Microsoft trims jobs as new year begins Microsoft kicks off the new year with more job cuts, albeit fewer than one percent of employees reportedly face the ax. As first reported by Business Insider, Microsoft is trimming its workforce again, including roles in its security division, with the cuts targeting underperforming employees. A Microsoft spinner confirmed the …
MS strongly suggests employees use Copilot to fill out their performance self-assessment and managers use Copilot to summarise them. The only factor which counts in these Copilot-produced performance reviews is some mystical woo called a "growth mindset".
And that is why Windows 11 is a pile of crap.
Interesting read, thanks for that. But absurd self defeating performance review processes aren't something new at Microsoft see Vanity Fair circa 2012 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
The copilot AI generated performance reports and then the managers using same to evaluate them is farcical, reminds me of the old joke about the man the dog and the computer in a room. Just cut out the middle men and have copilot write and review the performance reports and call it good.
As for the CEO perceiving himself as some sort of genius/messiah, seems to be part of the job description these days. Rock in to organization with "new" ways of doing things, I'm right, you are wrong, get inline and profess unwavering loyalty and support of my methods or take a fast exit your choice. Fast forward a year or two, company is in turmoil, people spend more time working at appeasing the god than actually doing what the company does until board or investors get peeved and exist the CEO and bring in an new personality to "stabilize" the boat. This CEO probably does have a clue but isn't flashy and sooner or later gets knifed in the back and then it's rinse and repeat.
Windows revenues are now only 11% of Microsoft's total revenue. Windows is around the same size as LinkedIn and XBox. Azure is huge now.
Long-term, I expect MS to slowly drop operating systems and move to a Linux Kernel with a UI that looks like Windows/KDE but showing Ads everywhere.
After all, they did this with Internet Explorer being replaced by Chromium based Edge.
Dropping their browser engine for Chromium reduced the amount of work they had to do because websites already worked in Chromium. Dropping the Windows kernel for Linux would increase the work they had to do because binaries don't just transfer over.
I don't know why this idea crops up so often. When Windows dies, it will just die, and given its market share, I don't think that will be soon. Microsoft may make more money by renting out servers, but just because Windows revenue is a smaller chunk of their pretty big company than it was ten years ago doesn't stop it from being a large number of dollars that they're quite happy to keep having.
And dont forget that Windows OS is the central plank of their monopolistic strategy.
Without Windows they don't have a stick (or have a smaller stick) to beat customers over the head with to make them move to Azure rather than stay on-prem or go to another cloud provider.
"What do you mean 'you want to move to GCP'...ok that's fine, here is your four fold increase in Windows license costs. But if you move to Azure we can make that problem go away...."
Trust me, Windows is here to stay
Did I get it right? One must convey something in one sentence, but it's not Up-to-Standards (TM), so one uses LLM to repack it into two pages of hallucinated fluff, which no sane human could possibly read, therefore their managesrs have to use LLM to hallucinate a "summary" out of the drivel. Hmm, what could possibly go wrong?
The company I used to work for (TCIUTWF) appears to be going down this road. Gone are management comments on your performance over the past year, and it's now all up to you to explain what you have accomplished and why you are of value to the Company.
Being retired, I no longer GAF, but time was, you had a manager who tasked you with roles on projects and knew what you did, then had a talk with you and told you what they thought of your work.. That was called "managing" you. If you did good work, you would get something called a "raise".
In TCIUTWF, that's all gone. Salary is "decoupled" from performance. You get a 3% raise for being alive and breathing and showing up at work, and maybe another 0.75% if HR feels like being generous. The only way to get a really significant annual increase, is to leave convince them you are promotable (a long, involved process that, again, requires you to explain why this is the case). Then wait to actually *be* promoted, of course. Your manager has input into this process, but no control over it. If you happen to be a senior technical contributor, there is literally nowhere to go, but into sales or management, so no significant raises, no matter how much you contribute to the success of a project (which, after all, is what makes money for the Company)
Notice a trend here? Lots of input required from you, over and above any productive project work you happen to be doing, with no clear benefit to you. But it's required, semiannually, now. And your manager has more time to write *their* progress reports or whatever, to justify their existence. I have a pathalogical hatred of "self evaluations", as the choice seems to be loudly (over-)blowing your own trumpet, or being truthful about your failings, neither of which will significantly change the amount of money you get in your paycheck.
which we identify and terminate at the earliest opportunity, apparently. Those extremely gifted in the art of the real cockup are excepted especially in cloudy roles.
"When people are not performing, we take the appropriate action" - appoint them to senior management?
1. high-performance talent
2. high-quality talent
3. customer-feedback-oriented talent
Choose two. I take 2 and 3.
It is like with cars: High performance cars are not made for high quality, they only need to survive one race. Maybe we need to purchase a new installed Windows for every boot soon.
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Guess my shop doesn't "perform" well enough to meet their standards. Motherf*ckers.
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That's the weird thing about the enthusiasm for AI. The outward-facing processes have largely already been dehumanized. It doesn't really matter whether the processes behind them are run by AI or necromancy because if there's no form of appeal you'll never know whether the decisions are right or wrong. It would probably be easier and cheaper to randomly decimate your customer base from time to time.
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From my 15+ years at Microsoft. And I quit working there about 8 years ago. That ‘Growth Mindset’ stuff was clearly identifiable as 100% bull$hit right from the get go. You only have to read Carol Dwecks book, which is full of utterly implausible case studies, to realise this,
Microsoft pay well and working there is basically endurance test of putting up with bullshit until your share options vest and you meet you financial goals in life.
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