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Comment by AbbeFaria | Hacker News Reader

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 ?

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> 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.

> 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.

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).

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.

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.

>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.

> 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...

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