could be referring to. Could they mean not breaking two things for everyone thing they add to a program of theirs? Could it mean creating (and then keeping) a usable and consistent UI, not bedazzled with shiny but less-than-useful eye-candy? Could it mean listening to the user community for what works and what doesn't? I rather doubt it, as any of this would require management raising its bar WRT how this juggernaut works, and...well, we can't have that, now can we?
Shit, if that were to happen, they might actually have to do something, and they are absolutely petrified that any action on their part might piss off the Wall st. cokeheads that really rule this company.
This is only being done to keep the shareholders and management (whose stock options need to increase in value) happy. Five percent could be considered excess weight so no big deal shedding it, but more than this will mean making hard choices as to what product lines to cut loose.
BUT... they emerge as far better employees, far more knowledgable, far more aware. After all, it's the very reason all the cadets on the command rank / officer stream have to do the Kobayashi Maru. You learn a lot from about both avoidance and mitigation from unmitigated disasters.
"Nadella added that "US-benefit-eligible employees will receive a variety of benefits, including above-market severance pay, continuing healthcare coverage for six months, continued vesting of stock awards for six months, career transition services, and 60 days' notice prior to termination, regardless of whether such notice is legally required."
I wonder how Twatter staff feel about this when comparing Microsoft's approach to their own "esteemed leader's divine ways"...
Microsoft Job Cuts Hit HoloLens Unit After Setback on Army Goggles
Microsoft won’t be getting more orders for its combat goggles anytime soon after Congress earlier this month rejected the US Army’s request for $400 million to buy as many as 6,900 of them in the current fiscal year.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-18/microsoft-scales-back-hololens-business-after-setback-on-us-army-goggles
"$800 million of increased energy costs "
Sweet mother of Pearl. What was their "normal" energy costs then? And how much of that was/is being frittered away in Azure doing nothing really useful except keeping CPU heatsinks warm? I can sort of see why some states want to target datacenters.
Please. The difficult made impossible.
For example, I had to change the NTP reference server on a Windows 10 Enterprise machine a few days ago. Not something you do often... so not something I'd developed any muscle memory for. It was trial and error banging away through setting after setting until the old date/time control panel decided to swim up from the murky depths after about 15 minutes or so to see what all the noise was about.
Couldn't find it under the new settings.
Old Control Panel -> Clock and Region -> Date and Time
Switch to Internet Tab
Change Settings -> Select Server Drop Down (or enter in edit box manually) -> Update Now.
Agree, very clunky, and needs the bar raising.
(Same antiquated method in Windows 11, so hasn't been solved there either).
Not something one does very often, as I said, so no point scripting it. And the help for w32tm.exe is labyrinthine. Plus it seems like different flavours of Windows 10 / 11 have subtly different ways to wake up the old style control panels.
As always the pain made me think I ought to learn the "tecchy" other way, so I looked it up, but I'll forget about it when I next need to do it probably in 12 months time. I spent a hundred and fifty times longer looking up how to do on the internet it one one would with a nice, simple GUI like there was in Windows 7, where simply a click on the clock in the menu bar caused the appropriate controls appeared. Far less hassle for something incredibly important but that you very rarely have to do. OK, the old control panel way of doing it was a little clunky, but at least it was there, it was familiar, it was clustered with all the other relevant settings and labelled mostly rationally. The "new" way for all these things... Jesus wept. Network devices / Internet settings are spread across umpteen different pages and the links between them are labelled in riddles.
To set the time like a pro...
In an elevated command prompt you use (for example):
w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:192.168.1.150
Then restart the windows time service:-
net stop w32time
w32tm /unregister
w32tm /register
net start w32time
w32tm /resync
Or use services.msc to locate and restart the service...
(Same antiquated method in Windows 11, so hasn't been solved there either).
"Solved"?!?. You expect a solution to this? The concept of a solution implies that someone at Micros~1 would actually consider this a problem. Saint Dogbert understands.....
"In an interview earlier this month, CEO Satya Nadella said the next two years are going to be tough for the tech industry, and that companies would need to look inside themselves and ask if they are as efficient as they need to be competitive."
Maybe, maybe stop being fucking greedy. Tell your investors "I'm keeping the price of license as they are, they don't need to be increased, we can take the small hit, more people will then buy as we'll be cheaper. Also, we need to do more testing instead of just pushing stuff out and we also need to STOP forcing Windows 11 (that is shit) on people".
But he won't.
Yeah, but you forgot the fact that their clients and the entire market are captive. When this happens, you don't give a damn about clients. Microsoft could easily double the prices for most of their products and the planet will suck it up. Who is going to throw out Office and Exchange just because the cost has doubled ?
On the one hand you get a put MS, Google or AWS on your CV but on the other if you've only been there 5 mins you'll be first out the door when the recessions come. Smaller companies that just survive by keeping a loyal band of staff happy are usually better places, you may not get a great entry on your CV but you'll probably have a good place to wait out the storm raging during a recession.
Exactly a week ago I read in headlines that Microsoft staff was to get unlimited leave.
From the article in The Times:
"Salaried US employees will be offered ten corporate holidays, leaves of absence, sick leave and mental health leave, as well as time away for jury duty, and bereavement leave, alongside unlimited “discretionary” days off. Workers with unused days of holiday are set to receive a one-off payment in April."
I must admit, I interpreted that differently than being sacked..
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
