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Microsoft Businesses IT

Microsoft Lays Off Employees in New Round of Cuts (geekwire.com) 46

Posted by msmash from the more-pain dept.
Microsoft conducted another round of layoffs this week in the latest workforce reduction implemented by the Redmond tech giant this year. From a report: The cuts impacted multiple teams and geographies. Posts on LinkedIn from impacted employees show the cuts affecting employees in product and program management roles. "Organizational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business," a spokesperson said in a statement. "We will continue to prioritize and invest in strategic growth areas for our future and in support of our customers and partners."
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Microsoft Lays Off Employees in New Round of Cuts More

Microsoft Lays Off Employees in New Round of Cuts

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  • Lesson to be learned (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VonSkippy ( 892467 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @03:18PM (#64598927) Homepage

    And this my tech friends, NEVER show loyalty to ANY employer. They will hire and fire you at the whims of their stock price and your performance, dedication, future work ideas mean absolutely squat.

    • Re:Lesson to be learned (Score:5, Interesting)

      by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @03:59PM (#64599055)

      In the book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, Scott Adams shares some of the best career advice he ever got.

      Your Job is Not Your Job

      The assumption here is that you’ll do your job and you’ll do your job well. That goes without saying. But the part you’ll forget to do is to find and land your next job, and grow yourself into it.

      Adams writes:

      “I asked what he did for a living and he told me he was CEO of a company that made screws. Then he offered me some career advice.

      He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was an ongoing process.

      This makes perfect sense if you do the math.

      Chances are the best job for you won’t become available precisely the time you declare yourself ready.

      Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for the better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.”

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @04:02PM (#64599069)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        You are burning a lot of bridges with such exits. While leaving to get a raise is almost necessary these days, coming back (for another raise) is also good idea. This is only possible if you exit in a reasonable way.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • You are burning a lot of bridges with such exits.

          You're only burning one bridge.

          We've rehired a few "boomerangs", but it isn't common. Most quitters are gone for good.

          A better reason for an amicable exit is if you need a reference. But if you've already landed a new job, that's less of an issue.

      • There are suggestions over here that work will become "results based" in future. That is, instead of hiring someone forever, you'll hire them until some condition is met - a bit like you might hire a contractor to do a specific project.

        I'm not sure how this will work in practice, because if you said "come work for us and make our deployments work in 10 minutes", then you might well spend a bit of time getting it to 20 minutes, but then slack off getting it any shorter than that. Even if you don't, what you'

    • It doesn't matter if you don't have loyalty to an individual employer if you're still completely loyal to the system we function in. If that's the case then you are de facto loyal to every single employer out there. They own you hook line and sinker because you can't think outside the Overton window enough to actually do anything about the situations they put you in when they indulge in layoffs

    • And this my tech friends, NEVER show loyalty to ANY employer. They will hire and fire you at the whims of their stock price and your performance, dedication, future work ideas mean absolutely squat.

      And they don't care about your mortgage either.

  • Ho hum. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @03:24PM (#64598951)

    Big company. Volatile industry. Workforce demands wax and wane as technology shifts and customers alter their focus. Business as usual. The idea that a big tech company is a safe career haven is done. Treat these jobs like temporary opportunities, enjoy them while they last, and always be prepared to meet the demands of the open market.

    Of course that's easy for me to say - I retire in two weeks, after a long career mostly in one company that enabled me to do so at the age of 54... part of the "forgotten generation" that continues to reap the benefits of our circumstances... I've never been unemployed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by The Cat ( 19816 )

      But that goddamn mortgage payment is due every month, ain't it? Kids have to eat every day. Wife ain't gonna tolerate unemployment checks for long.

      And then one day you wake up and realize that someone else is in total daily control of your whole fuckin' life.

      • But that goddamn mortgage payment is due every month, ain't it?

        You should have at least a six-month financial cushion before you buy a house or have kids.

        I lived in my van to save for my first mortgage. Paying $0 in rent is a great way to build assets.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by The Cat ( 19816 )

          So that shuts it right down, then. Right? Can't have a conversation about why jobs only last six months. It's the employee's fault they have to live in a parking lot.

    • In the past Microsoft would go out of their way to find a place for the employees because they wouldn't want to risk them getting snapped up by competitors.

      It shows that they are so unconcerned about competition and by extension antitrust law enforcement that they can fire with impunity.

      I don't think folks realize how much antitrust law protected tech workers in the past. Companies were afraid to fire us because our knowledge would be applied at other companies who would rise up and compete. Nowaday

  • You've been adjusted!

  • Making huge profits but still laying off employees. The millennials have it right. No loyalty to corporations.

  • "You think you're qualified huh? You a big tough guy programmer? Well now you're fired and you're a loser."

    "You hired me three months ago and offered me $200k a year"

    "Yeah, and now you're fired, so you're an unemployed loser. I win. You lose. That makes you a fuckin' loser. Now these two 80 IQ gorillas are going to take you and your box to the exit. Get the fuck out."

    "What about the big project you hired us all for?"

    "We're cutting costs."

    "If you burn the building down that would cut costs too."

    "Fuck you."

    "S

  • Please lay off UI redesigners (Score:3)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @04:40PM (#64599151)
    Windows OS would deliver better value if they stopped pointless UI redesigns. It will never be seamless, just too many controls. It will be a lot less annoying if you don't have to relearn controls all the time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by keltor ( 99721 ) *
      I mean, hating other sides of Win11, they have in fact been unifying part of the UI not touched previously (like they basically existed since win 3.0).

      Of course they removed functionality also, but they have been touching stuff.

      I'm more concerned that they laid off program management roles - they have a fuck ton of apps that apparently people update ad hoc and do so poorly, so actually seems like they need these people but need better people.

      • They probably laid off UX designers, UI consultants, program managers, project managers, marketing, HR and other non-enginnering staff.

        Microsoft may be feeling the Oracle effect, where they have lots of 20 year old-ish (or as hyper aged to 20 years in 10) products out there and that getting a 10% increase in sales for the lame duck products is a hard hill to climb.

        Many of the products are a victim of their own success with resume driven development of forced march 3 year product version lifespans and the ne

      • It still takes six clicks and three different UI styles to connect to a VPN. That's some quality for ya...

  • AI consumes everything (Score:3)

    by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @06:18PM (#64599343)
    All the high tech companies, and also many other sectors, are slashing everything to the bone in pursuit of AI/LLM dreams. Using business jargon, this "pivot" is draining important ongoing support and development in favor of pie-in-the-sky AI glory.

    It's a bad bet. Using AI/LLM for protein folding or physics give results because there are big training set that are known good. Anything scraping the web or processing text is guaranteed to have massive problems. That's because there is no "intelligence" in LLM/neural networks. It's hugely expensive black box pattern matching at it's core. Models must be retrained from scratch because no one in the world knows what's going on the trained models. Previously trained models are an unrecoverable sunk cost.

    So the resources that produce useful results are being looted and the real world results are going to be terrible. If you think there are problems with Microsoft or Google or big banks or (big business name here) you haven't seen anything yet. Enshitifcation is inevitable.

  • Did they dump the guy who invented recall? (Score:3)

    by biggaijin ( 126513 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @06:26PM (#64599351)

    I hope the guy who invented the new Recall feature that will invade the privacy of millions and allow our whole lives to be data-mined got the boot.

  • The economy sucks currently ... even you guys are starting to notice, eh?

    But at least "techies" voted for the "right" people, and sneered at the wrong ones! That must be ... some comfort, I guess?

    Yeah, I'd just hate to go back to that low inflation, full employment, and other terrors. Nice work, guys!

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