Microsoft has started layoffs today | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has started layoffs today

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237 pointsvaidhy87 comments

I was part of the much bigger proportioned layoff back in 2009 shortly after my second child was born, back when MiniMicrosoft was still posting. I was so upset! BUT! It was actually a great thing that happened to me. I got a big severance, and almost immediately started somewhere else I've been considering with 30% raise and pretty quickly arriving great bonuses. I wish the same to the people laid off, looks like at least a couple of people in that twitter thread are awesome people!

ALSO!

I went back to Microsoft consulting as a both orange and a purple badge for a number of years, and In 2011 I worked on a super secret project with Microsoft HR helping tune a badly implemented upgrade to the system tracking layoffs, so secret I had to sign a ton of docs just to know it existed. It was eye opening. In organization that size there are always layoffs, some small (like 10 people), some slightly bigger (like 100 people). They were in the height of the Skype integration (aka ripping it to pieces) and so several hundred of scandinavians/estoninans were getting an axe. I fixed the system's perf issues and got out of there asap

18,000… wow. Did that actually materialise?

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2014/07/18000-microsoft-jobs-go...

Yep - I lived through it too and it led to me realizing that there could eventually be a life outside of the MSFT bubble.

I think that the vast majority of the impacted employees were in Nokia, but the mothership was also affected - one of our team members simply vanished that day.

> I went back to Microsoft consulting as a both orange and a purple badge

Orange badge is for contractors, but purple badge are for dogs: https://twitter.com/juliehubs/status/892459513432858624

Was purple used for a different badge type back then?

It's either that, or you are an animagus like Sirius Black!

Purple badges are for business guests from other companies that might be doing a a stint onsite.

Yeah I was a purple badge when I was doing an Externship with them via a consulting firm.

They laid off KC Lemson! https://mobile.twitter.com/kclemson/status/15821754192685015... She invented Ninja Cat! She created the Bedlam card game, and she's been there long enough to remember the actual Bedlam incident. https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/inside-bedlam-a-car...

she was adding no value to the product. (My personal opinion is that) she wasn’t laid off sooner because she’s married to D Lemson who was friends with Terry Myerson. She used to try to stay relevant by sending these long “status emails” to the entire org with no particular goal.

I don’t have any insight except I follow her on Twitter and a lot of names I recognise are saying very different things from you, like for example Larry Osterman. Maybe you know better.

Didn't expect the last bit (Bedlam cards). These were fun.

Is she an engineer? What kind of contributions had she been making recently? If she’s been there 20 years I imagine her paycheque is enormous, perhaps she just wasn’t worth it anymore. Legacy product people being laid off is a much different signal to me than a company letting go young, versatile engineers.

> If she’s been there 20 years I imagine her paycheque is enormous

On the contrary, she must be extremely cheap. I don't know the details of compensation at Microsoft, but if it's like the other FAANGs (or really any other company), new hires are paid A LOT more than tenured employees.

Ageism in tech...

This sucks for everyone, but clicking on this thread, I see that KC got laid off[0]. She's somewhat famous for having created Bedlam[1], which not only introduced me to a lot of Microsoft culture when I was pretty early in the company but also has provided many hours of amusement when mixed with Cards Against Humanity.

FWIW, I'm in E+D but didn't hear anything about this.

[0] https://twitter.com/kclemson/status/1582175419268501504

[1] https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/inside-bedlam-a-car...

Yeah, I'm shocked. I haven't been at MSFT for a while, but I had the opportunity to work with KC several times and I've never known anyone at any company I've worked at who was more impactful to team culture (in addition to being very good at her job). Layoffs are never good for morale, but losing KC in particular has to be a huge morale hit for the team.

Can you describe how she was impactful to the culture?

KC took on the role of morale champion. If she were at Google, she would be the person who invented (or at least posted most actively on) memegen, but with less cynicism.

KC was a constant source of jokes and memes on internal mailing lists. She has a very quick wit and could make light of all sorts of internal events. It's hard to call out specific ones without getting into NDA territory, but they spanned the entire gamut of company culture. Because she had experience in so many areas (Office, Outlook, Windows Phone, Windows) she understood the big picture.

