Why would Microsoft even have layoffs? They're highly profitable and this is a small percentage of their workforce. Surely they're taking a huge morale loss and hiring hit when they do something like this? Why would I consider working for a company that just had layoffs recently?
Why wouldn't they just fire the underperformers and reassign the others? Mass indiscriminate layoffs are bad.
> "We understand that Microsoft typically gives laid-off employees 60 days to find a new position internally and offers two weeks pay for every 6 months of employment, according one employee."
It sounds like this is close to what is happening, except it's less about underperformer and more about specific skillsets.
Interesting. Why announce the total number if a lot of them may just find another project inside Microsoft? Shouldn't they wait the 60 days to see how many are actually getting laid off? Or do most people not find another project?
They file thousands of worker visas because there's a "shortage" of qualified people, yet they also set a layoff target of 2,850 people back in June 2016...
It's like no one really cares if anything adds up anymore. Perhaps it was always this way?
Qualified people are not interchangeable. I'm qualified for some jobs, and worse than useless for others. (You wouldn't pick me to formulate a new rocket fuel.)
Software Engineers at Microsoft may as well be interchangeable.
I was working there when they laid off 18,000 people. Everyone I knew personally who lost their job was rehired by the company within three months. One of them was even rehired to their original team, go figure.
I saw good performers laid off while poor performers kept their jobs. I also saw poor performers rehired. The rumor at the time was that the list of people being laid off was chosen at random. That certainly makes sense, as it would allow the company to say, "We randomly laid off X% of people doing Y work in Z division." in the event of any discrimination or wrongful termination lawsuits.
Companies of this size treat people as cogs in a machine. Provided all your cogs meet a certain minimum standard your machine functions well. If you need to cut down on the number of moving parts, you don't get too concerned over which individual cogs you get rid of. It's horrible and impersonal, but I guess it's somewhat necessary for a company like Microsoft.
Software jobs don't just need quality people, there are actual costs associated with ramping up new employees and knowledge transfer of old ones. There's certain things employees keep in their heads that you can't quantify as lost mindshare when they are gone.
Software has so much domain knowledge that there are all sorts of funny memes about what happens whenever the person that originally wrote the code leaves the company.
You're forgetting but Microsoft isn't just a software shop. They also do quite a lot of hardware, games / VR, design among other things.
I don't know who they're laying off but if they worked in, say, ARM Surface Hardware or maybe phone hardware engineering, they're going to have a smaller amount of places to go. Yes they could go learn software development but if they haven't done it that ramp up time is going to be years.
If this were just a trickle of 700 who were eased-out for performance reasons, I would accept your sarcasm. However, this was not easing-out. This was pre-planned.
If you google "microsoft mass layoff", it's like they have these pre-ordained layoffs of thousands every year, while their visa certifications are in the low thousands every year. In this case, the 700 is just a single wave of a layoff planned the middle of last year.
I am not knocking worker visas here. I am knocking Microsoft's honesty.
Sad to see Microsoft seeming to fall into this pattern of a recurring trickle of layoffs, especially when they are still so profitable. These kinds of layoffs can be incredibly corrosive to morale.
The 'update skills in various units' argument rings a little hollow at a company where a new hire on an eng team in an org with lots of legacy systems, like Windows or Office, will be expected to need 6+ months to be fully integrated in the team. If that were true, why not just retrain the people you already have?
> The 'update skills in various units' argument rings a little hollow at a company where a new hire on an eng team in an org with lots of legacy systems, like Windows or Office, will be expected to need 6+ months to be fully integrated in the team. If that were true, why not just retrain the people you already have?
I didn't see where it said who they were laying off. What if they were laying off hardware engineers? If they haven't done software before that ramp up time to integrate into a software development team may be years.
They do a lot more than just software. I agree if they're laying off of software then there is no reason they can't be retrained in another dev team but that's not always the case here.
You're also missing the part where Microsoft gives them 60 days to find a new position within the company. I'm assuming they have to re-interview but probably no way to avoid that.
>I didn't see where it said who they were laying off
"The upcoming cuts won't be specific to any single group, but will be spread across the company's worldwide offices and business units, including sales, marketing, human resources, engineering, finance and more."
Sounds like perhaps they dont expect to make their quarterly numbers, and are doing blanket layoffs to appease investors.
> "The upcoming cuts won't be specific to any single group, but will be spread across the company's worldwide offices and business units, including sales, marketing, human resources, engineering, finance and more."
I was referring to the type of people, mostly. Like, software engineers, hardware engineers, designers, HR folks, etc.
> Sounds like perhaps they dont expect to make their quarterly numbers, and are doing blanket layoffs to appease investors.
They announced these over 6 months ago so I'm not necessarily convinced that's why. Though I would love to know for sure.
My prediction, based on the fact that POTUS has a mind of a 7 year old kid, is a tantrum will be thrown. The adults in the room will pacify it with some superficial meaningless action/distraction and the cycle will repeat for 4 years.
As Daniel Kahnemen has said there is high demand for overconfidence these days.
And the tech industry has blindly satisfied that demand by creating platforms that prop up characters like POTUS. Not just in the sphere of politics but you can see this within your family, friends, teachers, scientists, religious and biz leaders basically everywhere you look.
