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Comment by knuppar | Hacker News Reader

Retention was never a priority at MS. Lower comp compared to G/Meta/Amazon, no refreshers, poor special stock awards, tenure-based promo queue, (...). If RTO becomes a reality I think the calculus of staying at MS will be tipped over for many.

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Over 25 years ago MSFT was doing the same thing. Amazon, Google, and Facebook didn't yet exist, so we were losing candidates to Oracle because MSFT paid so little. When Microsoft finally wiped the sleep from their eyes, my next review period saw me getting a 23% raise at review time, some from performance and a lot from Microsoft finally catching up to the rest of the industry because they couldn't hire anyone (I'd say it was also a demonstration of how badly I was getting screwed, but MSFT options were hot back then).

Will it happen again a generation later? Depends on how many candidates go to Amazon instead, I guess.

Google did the same thing about 15 years ago. Universal 10% raises one year.

In this economy the calculus will be “hold on to your job at all costs and hope that next round of quarterly layoffs hiring doesn’t touch you”

Where would those employees go? Almost all rival big tech companies are implementing the same thing. They also have a nearly complete hiring freeze unless it's for a super critical role (very rare) or extremely high skilled AI work (few tech workers can do).

These employees are going to complain, but unless they have their FU money already, they are 100% going to RTO. What else can they do within reason?

The "deal" at Microsoft is that you get paid 30-50% less than other big tech employers but it's a lot chiller (imo this is true from my experience at both msft and faangs, I hear it's worse recently though). A LOT of people are there for the lower work pressure and no RTO. If they get rid of that, there's no reason not to jump to Google where you'll get paid substantially more except for needing to grind leetcode. Or even go to Meta/Amazon if you're willing to grind for even bigger bags of cash.

I understand that, my point is that Meta/Amazon/Google have massively pulled back on hiring as well. I personally went from being contacted several times per year by Meta to being 100% ghosted mid-conversation last time. They fired all the recruiters.

> tenure-based promo queue

i wouldn't mind this

The deal was that you could have a chill work environment without grind.

Not anymore.

I don't know what a tenure-based promo queue is, but from the name, wouldn't it in fact be extremely focused on retention?

And it doesn't seem to be a bad strategy for their market fit, at least not for the last 20 years.

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