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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to defend the event or the optics of it all, but I would hazard a guess that if you hire Sting to perform at your company picnic it's not something you do the week before the event. The contract was probably signed off and paid in full months or years ago depending on how busy Mr. Sumner is these days.

I've been in a similar situation. Large company outing booked and all set up for the holidays, then there's a sudden layoff involving most of the people booked on the trip. We gave them the tickets and said "why not go anyway?"

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As a Microsoft employee I don't think it demonstrated good leadership and I am disappointed both with communication towards employees and them doing this.

If you are in a position you are laying off people which implies you are hurting as a company you should:

- Not spend money on expensive events or non-essential stuff.

- If you've already booked events (like the sting concert) either sell them to another buyer or donate them to charity. The optics of partying while you are firing 10000+ employees is awful.

Instead, it 100% feels "business as usual", one email from Satya and a bunch about extra-curricular events and "cool stuff" happening in the company and campus. I'm really missing the "we're in this together" feeling from startups.

(I am a high-performer working on a profitable and old product and I don't think I'm on the chopping block, I enjoy my work, my team etc.)

This was not the Microsoft company picnic, it was an event for 50 or so senior execs. Microsoft famously used to have a huge and extravagant company-wide picnic for all employees in the fall--they would rent out an entire stadium or other huge area. They canceled the company-wide picnic in the downturn of '09 and as far as I know never brought it back. This event was something different and just for a hand picked selection of execs.

When we (our group in Microsoft) did our group event a few weeks ago it was in fact a picnic. Guess what? because we didn't want to spend a lot of money on it and wanted to show we are cost-cutting we did a potluck. Everyone cooked and brought stuff along. No one spent a lot of money, it was nice.

When we did a team event it was volunteering together. No fancy restaurants like last year for the same reason - we don't want to be wasteful in an unclear market.

I am disappointed in our execs doing this. I understand it was already probably pre-booked and it was probably just a few hours in a lot of long and frustrating leadership meeting but the optics are bad. Satya is usually such a respected leader for knowing how to do the right thing and avoid these situations, bummer.

It was meant to be sarcastic. Sting performing a private concert in Davos is the farthest possible thing from a company picnic.

Microsoft has enough money on its pocket to pay the penalty for cancelling Sting's concert. It's probably a drop in the ocean compared to the cost of the compensation paid to all people being laid off.

So what you're saying is, they should have laid off Sting too.

Couldn't the same be said about layoffs? They're certainly were planned long before the execution.

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