Microsoft Labels Some Fired Staff as 'Good Attrition', Imposes Two-Year Rehiring Ban (businessinsider.com) 57
Microsoft has instituted a stringent new performance management system that places ousted employees on a two-year rehiring block list and categorizes their departures as "good attrition," Business Insider reported Tuesday, citing internal documents. The company now tracks staff departures it considers beneficial, mirroring Amazon's "unregretted attrition" metric, though no specific targets have been established yet.
Microsoft recently terminated 2,000 underperforming employees without severance and implemented a new performance improvement plan (PIP). Employees facing performance issues now must choose between entering the PIP or accepting a "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" with 16 weeks of pay.
Further reading: Microsoft Offers Underperformers Cash To Quit.
Microsoft recently terminated 2,000 underperforming employees without severance and implemented a new performance improvement plan (PIP). Employees facing performance issues now must choose between entering the PIP or accepting a "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" with 16 weeks of pay.
Further reading: Microsoft Offers Underperformers Cash To Quit.
But they didn't get rid of the Edge Marketing team (Score:2)
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So you're saying they have basically been adopted by a corporation? Didn't even know that's possible.
Re:Lies (Score:5, Interesting)
Far simpler than that. MS has for 2+ decades implemented a "Bell Plan" style strategy to prevent American employees from getting vested in retirement and other benefits. (They don't care about H1-Bs because H1-Bs are slave labor that can't qualify ever anyways.) It's illegal as fuck, [umich.edu] but companies do it anyways and count the fines as just "the cost of doing business" if they get caught or sued.
Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
The two year ban list is actually a carrot, not a stick, the stick was what happened when they got fired unfairly, the carrot is "don't make too much fuss about getting fired unfairly and you can come back in 2 years".
I would never consider going back to work for a company that fired me. Ever.
And news like this means I wouldn't take a job from Microsoft to begin with.
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I would never consider going back to work for a company that fired me. Ever.
I'm sure you are more flexible than you think. I work in an industry where mergers and acquisitions along with high attrition rate are the norm. It's surprising to see familiar faces come back later. The terms of people leaving a company often have nothing to do with the company itself, and very often are the result of specific people in it. People change (i.e. they can get fired, change departments etc). You'd be amazed the number of people who left on bad terms turn around when something like that happens
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They decided to work wor Microsoft (Score:1, Flamebait)
My compassion for their fate is non-existent.
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NADELLA MUST GO (Score:4, Insightful)
Underperforming? 2000 people?
- how long were these underperformers on the payroll?
- Who is at the top of that chain and failed to handle any part of this?
- What has MS done to innovate anything in the last five years. Hint: forcing everyone to upgrade to W11, paid support, and Recall are the opposite of innovative.
- SATYA NADELLA MUST GO. But, the thing is, he's the CEO of Microscrot so he has no boss. He's not answerable to anyone. I know, people will say "he's answerable to the board of directors." But he's not. They're ON the board because they ARE his buddies. Maybe "he's answerable to the shareholders." Go buy a share of Microscrot and see how much you can affect who the directors are.
"The Buck Stops Here" -- but not at Microscrot.
Re:NADELLA MUST GO (Score:4, Insightful)
Underperforming? 2000 people?
My educated guess is that, at some point, in order to get promoted further you had to take a manager position. This means you have people who might be a good engineer or support rep but not great managers filling those roles. You wind up with managers promoting other managers, not based on their skill in management, but on how well they cover for each other, and your company ends up looking more like feudal England than a team trying to make products.
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In engineering there are salary bands for individual contributors that are at the same level as manager. I would guess the bulk of these 2000 people are in sales and consulting, where your underperformance can be way more objective. Like if you bill less hours or sign less deals or generate less repeat business. If they are laying off engineers, its because there are A TON of engineers in windows division, but windows, as a product, is not very impactful to the growth of the company anymore. Part of th
Re:NADELLA MUST GO (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, at least explains why MS only seems to have mediocre engineers and ones worse than that.
