Microsoft getting ready to lay off 17% of staff | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft getting ready to lay off 17% of staff

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44 pointsnoor42027 comments

No Layoffs at Microsoft, and a Round-up of other Recent Comments: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2008/12/no-layoffs-at-microsoft...

This is definitely the post to read if you want a good perspective of what's really going on. I don't have any firsthand knowledge, but around this time every year MSFT seems to do a reorg, which can cause a lot of people to have to find new roles internally (which most people do every 3-4 years anyway). I suspect that internal roles will be more difficult to find, and a percentage of the internal job seekers will eventually run out of time and will quietly leave the company. But I highly doubt they will come out and announce a blanket 17% cut on 1/15 - just doesn't make any sense.

Why doesn't it make any sense? That post mentions that a large number of HUGE business customers are going away (bankrupt financial firms, mergers, etc). Revenue is going down. Does MSFT need 90,000 to do what they need to do to grow/succeed?

That post is interesting, but internal memos of managers saying, "No layoffs!" isn't very reliable. That's EXACTLY what they would be saying if there WERE going to be layoffs to keep people engaged, working hard, and NOT stealing IP.

I'm not saying there are going to be layoffs, but off the cuff I imagine it'd be a pretty good idea. Trim the fat.

That is a pretty deep cut, especially for a company which is profitable and has a warchest of several tens of billions last time I checked. (Full disclosure: shareholder.)

Do we have any evidence that this is, you know, true? Because if not, the rumor that I have $7 million worth of 10,000 yen notes stashed in my carry on luggage is also a fact. Please, let it be a fact.

The name of the website itself doesn't exactly inspire confidence in its accuracy.

Well, 7 million USD would be over 60,000 notes... so unless your carry-on weighs over a hundred pounds, it's probably not true.

Extremely unlikely. $20 billion in cash + equivalents on hand, 40% operating margins -- they don't need to do layoffs right now, and they'll benefit much more if they ramp up hiring instead.

It might be house-cleaning. I think some companies are doing layoffs right now that don't really need to because it's one of the few times where you can get rid of a lot of dead wood and come out looking prudent rather than in trouble.

I agree with your thoughts on this. Its always easier to layoff people and point to the economy

That is a good point, but I'm not sure. I have talked to a lot of Microsoft people in the past, and asked them a lot about Microsoft, and I would be extremely surprised if they had that much dead wood.

Especially because as they get bigger, their demand for 90th percentile types rather than 99.99th percentile types grows.

Nah, you get lots of dead wood at any big company. Nature of the beast. The hiring practices are more like an initiation rite than a real quality indicator.

Plus, 15% would be a pretty small amount of deadwood at a company that size. It may just be specialists hired for departments that don't exist anymore or people that stopped caring 5 years ago, but have been around so long that they can't be fired.

From what I've heard from friends at MS, it seems their dead wood is in management - there's a culture of ass-covering and doing the bare minimum on many teams, which goes a long way to explain why MS rarely does anything revolutionary. Great ideas that are risky don't make it very far in that company.

Exactly 10%-20% isn't that much. An company should be able to fire the worst at the bottom, hire new people to take their place distributed evenly across the spectrum & come out net ahead.

A sure sign of dead wood is when people deny any dead wood exists.

That's just as bad as "never eat on an empty stomach."

I would be extremely surprised if they had that much dead wood.

...

when people deny any dead wood exists.

The implication of the comment is that the poster spoke with MSFT employees who said things like "everyone is really hard working", "The people I work with are so smart", "Everyone pulls their weight". That is to say denials are rarely blunt. None the less they are still denials. In a organization of any significant size these generalizations have near zero chance of being true.

The question is whether Microsoft management can figure out who is dead wood. Based on their recent product fiascoes, I am not sure they can. It can also be that management itself is dead wood.

good point.

If this is mostly MSN, maybe they're just getting ready to replace that unit with a company they're aiming to buy :-)

if it's mostly MSN, it can't possibily be a cut of 15,000 people. Or can it?

Does this mean they're renaming Windows 7 to Windows 5.81?

In all seriousness, that's a sign of the times. I'm actually interested to see what happens. Never before have so many programmers, developers, and IT people been in the job hunt at once. So with this flood of available staff, there is bound to be something interesting to come out of it. And I expect YC's next round of funding startups will have a record number of applicants.

What's with all the MSFT employees speculating about the companies private business on a public blog's comment forum? Maybe they should start by firing those folks.

Because they can't speculate about this at work, or on a company-approved internal forum? MS is notorious in disallowing criticism of itself internally.

Hell, I've even heard of people being asked to refrain from inviting coworkers to "Wii parties" via company mailing list.

Why would Microsoft disallow criticism internally? Isn't that the one place where you want criticism?

I wouldn't find it surprising if they did. Think of it from the companies stand point. If employees are bitching about salaries, working conditions, etc... All that does is serve to get the entire work force all hot and bothered about it. It's not like we're talking about debating the merits of UI design in their products.

As an employee, I assure you that we are fully allowed to criticize the company internally.

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