Microsoft to lay off as many as 9k employees in latest round | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft to lay off as many as 9k employees in latest round

seattletimes.com

54 pointsmfiguiere19 comments

I feel like these layoffs are not technical layoffs but theoretical layoffs. People get hired and fired because corporate culture is to hire upon request and need. And fire when someone else says so, but not so when the employee is no longer necessary. So the employee just spends time here and there helping out.

Another person told me about this thing called shake the tree that every new leader - CEO does. They see what falls and learn from that.

I am an employee and stock holder both. Obviously, I would rather have a job than not but at the same time a significant portion of my personal wealth is in MSFT stocks.

I have seen engineering teams at MSFT that provide questionable value to the business so trimming the fat does make sense. Also These multiple rounds of layoffs have made me internalise that we need to be working on something valuable instead of useful.

Can someone discern why these layoffs are being done ? Driven by large shareholders? More runway till we get revenue from GenAI while we keep burning money on GPUs ?

>Can someone discern why these layoffs are being done ?

Over-hiring and over-aquiring during the ZIRP and covid eras causing big-tech to became massively bloated.

> Can someone discern why these layoffs are being done

They spent too much on AI without making enough revenue from it. So they need to cut elsewhere so that in quarterly reports, it looks like the AI investment returned the right numbers.

When you invent accounting terms to hide how much money Azure is really losing it catches up to you eventfully. Even Balmer, still one of the largest share holders, called them bullshit. And history has shown nothing juices executive stock price based bonuses like layoffs.

> made me internalise that we need to be working on something valuable instead of useful.

... Eh?

Just Microsoft being Microsoft. Being useful doesn't matter, just being good at the Microsoft game.

https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...

> l am an employee and stockholder both. Obviously, I would rather have a job than not but at the same time a significant portion of my personal wealth is in MSFT stocks.

There's something especially perverse about compensation for employment coming in a form that companies grow in value by terminatkng employment. Ostensibly the point of stock compensation is to reward doing work that helps the company, but instead of provides cover for the company to leech the potential compensation employees would get in salary to grow the value of the stock with less pushback from those it literally is taking the compensation from.

People often decry stock-based compensation as "golden handcuffs" that stop you from leaving, but perhaps the more apt metaphor would be a golden guillotine; they'll have you cheering for the executions right up to the point when your own head is on the chopping block.

Between like 2012 and 2022, pay and benefits for engineers at tech companies in the US skyrocketed. This was for a lot of reasons and it is not something that investors and management like.

Starting in 2022ish, tech companies started feeling pressure from investors to control costs at the same time that the covid-era froth was dying down and the economy was becoming more unstable. The first round of layoffs pushed back against over-hiring. But by doing this together, tech companies managed to halt (and somewhat reverse) the growth in compensation for employees. Regular small layoffs since then have kept the hiring market awful, so companies can hire for less and offer flat pay across time.

These layoffs are part of a broader reaction by capital against the power gains that labor made over the past decade (especially during the covid era).

Post by AbbeFaria:

    I am an employee and stock holder both. Obviously, I would rather have a job than not but at the same time a significant portion of my personal wealth is in MSFT stocks.

    I have seen engineering teams at MSFT that provide questionable value to the business so trimming the fat does make sense. Also These multiple rounds of layoffs have made me internalise that we need to be working on something valuable instead of useful.

    Can someone discern why these layoffs are being done ? Driven by large shareholders? More runway till we get revenue from GenAI while we keep burning money on GPUs ?

I'm gonna get this post quoted in its entirety. I wonder if you personally will be impacted by this wave of layoff and if so, how will your opinion change.

Somehow we've gotten away from managements role being creating great teams. Instead the ICs get thrown under the bus, instead of the managers that created and hired the teams.

Because it's all about suppressing wages of the one bastion of the middle-class in knowledge work that temporarily escaped the ire of the ruling class. Now, that's gone too.

This is what happens when people prostrate themselves before the (nonexistent) mercy of wealth instead of forming unions and their own co-ops for more stability and long-term happiness.

Don't think unions will happen in the tech industry because the workers are too selfish to have solidarity with one another. Just look at how hiring is done compared to the job duties required.

I do think implementing workplace democracy is much more likely, and can be legislated into law too. While tech workers will argue about unions, I feel like most of them wouldn't argue about getting the chance to vote for their boss.

Do you have experience with unions yourself?

> Don't think unions will happen in the tech industry because the workers are too selfish to have solidarity with one another. Just look at how hiring is done compared to the job duties required.

Tech skews low on socioeconomic-political intelligence. It would benefit this group greatly, but too many avoid it or are thoroughly indoctrinated to sabotage their own interests.

> Do you have experience with unions yourself?

Tech, no. Corporate America and a good fraction of academia are heavily anti-union.

We’re being told AI will “augment” workers, but it increasingly looks like it’s augmenting them right out of a job. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s stock is near record highs. Shareholders win, employees lose.

There's no contradiction there, and the companies aren't even directly lying - they're saying that with AI each worker can do more. It then stands to reason that unless you're in a rapidly growing business, then you're going to need fewer workers.

They will be replaced by H1-B visa holders operating AI.

A lot of the reason Tech layoffs are happening is because developers' wages can't be deducted in full immediately any more [1,2]. (Dev wages are classed as R&D spending). The "big beautiful bill" will reverse that, I think, reversing the original change which was legislated by the previous Trump government. What's weird and confusing about this, is that (IIUC), all other wages/salaries are immediately tax deductible.

> And so, on schedule in 2022, the change to Section 174 went into effect. Companies filed their 2022 tax returns under the new rules in early 2023. And suddenly, R&D wasn’t a full, immediate write-off anymore. [1]

[1] The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533

https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-micro...

[2] Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145

And nobody is saying AI is ready to replace them all today. It does seem like a bubble is bursting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com