Why can't they wait and make the announcement once they know who they will eliminate and do it in one swift action? Why put people in limbo for a year?
My only gripe is that the layoffs are not larger - we need about 20% of the marketing folks and 20% of the program managers that we currently have. I would cut deeply in those disciplines as well and then Page-style cut all of the deadwood non-strategic low-revenue projects (and there are a lot of them).
Laying off Terry Myerson (Windows) and Kevin Turner (chief hacker culture killer) would be a great improvement as well - they are both cancers.
Or am I wrong? Has that changed?
I used to work in a larger team in a different company but we only had 1 PM who frustrated us all, sadly. How do they balance 3 PMs? Do they argue between themselves?
The rest we should release.
Was Terry responsible for the compartmentalisation of Exchange to permit it to spread across different machines, each with different roles? Good idea but I found 2010 bloated compared to 2003, I skipped 2008 (and NOBODY tested 2010 SP2 did they???? That bust everything for me, and on an Exchange instance on one machine only; I can only imagine how it was for spread installations).
Are there really that many little projects? How big is the Office team?
Kevin's management style is to give everyone a scorecard, Walmart Style, on metrics like "top apps achieved" or "total apps achieved" that drives all sorts of terrible behaviors in our field organizations working with developers. This is why we have a Kindle application on Windows Phone that is terrible quality. Nobody has any incentive to help Amazon make it great because its not on the scorecard.
Actually, I'll be shocked if 10% of Marketing go.
What you're forgetting is those are the people that are best at justifying their own existence.
For example. We got acquired. New companies decides we need to cut some of our staff. They get rid of a co-worker who is solely responsible for training companies to work with our product. His pay was way under market anyway so they didn't save much letting him go. Then he goes and gets a job making double with better benefits doing training. Then a few weeks later our group is scrambling to find someone, anyone, capable of delivering customer training....
Sure, yes, they could come up with a master list and just pull the trigger today. But the odds of sweeping up a huge number of "false positives" grow considerably.
The idea behind waiting is that along with these layoffs are a lot of restructuring work - teams get moved around, some people actually get promoted, newly manager-less teams are absorbed by another team, etc.
When that happens, there will be a certain number of people who might have been underperforming that start to thrive, possibly because of having a better manager, or because they're more interested in their new group, etc. Other people who might have been coasting by and taking up space but getting decent reviews might suddenly be under a better manager and have no where to hide.
But basically, you can do layoffs, restructure, and then in 6 months time re-evaluate.
Typically, barring one-off events, they'll do several rounds here, a few months apart. Done properly, it won't be an every day worry, it'll be a concern 2-3 times over the next year.
It's easy to say from the outside that the layoffs will hit underperformers and people who are just coasting, but the fact is that layoffs of this scale inevitably involve politics. We're talking about an organization that had so much trouble getting the Office people on the same page as the Mobile people that they launched a make-or-break product (Surface) with a buggy beta version of its killer feature (Office). You think that organizational dysfunction won't extend to the restructuring process itself?
At least if you do them and get them done quickly, the people you want to keep know where they stand.
No -- most people who work at a big company know _exactly_ whether they're in danger or not. We're speaking about 5% of the original (pre-Nokia acquisition) workforce. You must know whether you're in the bottom 5%, or if your product is in the least critical 5%. Of course there are surprises and some good/productive guys will be laid off because of politics (as the process is not completely effective), but in general that's not the case.
I've seen similar things happening inside the financial industry around 2008. Many people left (sometimes much more than 5%), but we could usually guess who's going to be affected (with really high accuracy).
In the brave new world of "mobile first, cloud first" what's the least critical 5%? In a "mobile first, cloud first" world, somehow the newly-acquired mobile division is getting the brunt of the cuts.
Sometimes. I used to work at RIM (BlackBerry) and they announced huge layoffs for August 2012. I knew at that time that my whole team was gone. The rest of the team just talked about how valuable they were and how no one could do the job we were doing. I think they honestly thought that. A lot of people have a tendency to over-value their work and roles.
I think most people are shitty at it on either side. You can be great at your work and role and still get the axe. Management doesn't often take that into consideration.
When it's not whole teams, it's generally managers being told they're losing N reports but they can choose which N. Then, effectiveness at one's role is at least part of the equation.
Generally a company making big layoffs is a sign of a sinking ship. If you are a hot programmer you aren't going to want to hang around waiting for doom. Much better to move to an expanding and thriving company.
Also, I disagree with your assumption that it's easy to know if you're in the bottom 5% of performers. Of course you will have a general idea of where you stand, but in a company the size of Microsoft with considerable organization dysfunction I really doubt anybody can judge themselves with that sort of granularity.
I was a Zynga until last June, when the shut down their whole Shared Tech Group (basically the core Tech Support for all Teams / Server Management, Engine Development etc.) overnight, the whole group always had the feeling they would not be in danger because after all, pretty much everyone was dependent upon them. Until management thought otherwise, they announced "some cuts" at the Company Meeting, which was on Friday the next Monday we held the severance agreements in our hands and were instructed to leave the office.
You never really know what management is planning unless you know someone up their or are part of it.
It's even less true when you are talking about merger layoffs. Even if you are good, the Nokia guy might be better.
or people can get re-hired on as v- contractors or moved to other parts within the company. It's not like other MS employees haven't left and started their own firms using MS technologies.
