Microsoft winnows: Layoffs hit software engineers hard Microsoft's recent round of layoffs appears to have fallen largely on software developers, including several prominent Python developers and a veteran TypeScript developer. As The Register reported earlier this week, Microsoft plans to cut 3 percent of its staff worldwide, or almost 7,000 employees. According to Bloomberg, …
Given how crap everything works I'd say its the people doing actual useful work.
Let's hope all those sacked from the cult now learn how to write decent UIs and decent code. Clearly they were not allowed to do so working for MS, and until they do we can't let them take their still tainted aura near anything critical.
The only reason the word 'enshittifcation' is over-used is because every major company has eagerly embraced the concept and has been enshittifying everything faster and faster since 2015. Microsoft fully hopped on board about 2021.
The overuse is just a symptom of the very real cause - which is giant evil corporations aggressively making everything worse. There is no way anytone can say that Microsoft has not been ever aggressively enshittifying since at least 2021. EVERYTHING they do has gotten worse. Copilot. Recall. Teams. Outlook. AI in everything. Supposedly tested major updates breaking everything. More aggressive ads in the start menu. What they've done to XBox. The f#$ing disaster of Flight Sim 2024 with the PC version, yes, deliberately enshittified, so the game could run on their shitty least common denominator version of the console. Getting rid of local accounts. AI coding. Jacking up the price of Office for... yes, AI. Starfield. There is nothing they haven't made shittier in the last 4 years. Okay, they probably own some game studios that have actually made some good games recently because they were under Nadella's radar, but very much the exception.
over-used "enshittifcation"
For variation you could roll your own coinage for the same process. [En]fæcalization or just [to] enfæcate, stercofication, copriafication... every language appears to have pooponderance of words for Nº 2s animal and human, literal and metaphorical.
With those and the -ficate (< -fico, -ficare...) suffix you can make the world your dung heap. ;)
MS Typescript recently announced that they had mostly completed rewriting the typescript codebase in Go. That puts anyone who who had been involved developing and supporting the original typescript version of the typescript "compiler" in a tight spot, as the new version is going to get more support. Obviously doesn't make it any better for Ron - so sorry to hear that.
Well, with how stunningly shitty everything from Microsoft has gotten in the last 5 years (release of Windows 11 marks a clear inflection point, all downhill from there) I'm not sure we'll even notice the difference? Nadella still seems to be quite proud of the Glorious Empire of Shit he's built.
The countdown has begun to the moment when Microsoft is bemoaning its inability to recruit the talent it needs to meet its growth targets.
The big tech companies have arguably been over-recruiting for years in a weird game of beggar-my-neighbour They've had plenty of time to wind that down in an orderly and more humane fashion but chose not to. I think they'll find their AI resources rather more of a burden than they imagine: disposing of them means writing off large capital sums, they're not worried about maintaining their visas and they're not going to accept a real-terms reduction in their power input in the upcoming spike in electricity price inflattion. And that's before you have to worry about the inappropriate workplace behaviour.
But as highly paid business executives, I'm sure the managers have a detailed transformational plan and not merely an infographic showing a small dollar sign on one side, employees being fed to alligators in the middle and a larger dollar sign on the other side.
I thought that was Powerpoint slides?
I just had to educate a recent junior joiner of our team how to avoid Powerpoint newbie syndrome by pointing at the Guy Kawasaki 10/20/30 principles. Newbie proved having a brain by observing that this meant leaving about 95% of the bells and whistles untouched, so there is a future for this one..
The big tech companies have arguably been over-recruiting for years in a weird game of beggar-my-neighbour They've had plenty of time to wind that down in an orderly and more humane fashion but chose not to.
Nothing boosts the stock price more than laying off a good proportion of the staff, I think they recruit a few thousand extra every year just to be able to do this.
>” Other factors may be at work too. For example, Microsoft's plan "to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters" may be constraining
Sorry, I doubt what MS executives want to spend on salaries is influenced by their AI investment. The AI investment will be just a useful diversion or avoidance from stating the truth: they want to pay less money out as salaries.
First, they fired their QA department.
Then they got rid of their testing department.
Now, they're getting rid of their coders.
I have just one question left : when is Nadella and the Board going to be replaced by AI ?
Because if it is really that good, then go the whole distance.
As long as they make shareholder happy, never.
As soon as profits plummet, they're be shown the door - still they will activate they golden parachute.
Nadella full understood that today spending money investing in your own R&D is "stupid" - it's far better to exploit code written elsewhere as much as you can - after all this is the "FOSS" model - avoid to invest yourself, exploit free work. Fully compatible with his brahmin mentality, and shareholder greed (after all, the same mentality).
