Microsoft Lays Off 1,500 Workers, Blames "AI Wave" | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Lays Off 1,500 Workers, Blames "AI Wave"

futurism.com

43 pointsRickJWagner56 comments

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Actual Business Insider article referenced:

Microsoft exec blames Azure layoffs on the 'AI wave' in leaked memo

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-exec-blames-azure-...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593559)

Before you got to train and now you build your replacement

haha. yes. i did this for paypal in 2006

Can someone with experience in hiring and firing help me understand something? Microsoft has many open positions listed on their website[1]. Why would they lay off people they've already invested time and money into hiring and developing, instead of offering these employees the open positions within the company? Doesn't this seem counterproductive? Why are big tech companies so quick to fire employees?

[1] https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/search?rt=profe...

They're not real positions

This, too, is often a component of the grey-area, (bordering or rhyming strongly with fraud,) that a lot of these firms are finding themselves in.

> Why are big tech companies so quick to fire employees?

Because the co believes they can be replaced tomorrow, with adequate help, costing the same, or less.

Because they're "too old", or have a chance at retirement benefits.

Because they're politically active.

Because they've been around for 14 months and they seem complacent, compared to the new hires killing themselves for the role.

It's the law regarding redundancies where I live (currently going through one now) that everyone should be evaluated against all open positions. Not just open, all remaining ones as well. So you can't just axe a specific team, those people could lay claim on the same role in different positions, and be evaluated against objective criteria (like experience, tenure etc).

So it's a huge thing we're going through in my company now. Last week lay offs were announced, and by end of this week everyone will have been evaluated against the remaining positions.

Because they are afraid to do performance reviews and fire people.

So they layoff and try again, sometimes hiring the same people back.

Funny, probably have no communication between these departments either, the people hiring them think they are excellent and then the ones firing them don't.

But the problem never gets solved because the hiring people just go "I don't know at all why this person got laid off, looks great on paper! Let's re-hire them."

"AI Wave" being -> cheaper indian workers that cannot keep up with the support tickets and move them all over emea, asia and US. Azure AI that helps with tickets cannot replace a real agent.

The layoffs from mixed reality aren't all that surprising since lots of tech companies thought VR/AR was going to be the next hot thing and then AI popped up instead. Azure is a bit surprising, but that division has grown so rapidly that they likely did hire some poor performers, and this is their opportunity to get rid of them under the cover of AI instead of admitting they staffed up poorly.

"under the cover of AI instead of admitting they staffed up poorly."

Yep, the "AI" thing here smells of BS... like most of AI anyway. Just look how well our AI business is doing, we don't need that many people anymore.

>The layoffs from mixed reality aren't all that surprising since lots of tech companies thought VR/AR was going to be the next hot thing and then AI popped up instead.

Yeah, to be followed by layoffs from AI when the next-next hot thing comes.

Always so surprising how its easier to hire new grads than to just redirect your existing staff thats already integrated into the process and culture to work on something else.

New grads are cheaper

A few explanations:

- the "current hot thing" is usually something bogus that requires token effort (it's more about signalling to the market "we do that too") so doesn't need much experience until it actually gets real.

- the new hires are cheaper, while the existing staff was starting getting dangerously more senior and more jaded (and thus demanding more, and seeing through the bullshit grind culture more)

- the new grad hires also come familiar with the latest "hot thing" for free

One take on Azure's apparent rapid growth - "receipt swapping" aka dubious financial engineering:

> ...the number of users only grew by ONE percent between 2017 and 2022 while Azure revenues grew by 273%. Did companies really spend three times more for cloud services in the same period of time? Let’s have a look at that starting from the list of the biggest annual contracts with Azure.

>...I checked all the names above and their cloud computing expenses are so minimal that they are not shown separately in their financial statements

https://justdario.com/2024/05/what-if-nvidia-simply-tagged-a...

The articles on nvidia are just as mind blowing.

It’s this kind of stupid biased comment that I hate the most. What logic says that these folks were “poor performers” rather than Microsoft hiring too many people?

Everyone knows that in massive layoffs these companies aren’t competent enough to pick and choose the worst employees, it’s such a bad take.

You’re just perpetuating corpo bullshit and harming the reputations of those who are laid off.

I hope someday you get laid off and everyone thinks you’re a poor performer because of it.

That's less than 1% of their total workforce.

No problem for those people to suffer then

I think the parent is more concerned about whether the poor company's stock might be in trouble...

He never said that, he just pointed out a statistic. You choose to assume that. Please top braking HN rules by assuming bad faith.

HN rules state: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

OP was dismissive.

> Microsoft lays off 1,500 workers

This is a heading of interest since we all are concerned about being laid off.

> That's less than 1% of their workforce

Focuses on how the lay offs look from the perspective of the company.

> No problem for those people to suffer then

Points out that looking at it from the company focus omits the negative impacts lay offs have on on individuals

I mean we are having a conversation here and not just listing factlets, right? So do you really see any bad faith in the above?

Headline is misleading.

They laid off non-AI roles, to redirect funding to AI.

"AI wave" that Microsoft itself and probably some of those laid off 1500 workers helped orchestrate...

Interesting I guess, but hardly newsworthy for a company of over 220k.

I guess theyre dogfooding the AI will make programmers et al more efficient

If all companies are using AI in development, all programmers will get more efficient. Laying off programmers because the remaining ones are more efficient only makes sense if other companies will never have access to the AI.

yes, but you would assume that if they are leading the way in AI product development, that they would need more employees than ever.

The assumption is AI would exponentially improve itself.

If theyre dogfooding? The singularity is a natural belief'

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