Microsoft's 10,000 job cuts didn't quite do the trick The 10,000 jobs Microsoft said it would prune from the corporation in January are done, but fresh filings with US state officials show the bloodletting continues. A WARN notice posted in Washington shows 276 being let go in the state alone, but the global total is likely to be much higher and the cuts are much more widespread …
"loads of the people that earn us those profits"
Either those people were earning the profits, in which case how do they make profits in the future, or they weren't in which case why were they employing them in the first place and wouldn't it make sense to start with the most highly paid of them?
"or they weren't in which case why were they employing them in the first place and wouldn't it make sense to start with the most highly paid of them?"
Microsoft and Google have been hiring people and assigning them to pointless projects just to dry up the pool of engineers so that start ups have nobody to hire. Now that interest rates have shot up and startups can't get investment they no longer need to do this.
Just think of it as an indicator of quality.
If it supports the latest windows, you know there must be plenty of cores and cycles and RAMs to run the crappy badly-optimised code, there must be plenty of storage for the bloated install and the comms is reliably stable for dumping petabytes of telemetry.
So they're making massive profits and laying people off. That's not really a sensible solution - eventually you get overstretched and you can't maintain services any more.
If they're not careful they'll hit a tipping point, people start leaving and they can't maintain the services and the quality slips, the services slip. Seeing it now with Twitter, wonder how many people M$ needs to fire before they start circling the drain too?
Variable by service and product.
Just off the top of my head in Microsoft's case that would probably be poorer quality of testing, leading to more bugs hitting production, more security alerts, slower turnaround on patching. More outages for Azure. Data loss in databases running on MSSQL.
In Twitter's case, outages, flaky APIs, users complaining of tweets double posting or not posting at all.
In the end - in all cases - users losing confidence in the brand and actively looking for alternatives. (In Twitter's case Mastodon, in Reddit's Lemmy/Raddle/etc)
In the UK and US there is always talk about the lack of productivity....
why is productivity so low? Why are people leaving the workplace early?
Then you read things like this and Reddits antiwork subs and you realise that only a lunatic would actually do anything past the minimum for their employer.
Why bother working your backside off when you know you can be made redundant on a whim, probably by an HR bod whose scoring you on some random chart & doesn't count the times you worked until 2 am as actual "work"
I'm not sure about the UK and US, but around here the problem isn't people leaving the workplace early. It's people being in the workplace and look like they are working, while actually doing very little. In some places where the chair-warming culture is toxic enough, some people actually stay for unpaid overtime in the office - often after having spent half the day faffing around, or unable to work due to everyone else faffing around.
Not only that, but those people get celebrated for being in the office so much. Even though they do less than the more efficient/effective employees, who work their hours and go home.
Companies have set themselves up to fail with their obsession with presenteeism.
Similar, but more insidious: I have a friend who works in a place where everyone goes to have a beer together after work. Sounds good? Not so much, once you consider that this happens roughly at 19.00, when the place closes. My friend's work hours end at 17.00.
Of course, you don't have to participate, and you don't have to work between 17 and 19... But if he goes home, he gets labeled as unfriendly, distant, not sociable, poor team player - what kind of misanthrope doesn't want to have a beer with colleagues? And if he stays, well, there's nothing to do but work, and even if he tried to do something else, someone would come asking for a hand for "just a quick thing" anyway.
This sort of crap ought to be purged by fire.
Quote
"In the UK and US there is always talk about the lack of productivity....
why is productivity so low?"
Heres something to ponder....
At work cell #7 is old and a PITA(not helped by spilling its guts all over the floor this morning.. god I love struggling to replace split hydraulic oil pipes) but when it works it runs 16 hrs a day doing the work of 3-4 people, however a rival company might employ those 4 people at min wage and 4 older machine tools for less than the cost of cell #7 , they output about the same... so the beancounters would say "why bother buying a machining cell when using the old method will output the same?, plus when things get slack we can just fire the operators"
thus our productivity per person is higher than the rival company, but they can work out cheaper.
Check out history
Hiero of Alexandria made a steam engine...... so why did the greeks/romans not take that idea and make a steam powered grain milling machine
because it was cheaper and easier to buy 10 slaves and get them to do it.
Rebranding is never pointless.
It demonstrates that the coloured pencil brigade is contributing value to the business, and should be exempt from any downsizing, unlike support, development, or QA, who only cause problems and bad publicity.
'2023 now has the "second-highest total for the sector ever" with only 2001, the year of the "tech bubble" recession, having more. That year, 168,395 cuts were announced in technology.'
Well, we're only halfway through July so seems quite likely we'll have more than that by the end of this year.
They conducted some risky experiments and their hypotheses got falsified. It is now to undo the damage.
Firstly, will they finally fire all the “developer advocates” running those pointless, unwanted livestreams and podcasts with less than 2k views? Microsoft spent the last 5 years emulating the attitude of Google while producing content befitting of a community Linux distro, and it just doesn’t fit what they do in any way, shape or form. Those with any common sense stick to APIs Microsoft makes available with the operating system, not the new fangled stuff which needs replacing every couple of years, which is why nobody watches this crap.
Secondly, they wasted boatloads of money on fruitless social media opportunities which could have been better spent poaching even B-tier university students. In the real world, people want tried, tested and true technologies advocated for by no-nonsense corporates with the backing of highly talented (yet socially inept) computer programmers. If it doesn’t come from Dave’s Garage, we don’t want it. Anything else can be had elsewhere for a much cheaper price.
Finally, they’re still wasting boatloads of money on offering services people neither want nor will they ever pay for. Bundling won’t change that. Clipchamp is inferior to every free editing tool out there, kill it or make it FOSS but without the cloudy nonsense. Yammer Enterprise is as dead as Google+ and whatever value Sway has needs to be ingested into PowerPoint.
"Finally, they’re still wasting boatloads of money on offering services people neither want nor will they ever pay for. Bundling won’t change that. Clipchamp is inferior to every free editing tool out there, kill it or make it FOSS but without the cloudy nonsense. Yammer Enterprise is as dead as Google+ and whatever value Sway has needs to be ingested into PowerPoint."
Not to mention that thing called 'Teams' in W11, which isn't Teams as most people understand it.
I've yet to come across anyone who uses the fake-teams - consumer-to-consumer user chat seems to be the target market, but there are already loads of players in that space and something as generally shite and ill-conceived as this isn't going to make any impression!
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