Microsoft Prepares for New Round of Layoffs in May 2025 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Prepares for New Round of Layoffs in May 2025

thebridgechronicle.com

31 pointsmooreds16 comments

One key factor in promoting a manager is the size of their team or organization—the larger it is, the better it looks on a promotion case. This often incentivizes managers to expand their teams unnecessarily, a practice commonly known as "empire building." While growing an organization to tackle genuinely complex challenges can be justified, too often the expansion merely adds complexity to existing work without a clear evaluation of its actual value. These managers still get promoted to director or VP roles, then move to other organizations or companies, repeating the cycle.

> Microsoft seeks to reduce bureaucratic layers and enhance the "span of control" for managers, allowing each to oversee more employees.

If you've ever worked on large-scale organizational transformation (i.e., layoffs), you'll recognize this. 'Span of control' is the most straightforward way to systematically lean out an org chart. It's repeated over-and-over by legal and HR that your task is to eliminate roles not specific people. And it's pretty easy to look for managers of people that ... just don't manage that many people.

It's also a surprisingly effective exercise for consolidating redundant orgs. If you nix a managerial position, you'll map that manager's branch onto some other manager.

Very imperfect, but it does work!

Yeah, we used to find out that some directors only direct 4 people, some direct none!

We used to compare manager ratio comparing to equivalent companies and we were way over bloated.

Not MSFT.

If this tariff situation really impact the US economy, when should we start to see layoffs?

Next month, possibly end of this month. Doesn’t sound like that’s the reason for these Microsoft layoffs though.

We already have. Chrysler laid off 3600 people in Canada due to tariffs, and 900 people in the US that worked at plants supplying the Canadian factory.

Known for sure or rumors?

That is a way to get back the money that went into the 63% pay increase of Satya Nadella

His salary didn't increase.

Makes sense, Windows looks more like slop every passing day.

I would love to know how the start button search has been so terrible and almost useless for more than a decade. Not to mention searching in a folder doesn't work half the time either. So many basic things are broken it blows my mind. And now we nueter the ui for no reason too with windows 11

It’s 2025 and windows can even show a preview of a png

I've seen multiple overlapping cycles of sentiment towards Windows from within geek culture. Often contradictory and frequently shifting wildly in hindsight. To say it's "more like slop" would imply there was a generally acknowledged period where it wasn't slop and I struggle to think of a period where that kind of consensus existed.

So - when did you have in mind when you wrote that?

I had in mind everything since Vista.

Its only saving grace is WSL2.

Not OP, but I personally think the original Win10, despite Cortana, was good, thanks mostly to powerToys and later wsl2, but since the Skype/teams kerfuffle happened around the same time, it's hard for me to think they weren't mostly slop at the time.

So I'd say windows XP? 2003-2007?

Windows has always been terrible. At this point, I honestly think the anomalously good Windows 2000 was an accident rather than anything deliberate.

In fact I'd go further and say everything Microsoft touches turns to slop. Windows CE was garbage. 9x was garbage (as was everything that preceded it). Even Microsoft BASIC was garbage.

I suspect the only reason people hold Windows 7 in such high regard is a combination of:

- them being too young to have used Windows 2000. 7 might be terrible but it's the least worst Windows OS in over a 20-year time span. So younger professionals today wouldn't have had the luxury of using Windows 2000

- Stockholm syndrome, where they're forced into using Windows for work so don't know any better.

The problem we have today is that there isn't anything particularly good around either. macOS is slop. Linux is probably the least worst of current desktop operating systems but Linux is still terrible for a plethora of reasons and a whole lot of use cases. It's no wonder the general populous find smartphone/tablet OSs more convenient than laptops for casual stuff. I think I would too if my options were Windows or Android/iOS.

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