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Jack Welch of General Electric fame appears to be the originator of "stacked ranking" in American Business. We can see how well that worked out for them. A few hundred people became richer than the Pope and G.E. is almost entirely gone now.
I can see why those at the top pursue it... which proves they are short-sighted and greedy.
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Large sized companies CONSOLIDATE.. (which by extension means the control/elimination of the SMB competition)
Medium companies expand the market by merging prod
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Looks more to me like MS is all in on enshittificatinon these days.
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Underperforming? 2000 people?
You totally nailed it. A company that has 2000 under-performing employees is a systemic company problem, not a "few bad apples" problem...
There's an old joke, where the guy who is getting married for the fourth time says something to the effect of, "you know, I'm starting to get the idea that this is my fault!"
A company that produces this many "under-performers" needs to do something about its culture, leadership, and management.
Re:NADELLA MUST GO (Score:4, Interesting)
Underperforming? 2000 people?
You totally nailed it. A company that has 2000 under-performing employees is a systemic company problem, not a "few bad apples" problem...
They didn't have 2,000 underperforming employees. They had probably 100 underperforming employees, 600 underperforming managers who didn't manage 600 employees adequately, and 1,300 employees who were chosen to be declared as underperforming to satisfy stack-ranking quotas.
F**k Microsoft. You couldn't get me to work there for a million dollars a year.
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I'd work there if they guaranteed I got to fuck some of the young, hot, sexually aggressive and available women that a previous poster mentioned above.
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True, but also There is little need to do anything about culture, leadership and managment when you have a monopoly and earnings are constant. In the long future it could destroy the company but historically Microsoft has been able to be afloat with the worse team, the worse products and the worse managment, only thanks to the Windows thing. Market dominance works better than good staff.
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You're asking the wrong question. This isn't about long standing underperformers who were bad for MS. This is about management needing staff cuts raising the arbitrary bar of who they consider under performers. This is about unspoken targets by department, it's about bell curving. It's about the x% of a department being below average and told to go (this is a process called stack ranking and it used in many toxic cutthroat companies).
SATYA NADELLA MUST GO.
Based on what? Microsoft's share price is riding an all time high. He is o
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The lower-hanging fruit would be to fix all the glitches that have piled up. MS is a digital infrastructure company, they don't need to invent Jetsons shit to have customers, and are probably too big to be innovative anyhow.
For companies that size it's usually cheaper to buy new ideas than do your own R&D. MS got big doing that even. Visual Basic, arguably their most innovative idea, was purchased.
Rehire ban for 2yrs? (Score:4, Funny)
Who would return to a company that used "good attrition" to relieve them of their job?
Re:Rehire ban for 2yrs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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And... that is why they do it, because they know someone will be desperate enough to fill the empty position regardless of how callous it all is.
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I suspect that there were lots of cases, in a company the size of Microsoft, where someone didn't get along with their boss, or had problems with a team that they were on, but that still had friends and allies in other parts of the organization. So they might get let go from one part of the organization, but when another part of the organization had an opening they then got rehired.
Like most rules of this type I would bet that the new policy has an interesting story. I would bet that one particularly to
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I suspect that there were lots of cases, in a company the size of Microsoft, where someone didn't get along with their boss, or had problems with a team that they were on, but that still had friends and allies in other parts of the organization. So they might get let go from one part of the organization, but when another part of the organization had an opening they then got rehired.
Like most rules of this type I would bet that the new policy has an interesting story. I would bet that one particularly toxic employee got rehired enough times that management finally created a policy against it. The whole point of the new policy is that people fired in this manner can no longer work for Microsoft for two years, even if some other part of the organization wants them.
Unlikely. They wouldn't want to let that sort of person in after two years. They would simply flag that employee record as "no rehire".
No, this isn't about that. This is about workers who they think are underperforming. The theory is that those people might learn from the experience and be better employees after a few years.
In practice, however, this is rare.
Most of the people who are underperforming are not underperforming because of laziness, but rather because they were in a job that wasn't a good
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Money talks and times are tough.