Your product become a mess? As long as profits are high enough, it doesn't matter. And as long as your competitor is Linux - developed the same way, you're safe.
My theory is that the galaxy-brain move here is to keep telling the world how much of your code is being written by AI in order to trick your rivals into trying to use AI for everything. Then you keep using competent developers and build a massive market lead while they flail around trying to find non-trivial scenarios in which AI code generation is useful.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like any of the middle-management finance guys promoted way out of their competence that represent our overpaid and deeply replaceable CEO class have those kinds of smarts. In fact a profile on Nadella last week suggested he was working in an almost entirely AI-mediated way, which is probably not good news for Windows users or Microsoft staff. Good for the board, though, as I bet they could save a bit by cutting out the middle-man and just letting an LLM run the company.
Here's an idea for the shareholders. Instead of laying off software engineers, how about laying off the Hype-AI Dept; i.e. AI-Nadella, Marketing, and BS advertising sales execs. That might get back to some semblance of normality. Perhaps it's because they don't even pretend to be a software company. "MicroSoft" should be renamed "MegaBsAI".
I've tried out a couple of the VSCode AI plugins, and even have a locally hosted brain damaged 9GB Ollama LLM running for cline on my box right now. That one is brain damaged because it's so small, but it will provide me with a testbed for trying to write some MCP services.
The Claude online/free signup LLM for cline is much more useful, but too expensive. Deepseek-R1 with Claude training enhancements is much cheaper and good enough, but still costs money I don't have.
Microsoft's free introductory service is comparable to Claude, but can't be used for the MCP services I want to play with.
But none of them can be trusted at all. They hallucinate APIs and packages that don't exist in Java 21 and it's family of frameworks and jars. For every moment of brilliance they show in using the latest code styles and letting you know which JDK added that feature, they drop the ball somewhere else in the code they produce.
Are the paid versions better? Somewhat more recent in their code styles, but still no more trustworthy from what I've read.
Companies need senior staff that know when the AI is screwing up. The productivity comes at a serious code quality cost, especially if people let the AI do the writing for them.
The old adage of "You can have it fast; you can have it cheap; you can have it good. Pick two." applies as much as ever.
So Satya says that 30% of Windows is coded by AI. What was used to train the AI that generates the code? Doubtless Windows itself, maybe Windows 10, and surely not Windows 8! All the modern versions of Windows are littered with code defects, as evidenced by the monthly Patch Tuesday release of sometimes hundreds of updates, and occasional "must fix" updates on other days.
My conclusion here is simple and it seems logical. AI is helping to generate even more Windows defects and faster.
Faster Python is a 5 year project to gain a 100% speed increase (or cut the runtime by 50% if you wish), based on fairly deep engineering to eke out 10-15% gains through each yearly release, by identifying multiple areas deep in the core execution engine that could be optimized (things like subinterpreters). I am not sure the global interpreter lock (GIL) removal to speed up threading is part of it, or a companion, but separate effort (I suspect it's the latter).
There's a roadmap, and some targeted domains and then the team responsible tries the proposed ideas on each release's roadmap and then rolls it into the mainstream if it's bearing fruit. Or a given optimization might carry over to the next release if it's promising but not quite ready. Started with Python 3.11 or 3.12 and has been working quite well at these incremental, cumulative gains. 3.14 is due to roll out some more.
(I hope I haven't mangled the gist of it overmuch).
The main thing though is that this isn't bug fixing or small feature additions. You do it best with dedicated full-time people that are thinking deep on only these problems, not part timers. It was a good of MS, to sponsor the project. Not so cool to yank it out on short notice. It's not that big a team either.
Hopefully another, less blinkered, corporation that makes use of the Python ecosystem for its own purposes will step up and shepherd this through. I guess someone with a big enough fleet of servers running Python loads would get payback on saved energy use, for example.
Meanwhile, AI will save the day, no doubt!
So, Micros~1 is writing "30% of its code" using AI. They're probably using CoPileIt, which in my personal experience, really sucks at writing code*. Hence the precipitous decline in the already miserable level of quality in their recent offerings.
They probably think they don't have to test CoPileIt code either, because...well, it was written by AI, so it can't possibly have bugs in it, amiright?
So, sorted, then.
*YMMV, of course...but probably not.
Microsoft are a massively profitable company. They are sacking talented people because, why? To move some numbers around on a spreadsheet to make investors happy.
Actual competent leadership would see the talent they have and utilise it to grow the company. It cost them a fortune to hire, train and grow those people, and now they'll go and use those skills with their competitors.
This cycle of hiring and layoffs is a symptom of, frankly, idiots in the C suite.
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