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Comment by medearis | Hacker News Reader

"Microsoft announced today that it will be laying off up to 5,000 people over the next 18 months... Microsoft also says that it will continue to hire..."

I don't know what percentage of those are developers, but my guess is that it will include a significant percentage. Does anyone else see a problem with this approach to hiring? To me, it seems to reflect a lot of the negative aspects of the "career" software engineer. After a few years on the payrolls of mega-corp, you get replaced by someone younger, cheaper and with more recent knowledge. Perhaps it's inevitable with a competitive labor market... just kinda sucks if you ask me.

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This actually happens a lot at Microsoft; the reason why it's unheard of is they're normally hiring more people than they're RIFing. The Microsoft reorg 30 day job search is a way of life for people in some disciplines and teams there.

Much like high level programming can "waste" large numbers of clock cycles, cutting huge orgs while hiring other ones certainly doesn't seem efficient, and is especially grating given that we're talking about livelihoods, not zeros and ones. Unfortunately I don't think anyone has come up with a paradigm that works a lot better than this, although I'd be curious to hear of any large successes.

After a few years on the payrolls of mega-corp, you get replaced [...] Perhaps it's inevitable with a competitive labor market...

Yeah, it was a feature when many of us were getting in during high-school, but it sucks as an incumbent. I guess the takeaway is to stay hungry.

They can replace you if you are just a coder. If, on the other hand, you work on an important product, acquire domain-specific knowledge, and know the code inside-out, then replacing you with someone else will be a lot harder.

Think, for example, about the folks who work on the Microsof's C/C++ compiler. I doubt any of them need to worry about their job. On the other hand, if all you did is implemented the Shutdown button for the next release of Windows then, sure, you can be easily replaced.

That's both right and wrong. While making yourself valuable to your company is probably a good idea, you have to be working for an employer smart enough to realize it. Which is, in my experience, not most large employers.

In the layoffs I've been through, the people let go were almost random WRT how valuable they were as employees or developers. What was rewarded was managing up.

"I assume this confirms my previous bias. By the way, did you notice how this story provides even more evidence that my bias is correct?"

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