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None of those that have options. Explains nicely why MS has been doing crappy engineering for decades now.
Performance Plan (Score:2)
1) Get hired at Microsoft.
2) Under-perform.
3) Profit!
F--k your PIP (Score:2)
If manglement tried to put me or anyone on my team on a PIP, I would take the severance pay and find a new job. And probably give the idiots in charge the finger on the way out.
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I was at a company where the only way HR would allow anyone to be fired is first put them on a 90 day PIP which HR took very seriously, wanted work and communications logs, weekly update meetings, etc.
The PIP process was so painful for both managers and staff, it was unclear if the goal was to get staff to just quit or discouraged managers from firing anyone. Over the course of a few years I fired one person through PIP because he literally had been doing nothing for years and one of my leads wanted to fir
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As somebody who had to put an angry employee on a PIP which turned out to be a 3 month saga, let me tell you that I would have greatly preferred that they opted out.
It was with good intent. I really didn't want to have to let them go. But they exploded upwards through four levels of leadership, dragged me through a respectful workplace investigation, and ultimately quit one day before the three month deadline was reached. With no package.
The PIP has a bad rep, but sometimes it really is what it says on the
Re:F--k your PIP (Score:4, Interesting)
Putting someone on a PIP with the purpose of improving someone's performance is misusing a PIP. The reasons PIPs were created in the first place was to document poor performance so the employer can protect themselves from claims when they fire someone. Any employee who hasn't been living under a rock understands this. Being put on a PIP is a firing with a defined lead time. So you shouldn't have been surprised when it blew up. Instigating an HR investigation was a way of fighting back and preserving potential claims against the employer. Sure, maybe a select few employees manage to emerge from a PIP. That may be by design so they can make the argument in a court proceeding that the PIP program isn't a sham.
If you actually want to improve performance of someone on your team, you work with someone informally. No need to get HR involved unless you've already given up.
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Sometimes formal process is the only tool that will truly convince somebody that something really is wrong and must be changed. In the case I described I had a year of informal acknowledgement and zero progress. Not one centimeter of progress until pen was put to paper, and it became real. I gave them a specific list of deliverables that should have been 2 weeks, and three months work with. It was very attainable.
I think you've got it backwards. The PIP with no path to emergence is the abuse.
In 14 years of
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If they need a PIP to come to Jesus, then they are typically too far gone (if they were ever there in the first place). If someone is so dense that direct feedback, a bad performance review, and ongoing coaching doesn't do it, they probably aren't someone you want on your team anyways.
If the PIP has easily obtainable goals, then you are just setting yourself up for another one soon. Because most employees know that PIPs are usually pre-firing paperwork, they are going to start looking for another job even i
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There are two reasons for a PIP:
1) You're incompetent and management is trying to fill out your HR folder to justify firing you.
2) Your management is corrupt or stupid and is trying to fill out your HR folder to justify firing you.
The third option - a manager who is trying to mentor you into being a better, more valuable employee - is rare enough you should ignore the possibility.
Just start looking for work IMMEDIATELY. It's better to change jobs of your own accord and on your own schedule than to have to
Re:F--k your PIP (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked with someone who was on a PIP. And he did not improve. I might have been the person that initiated the PIP as when I complained about this person I was told I was not the first to complain. Cognitive dissonance was would be the word to describe his work. He could be told in written instructions exactly what needed to be done to not only not do it a day later but question what needed to be done. Multiple times. Sometimes he would contradict the instructions: ”The email said to do this step using method B so I did. . . " The email said to use method A and never mentioned B.
While the PIP was painful, I see it as unfortunately necessary. Many states are right-to-work but anyone can sue. I see PIPs as HR/legal needed meticulous documentation that employees who should be fired have their suits quickly dismissed if they decide to sue.
If you fire quickly, fire twice. (Score:2)
label links to paywalled content, please! (Score:3)
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Archive.ph breaks most paywalls. Just FYI.
Meanwhile, (Score:2)
in Night City