All I ever see is more and more naked greed and talking down to employees as if we are idiots that cannot see through their BS.
Like all of the return to office stuff. We all know it's not about "in-person collaboration", but that's the line they think we're most likely to swallow.
But then the layoffs happened, and they both gave a big song and dance about how they're "taking responsibility" (whatever the hell that actually means), and that these were "tough decisions" to fire tens of thousands of people.
It shouldn't require a 10,000 IQ to think that maybe hiring thousands of more people than you actually need is a bad idea, and if they couldn't see shit like this coming, then what value are they actually bringing to company? Vague truisms and platitudes about how they regret having to uproot peoples' lives?
I think this is the real key.
Why are these people in charge of these huge corporations?
In a world with 8 billion people they cannot be uniquely qualified for those positions, so why them and why not someone else?
Nowadays I always just assume they're someone's buddy.
Satya Nadella has made it abundantly clear that he's a moron, or at the very least a gambling addict. Does it really make sense for him to be in charge of a company that is worth almost as much as the nominal GDP of Africa [1] [2]?
[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/microsoft/marketcap/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Africa
This is a bad allocation of funds, but presumably this was done because of the off chance that the market would keep growing and the work for these people would follow.
When you do high-risk things with the express purpose of short-term gains, that's basically just gambling.
Now, it's possible they hired all these people in anticipation of future needs, which is fair, but it doesn't take a hyper-genius to know that markets fluctuate, particularly after a global pandemic.
So at this point, either Satya Nadella is so stupid that he didn't know that markets tend to fluctuate, or he's gambling with human lives.
The entire point of a low interest rate economy is that, if you have a bunch of cash, you need to put it into something other than a savings account in order to make anything of it. From that perspective, simply paying engineers to sit and twiddle their thumbs all day has the business advantage of preventing your competitors from moving any faster or to prevent your employees from forming future competitors. It's a complete win win for the companies.
In fact they remind me of financial advisors who charge you regardless of whether they make you or lose you money and are all consistently worse than passive investment in the long run.
That's how I feel about these overpaid CEOs. They are worth orders of magnitude less than they are paid
In what world was it a bad idea for them to hire thousands of people and then fire them? Laying someone off saves tons of costs, and in the meantime, you prevent your competition from utilising those resources. Literally a win-win for them. I say this as someone laid off. I don't understand how this whole trope of 'lay offs are bad for the company that did the laying off' has taken over.
It makes 100% of sense to hire and fire if your competitors are doing it, and you have the money. Microsoft is not suddenly going out of business here.
That's why, as an employee, it's smart to work towards financial independence and just not quite give a whole lot of you know whats. Like when my former boss told me layoffs were expected, that was just a signal that I was going to have way more time to go skiing, which we did.
The main reason so many employees feel like suckers is because they are not as ruthless as their ceos. I changed jobs during the pandemic with the express purpose of maximizing compensation. I made way too much for those years, and when I got laid off, I got free unemployment, free medical, and a free sabbatical. The only ones who were suckers were those who gave their companies loyalty and got laid off anyway. Stop doing that.
I guess I made the mistake of believing them when they said that they “regret this decision”, and assuming a human level of empathy.
Put this next to the fact that high level executives are paid upwards of 100X the average employee.
220,000 microsoft employees
Assuming each was in line to get more than a 5$ raise (obviously), the bonus to the CEO MORE than offsets the cost saved to the employees.
From a financial perspective, a bonus to the CEO makes perfect sense. Welcome to capitalism.
This isn't a fucking game. These are human lives. Microsoft laid off 10,000 humans [1] because their idiotic CEO decided it would be a really good idea to overhire like crazy in 2021 and 2022. This was the wrong decision and now they have to do massive layoffs and paycuts.
Compulsively making high-risk decisions in the hope of short term rewards is such a common thing that we actually have a word for it: gambling. This gambling addict has uprooted 10,000 human beings' lives, and yet he still gets a $10,000,000 bonus. Get off your high horse.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/09/tech-industry-layoffs/
> This isn't a fucking game
That is *exactly* what it is to these people, and I don't doubt that they make use of game theory to make some of these decisions.
Until the rules of the game change, nothing will.
Humans are quite adept at Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma — and play it even during psychology experiments which are supposed to model other games. (This is the source of most “humans are so irrational!” papers.)
Corporations defecting will bring about defection in response:
What is Microsoft gaining from this play, which offsets their losses during the “next round”?
I'm sure a good percentage of these people quit jobs specifically to work at Microsoft. When they quit those jobs, their employer probably filled that position. Then Microsoft fired those people, and it's likely that a lot of people were unable to go back to their previous positions.
This isn't even taking to account people who moved to Washington or California to work at Microsoft, who sold their homes to move to a place with a substantially higher cost of living.
Selling your house and moving for a job in a clearly ridiculous job market is going all in on a gamble. Much moreso than nadella did
Of course Microsoft also historically benefitted from housing in the surrounding area being 1/2 to 1/3rd what it was in the bay area, so they could pay a lot less. Now that good family housing around MS campus starts at 1.5m, MS has been forced to increase salaries dramatically.
> Selling your house and moving for a job in a clearly ridiculous job market is going all in on a gamble.
Tech hiring had been crazy for years before the pandemic, IMHO pandemic hiring in tech didn't stand out as being particularly odd. Of course looking at the numbers afterwards, we can see how much companies grew, but no one applying for a job in Jan 2021 knew that Microsoft intended to hire 40K people that year.
Getting and extra 100k is real beneficial for each of those 10k people.
If those 10k people took big risks, that's a problem with their own risk management, rather than microsoft's
I just don’t think they should be gambling with human lives.
If a large corporation that has the power to do damn nearly anything can't figure out what to do with ten thousand highly talented software engineers, then some people in leadership need to discover some new sources of bright ideas.
[1] There are things MS is really good at operationally, getting contracts signed, getting marketing efforts in place, localizing software for true world wide releases, security reviews, etc. Sadly they got rid of their engineering excellence org years ago. I once spent over a year looking around for someone who knew SQL who was available to spend half a day helping me optimize a database. Then there is the time my group couldn't find anyone who knew how to write software for Windows...
Welcome to Capitalism...
Presumably then he won't get a raise this year along with the other employees as well.
Honestly, just disgusting.