Besides, I fail to the see the logic that advance warning isn't objectively good. If you're going to be laid off it's better to have some additional time on the job before your severance, even if there's uncertainty. And besides, how much peace of mind did employees at Microsoft have anyway? If they were paying any attention at all to how the company is doing everyone at the company had to see that layoffs and restructuring were inevitable sooner or later anyway.
Yep, I'm sure they'll save a lot in severance when their best people quit.
Look into co-determination in Finland for an example. Finland of course is also a big part of the news from Microsoft today.
Getting rid of dead wood is a great idea. Tons of middle management there, just sitting for years and causing obstructive damage.
"We need to cascade memos about our holistic logistical matrix approaches."
Regarding the "tons of middle managers" (another dehumanizing expression imo.) - I haven't met anyone just "sitting for years" and happily "causing obstructive damage" yet. I have however met quite a few where it took me some time to appreciate their work (looked like nothing/trivial from the outside) and realize their failed struggle with organizatorial constraints on their work.
Apologies if I am reading too much into your post. However, there seems to be pervasive contempt for the people affected by layoffs in threads like these that's unnecessary and unwarranted.
- There is dead wood. People who do negative work, or who do not add value, only process, to shipping products
- There are toxic middle-to-upper level managers. These people exist; I have personal experience with one who I believe is an actual psychopath
- There are many partner-level people who have essentially reduced their careers to manipulation of other people's careers, by canceling products, or getting people canned or quashing promotions, or backing poor promotions.
I don't think it's hyperbole to say that middle management at Microsoft is riddled with "dead wood".
how do you know it's middle management?
> Getting rid of dead wood
That's such a despicable way to talk about human beings,but not surprising here,unfortunatly.
Nobody is implying the people who hold those jobs have any personal failings or aren't capable of doing productive work, but the jobs themselves are not helping the business.
He explained that any company who could shed a massive amount of its workforce within a year, or all at once, is a red flag for massive internal problems. At the time we had this discussion, he was the CFO of a company that had over 30,000 employees globally.
His thinking was that the same principals that small companies use (not hiring too quickly, etc.) should be scaled up regardless of the company size. You either need people or you don't. You don't hire too fast simply because you are experiencing rapid revenue growth, because revenues do not grow unabated. You hire as slowly as you can, so that when recessions hit or market forces change, you don't suddenly have 3 or 4 times the staff you need. His thinking (which I agree with) is that since those people worked extra hard to cover the work when times were booming, you don't turn around and lay them off just because things slow for a couple of years.
Those people worked hard for the company because they are good employees; he saw it as more important to have good employees on hand when things ramped up again rather than just cut them loose and hope he could get more good employees later.
Since that discussion, he's gone on to two more companies, leading one through an IPO as the CEO. All of his companies have operated like gangbusters - he comes in, revenues go through the roof, debt gets paid down and he's NEVER LAID ANYONE OFF. In the meantime, in his work history, he's been through 3 IPOS (two as CFO, one as CEO) and I don't know how much he made personally on each I do know that he cleared $41 million in a single day on one of them.
This is in complete opposition to what I've heard from several other CEOs, who tell me 'labor is your most controllable expense'. Yet, none of their companies (some also on the NYSE or NASDAQ) have performed anywhere near what my friend's has.
I think he's right. Wall Street is full of guys who have no actual experience running a business. They see layoffs as 'cleaning house' and 'cutting expenses' but the reality is that while that can be true, it more often is a harbinger that the company is not well run.
Counter Nadella's communications over the last few weeks with what Larry Page said/wrote when he took over from Eric Schmidt. Even though Google pursues hundreds of interesting initiatives of varying revenue importance, it appears they have a coherent strategy (internally, at least) and have been making appropriate decisions to further it, even when those decisions are sometimes indecipherable to external viewers.
While it sounds like your friend definitely knows how to run a real business, he/you may want to re-asses Wall Street's real business: it isn't "running companies", it isn't "building value" and it sure isn't "giving away solid analysis for free".
They make money off trade-activity that generates short-term returns.
The sell trades, not stocks. Not unlike eBay. They can and do profit from irrational/emotional behavior and they have no qualms about designing their business to fuel and leverage those behaviors for increased returns.
If 2007 taught us anything, it should be that Wall Street is more than happy to tell you whatever you need to hear to generate predictable trades -- more than happy to tell business news channels whatever will generate predictable trades -- even those they know those trades to be bad and foolish to the extent that they personally bet against them.
I had a guy under me laid off, and I resigned on the spot -- because his being laid off meant the company was giving up on a core capability that was the main reason I wanted to be at the company. A friend of mine was working at a large software company that laid off "dead wood" (according to management) including key engineers, which literally led to all the other experienced engineers on his team leaving.
In every post about this story, right near the top have been dreamy posts about "dead weight" and "middle management" being cut, as if all of Microsoft's prior executive bungles are suddenly being resolved (with most of the same executives, as an aside). Yet the bulk of the layoffs come from Nokia (man, Finland is going to be pissed), people whose only mistake was following a leader who was widely considered a trojan horse.
Elop keeps his job. Those people lose theirs.
And how ridiculous prejudicial for all of these people whose only mistake was being in a company that main horrendous strategy decisions time and time again -- having people title you "dead wood".
I often hear 1-3 months of employment and or pay over the time, giving hopefully adequate time to prepare.
Keeping it secret is a lost cause. There would be rumors and theories and half truths flying around.