I believe KC briefly had a stint where part of her job description in the Operating Systems Group was morale/culture, and KC went to town helping to plan events, design and distribute swag, and more. The Ninjacat is her most famous contribution** but there were plenty of others too.

KC was the author behind Bedlam, a Microsoft-themed game similar to Cards Against Humanity. This wasn't a lazy retheme - the cards were hilarious in their own right and almost all of them had a funny anecdote at the bottom. Here's a random assortment I drew out of my set (there are probably funnier ones in there, but I haven't played since I left MS so I no longer remember specific ones to dig for): https://i.imgur.com/PMc6I4Y.jpg

KC organized a number of sessions to play Bedlam (and other games). These were open to anyone who responded and I met a number of amazing people through them. At this point in time, I was just an IC dev (mid level or newly minted senior, I forget) while KC was at least a Director, and plenty of other high-tenured folks joined in to those groups. KC created a welcoming environment where seniority (either in title or tenure) didn't matter and everyone felt welcome and like one of the group.

I stayed at Microsoft far too long. Financially speaking, I should have left after 2-3 years, and in terms of personal and career growth that probably would have been optimal as well. A bit part of the reason I stayed is because of people like KC. For all the politics of a big company, for all the struggles of working with 20-year old Win32 code, the welcoming effect of KC (and other wexcsul/osgrandom veterans) was incredible. There were other factors too (I was on a team where I got to work closely with a number of very senior amazing engineers who I learned a ton from), but folks like KC (and a few others who aren't as well known externally) were who got me through my cynical periods.

**yes, I'm aware that Ninjacat bears some resemblance to previous artwork. As far as I'm aware, that's all been worked out with the author and I forget the details and won't go into it here. Ninjacat wasn't originally intended for external distribution (it just exploded in popularity internally until it couldn't be contained any longer).

Local to Microsoft here. Worked there a few decades ago. Every indication I get from people who work there today tells me that they could bleed off 10,000 employees and if it were the right 10,000, the company would be better off afterwards.

True in every megacorp.

Reminds me of John Wanamaker's quip re marketing:

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half."

>if it were the right 10,000, the company would be better off afterwards

Doesn't this apply to literally every big-corp? The big-corp I left had so many people doing nothing, it was insane. It was also crazy and sad that those people doing nothing were ironically by far the better paid ones, fact confirmed by the payroll lady.

If you have a "payroll lady", you're not working at a big-corp.

"One of the payroll ladies" for correction. Also, working for a small office of a big corp still counts as working for a big corp. Not every location of a big-corp has thousands of workers.

Once you reach a certain size, I guess this is true everywhere. About 2 to 3% of employees in any org. will be slacking.

Yes yes, the No Output Division:

> I believe 1/2 of these people could be let go from DEC today and our productivity would take a sharp rise.

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/dec.b...

This sounds more like routine housekeeping (<0.5% of employees) than a significant round of layoffs.

It's hundreds of people losing their jobs at once. It doesn't matter what the relative magnitude, it's still hundreds of families dealing with the sudden loss of a job.

But still very different from thousands people losing their jobs at once (has happened before at Microsoft)

They are all ridiculously well-paid, unless they've been terribly mismanaging their finances I'm sure they can deal with it.

I will spare my sympathy for those in minimum wage jobs who are suddenly fired and struggling to make ends meet. They are the real victims of our economy.

You don't know them. How many are supporting disabled loved ones via healthcare? How many are disabled themselves? 1 in 4 people live with a disability. A massive loss of jobs is a problem because benefits are tied to jobs.

For people who've been around longer, is it wise to take a new job with a company that's undergoing layoffs?

Depends on the quantity and reason for layoffs. Meta, I would avoid at this time. Microsoft is doing fine, despite this small layoff.

In todays market be leery of companies who aren’t showing fiscal restraint. Look more at the strength and market positioning of the company, and don’t join a company whose business you don’t understand.

  My general observation is some companies use layoffs as a periodic way to get rid of folks without performance reviews.  (“Position was eliminated” doesn’t lead to law suits) Also, when companies do multiple rounds, they get less generous on each subsequent round.

