Microsoft Lays Off Employees in New Round of Cuts (geekwire.com) 44
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."
Lesson to be learned (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.”
Re: Lesson to be learned (Score:2)
But I don't like the job of job hunting. How can I get a better job than job hunting?
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Have you tried being independently wealthy and having a large network of rich and powerful friends?
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How's that working out now for Scott Adams?
Re: Lesson to be learned (Score:1)
Brain worms got him.
Re:Lesson to be learned (Score:5, Interesting)
I almost tripled my salary in the space of five years by following this advice. Had spent the preceding eight years with the same employer, absorbing annual COLA raises that never matched inflation, watching them hire new people with less responsibilities for more money while denying my raise requests.....
Average tenure after that job is 13 months. I give them the first year and when they come back from my "exceeds expectations" performance review with a below inflation rate raise, literally telling me I'm worth less than when they hired me, that's when I'm out. At this point I don't even bother giving them notice. They find out at close of business on whatever day I've decided is my last. People will tell you that you have to give notice, I used to do that too, but nope, there's next to nothing in it for you. No large employer with a real HR department will offer any sort of reference for you, except to confirm dates of employment, so fuck 'em. The last time I tried to give notice my supervisor loaded me up with a bunch of busy field tech work that was frankly beneath me, they just didn't have anyone else to do the work, and my days of crawling through crawlspaces and drop ceiling are behind me. Told 'em I'd do it, then proceeded to play games for the next two weeks, but I made a show of answering a few e-mails each day to establish a paper trail that I'd "worked" if they tried to deny my wages for the unfinished FT work.
When the only way to get a real raise is to switch jobs, what's the incentive to remain in your current one for longer than necessary, or give them more than the absolute bare minimum not to get fired? I don't agree with the Gen Z'ers on much but when it comes to employee/employer relations, they're way smarter than my generation.
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Pffft, I went back to one job that I had quit without giving notice. Nobody cared. There had been nearly wholesale turnover across the organization (except the C-suite of course, they always take good care of themselves and each other) and nobody even remembered my name. I was an entry in the HR database, with start and end dates, and a bunch of good performance evaluations. My lack of notice was not a factor.
Nobody with half a brain cares about whether you gave notice or not. Unless you're giving mon
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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.
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I'm approaching the three year mark at my current role. That's mostly because of benefits I cannot match elsewhere (five weeks of PTO) and not raises, which remain below inflation. Granted, inflation is high right now, the numbers they're using would at least match/slightly beat it in normal times. It's difficult for me to find another role with four weeks of PTO, never mind five, so that's the current handcuff. At least it's a good problem to have.
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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'
People show loyalty to the system (Score:2)
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So do you have a coherent idea of what to replace it with, much less how?
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Probably something like this [youtube.com]. ;-)
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Another option is an autonomous collective anarcho-syndicalist commune [youtube.com].
Re: People show loyalty to the system (Score:2)
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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)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
There's a huge difference (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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Well... agreed. Yeah. I get that.
You're not fired (Score:2)
You've been adjusted!
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We refactored the organization.
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Making huge profits and still having layoffs (Score:1)
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It's Not About the Work Any More (Score:2)
"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)
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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.
Soft skil jobs most likely laid off (Score:2)
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
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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)
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)
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.
Are we still pretending these are about any one c? (Score:2)
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!