Early in my career I joined a large company right when they went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Worked there for a year, then moved on. They shut down the office where I had worked a year or two after that. I don't regret working there at all. And I doubt Microsoft is even close to the same situation. They employ a couple hundred thousand people, so laying off 1000 is nothing. It's like a 200-headcount company letting go of just one person.

Either way, I think it's fine to join a company that is downsizing, since presumably the area you got hired is a department that isn't part of the downsizing. Of course there are horror stories of people who got laid off immediately after getting hired, but that's just bad luck. Most of the time there is a budget for you, or the position wouldn't be advertized in the first place. If you end up doing valuable work on a valuable team, you should be safe from any cuts - and you can ask those questions during the interview process.

From my perspective, any job where you get paid to work on something interesting and learn new stuff is worth considering.

Yes and no. Yes, because it could demonstrate how much you like the company to be willing to look beyond the immediate-term risk of becoming part of any near future layoffs. Also, it shows that you are brave and confident in your own ability to find another job if it does happen. This could lead to the employer giving you more compensation and benefits to counter the reduction in interest from other candidates.

No, it may not be wise because it may result in you actually getting laid off soon after joining or having your offer rescinded 1 hour before start. As a great man once said, it all depends on your risk tolerance.

It depends on the reason. If it was an old pharma company with expiring patents and no pipeline of new products to immediately replace them then that's a bad place to be. It's not as big a problem when it's a company that's making money hand over fist. You need to understand whether you are sustaining existing products or building the next set of things.

When you are really early in your career then you are less likely to be affected by big company layoffs. You are a relatively small cost and viewed as someone who might hang around, so are worth investing in. At least, you'll get a shot at filling the boots of the people who left until the better times come around.

EDIT: One other thing to look at is how the company cuts. Cutting a little when deep cuts are needed has a big impact on the day-to-day experience. No one feels safe. If there is a CEO who makes big cuts that seem reasonable for the business (completely ignore the tech) then you are better off.

Check the financial health of the company you're looking at. Are they profitable with positive cash flow? Microsoft had mountains of money coming in the door. One of the downsides of the American system is that a successful company changing priorities can fuck up people's lives.

if it's a small, unstable company on the verge of death probably not. For tech giants with tens if not hundreds of thousands of employees it doesn't matter. Would be weird if they didn't have occasional rounds of layoffs.

If you can find a decently paying job there and you're able to pick up a lot of skills and knowledge while getting paid for it, that is probably more than worth it, particularly if you're early in your career. A resume with Microsoft or something like that on it can't hurt.

I wouldn't turn down the opportunity if fresh out of school or still very early in career. Worst case you get laid off and are back on the market and not really any worse off than when you were looking earlier.

Once you're mid and senior level it's a bit harder to hop out and into a new job on very short notice--you really need clout and the right place at right time, or connections/network of companies that are hiring.

Might not be ideal, but going to a company that hasn't done a layoff yet is likely to be even worse. If business stability is a concern (and sometimes it legitimately isn't) then evaluating the odds going forward should be the main focus.

They’ve been letting go quite a bit of their recruiter/HR team the last few weeks - I’ve been watching the damage unfold on LinkedIn. Are they part of this 1000 or separate? (My understanding is many of those roles are backfill contracts which can eventually roll into full time, meaning they were always likely the most insecure.)

Microsoft just announced a layoff of around 1000 people, including in experiences and devices which includes office and windows divisions.

For context, Microsoft’s total headcount is around 220,000.

They still had windows and offife divisions? I was sure they had swithced to something like rentacoder.

So not a layoff.

Microsoft employee here. Haven't heard anything. There has been hiring slow down recently, but revenue/customer acquisition is going strong. It's a large company, so probably nothing in my division (azure / backups and disaster recovery).

I doubt you'll hear anything if you work in Azure :)

(I don't work at MS but I guess it's a significant piece of their strategy today).

Why not link the original this links to? https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/17/23410148/microsoft-lays-...

I’m hearing they’ve laid off low performers…

What's the definition of low performer?

The chief people officer and a couple interns who prepared the list know… so it’ll be something like ‘didn’t get a bonus for X years’

"someone you don't want around anymore"

People with “Insufficient results” also known in other places as PIP

People that don’t work

Methinks this is a bit too harsh for Hacker News.

If everyone worked all day, this place would be deserted.

So the windows team?

Reminds me of a glorious post on HN where someone happily blogged about how he wrote some code to tell him who to fire, the answer was him, which meant the code wasn’t quite right. So he picked some people instead. I live for those posts.

Please say you still have a link to this post

Check my comments from about a year ago

Seems like this comment and this article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713859

https://danlebrero.com/2020/12/02/cto-diary-downsizing-team-...

I don't see where it ever says the program told him to fire himself

Second bullet point under The Result.

Wtf didn’t expect anyone to be sleuthing well glad to be of help , the above was my take anyway

The names we have been able to know by now would indicate that theory to be wrong - or Microsoft has a warped idea of what constitutes as a low-performer.

Of the names I know, some were involved in a number of failed projects, e.g. a foldable Windows phone. Perhaps unlucky for them, perhaps low performance.

But they only hire the best!

Why does Twitter have a four to five second delay before showing anything? It should be ten milliseconds.

While probably a rhetorical question.

GT Metrix is a good site to answer - see the waterfall view: https://gtmetrix.com/

Also right click and inspect on your browser.

About one-third rhetorical. Good answers for what to do about it in sibling replies, though.

Probably the 1000ms!!! it takes for the GraphQL on tweets to respond. Ooph.

Do you have a "More tweets" section under the main tweet? I have one, and I imagine that that is both generated on-the-fly and tailored to my browsing behavior. So it probably interrogates a larger system, adding latency. I'd bet as well that there is some fetching of 'live' quote/retweet/like counts, that probably occurs in some kind of interval.

Not sure, but I've been experiencing dramatically worse load times on Twitter in the last month or so.

While at it, have you tried nitter.net? It's very handy for opening twitter links on mobile, where I want things to be lightweight.

The only Twitter exposure I have is via HackerNews and that bothered the crap out of me too, so I wrote a dead-simple userscript that is run with ViolentMonkey in Chrome to take me to Nitter instead. The redirect and page load all completes before I would probably even see the loading spinner on Twitter. What a garbage site.

https://pastebin.com/ZpgYYF1N

Yeah, it's really painful. +1 to all the Nitter recommendations. I use Invidition (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/invidition/) to redirect (Twitter, YouTube) -> (Nitter, Invidious). It also can automatically pick the fastest responding instance, which makes a noticeable difference.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/invidition/

FYI, the description of that addon says its unmaintained:

"PLEASE READ THIS FIRST ! Invidition is now deprecated and is no longer maintained. Please, use Privacy Redirect by Simon Brazell instead."

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...

Can only recommend libredirect https://libredirect.github.io/

Should be "lays off"

/grammarnazi

Just like the plural of breakdown is breaksdown, the plural or checkup is checksup and the plural of hard-on is hards-on.

Absurdly incorrect.

Unless you are joking in which case - nice one.

There is no "should" except what the most influential majority believes is correct. Language naturally evolves all the time and that is a good and beautiful thing.

You may have a preference or think this historical norm is interesting, but please stop with the "should" talk, it is irritating, condescending, and incorrect.

This particular norm is especially "wrong" (heh) because the overwhelming social majority has already left it behind. Clinging to it just because some academic wrote a book claiming that was correct or because 100 years ago that phrasing was common is especially misguided since for most modern English speakers it isn't just a thing they forget sometimes, but actually sounds wrong and weird to them. By any sane understanding of language that makes them far more correct than you.

Actually no, it shouldn't.

https://www.limlessons.com/en/blog_post/compound-nouns-deriv...

In this case, "off" is not a preposition, but "lay off" is a phrasal verb

No. "Layoff" is a real, full word. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/layoff

Similar: He delivered a knockout punch. He knocked him out.

For the people who are downvoting this, I believe the HN title was edited, and was originally something like "Microsoft layoffs 1000 people". (It's always a bit dangerous to comment on the submission title without saying what the title was at the time of the posting!)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com