If we want solutions that trend has to be reversed.
> My prediction, based on the fact that POTUS has a mind of a 7 year old kid, is a tantrum will be thrown. The adults in the room will pacify it with some superficial meaningless action/distraction and the cycle will repeat for 4 years.
You assume adults are let into the room and will be making the decision. He is the POTUS as long as he cares and isn't lazy enough to pawn it off he'll be the one making decisions.
When it seems like companies don't complain enough how scarce it is to find hirable talent, I wonder what the details are on their engineering layoffs. Why not just move them to a different team? Why not just keep work on tech debt efforts? Laying them off seems like a terrible long term decision. I'm assuming these lay offs are not some guise to hide that they're getting rid of their low performing engineers.
> The article says they can apply for other positions within Microsoft
I don't know how I would handle that mentally, to have to re-apply to the company that just laid me off. The message is weird. "We're letting you go, but if you REALLY want to stay, find a team that wants you. Here, we'll put a 2 month timer on it."
Sorry if that sounds like rambling, but I simply don't understand.
We're letting you go, but if you REALLY want to stay, find a team that wants you
I don't know about Microsoft. But I've known quite a number of people at Intel who have gone thru this sort of procedure.
Every two or three years there would be a re-org and thousands would get thrown into a layoff pool, from which they had perhaps 60 days to get hired into another group. But there really wasn't a stigma, many people successfully navigated that process four or five times over the years.
The real downside was that being in the pool was your severance. When your 60 days ran out you were SOL.
"Your team is going to be no more or is being downsized because its not as important anymore, we really want to keep you though, so we are going to give you 2 months to find another place inside the company where you would like to work at."
I was at Microsoft during the "great" mid-2014 layoffs when they eliminated 4/5ths of all SDETs in OSG (the Windows org). My division was one of the least affected, but not everyone was given the "musical chairs" treatment to find another job internally - seemingly that privilege was reserved only for those at the top of the "rank-and-yank" pecking order - presumably to avoid those perceived as being less-capable from taking an in-company job away from someone else being laid-off who was more desirable to retain.
(I had a friend in MSFT HR at the time who confirmed that the 2014 layoffs were conducted by-algorithm and were absolutely not based on job-performance - hence why management had to resort to creative ways to retain people they wanted).
Even for those who were granted the "privilege" of applying internally, it was incredibly stressful for them because now there was rampant competition for a limited number of places. The QA/SDET roles were hit the hardest because most of the open positions were exclusively SDE - and SDE hiring managers are reluctant to engage SDETs.
It is good to see some messages from those who do have inside knowledge about working within (and being kicked out of) this particular bureaucracy.
The similarities and differences between different bureaucracies in different "tech" companies, some quite similar and others quite different by design, is interesting too.
Regardless, it fundamentally looks like the decent companies that have a system to truly hire employees worth investing in, and are qualified enough investors to never let that investment in their people lapse (since it always pays off, short-term or long-term), would be the last ones to lay people off at all. Certainly not layoffs as part of a non-emergency long-term planned business strategy, in such a non-astute effort known as "across-the-board", or even more childishly by algorithm.
As a businessman while trying to maintain or accelerate growth, if you can also limit the downside to the rate of attrition, you will never need to lay anybody off.
Depends on how good a businessman you are.
There have always been companies that are not decent,
some even have an actual system to exclude potential employees who would otherwise provide the most return on resource investment,
and there are some that never even leverage a respectable percentage of their capable people anywhere near their full potential.
Even for these lesser companies, bold downsizing leaves unmeasurable damage to the company and remaining employees, just as strongly as it can to those who are kicked out. Although many who are laid off move on to much better careers after being separated from companies which didn't seem so poor up until that point.
When the unmeasured damage exceeds the cost of retaining actual good people, the direct negative effect on the bottom line can still be completely obfuscated. This can easily be ignored by the ignorant or malicious, or swept under the rug by a large variety of bureaucracies, most of which are not capable of building or maintaing alignment of employee interests with those of shareholders.
In this case it can be a significant notch-down in opportunities for both employees and shareholders from that point forward, with no indication whatsoever on any current financial statement. Too bad it's the future financial statements that will be less impressive or more disappointing, depending on the situation.
How exactly is this not just people being fired? I understand they get severance so that's nice for employees, but what's the goal of doing it this way from the companies perspective?
A firing usually means the employee did something wrong, such as harassing a co-worker, stealing money, or violating critical policies. A layoff means simply that your services are no longer needed, and that's it.
That's not 'no reason'. Even for places that have pro-employee workplace laws there's often provisions for getting rid of employees who can't do what you pay them to do.
There are different cases on "not able to afford".
In Germany cases where companies truly cannot afford the person the following rules apply:
1. there is absolutely no way for the person to conduct different work inside the company
2. the company needs to choose those that can more easily afford to be laid off. (employment duration, young, single etc)
3. the place of work has to permanently be gone
Beforehand, the company has to talk to the workers council though so they can possibly find solutions to the problem without having to fire people.
It's not like that here (Australian), where you can lay someone off but it's not as simple as at will.
Simplifying a bit, you have to have attempted to help the employee meet standards, or find a suitable position. Also, if the employee develops problrns like alcohol abuse you have to attempt to get them to sort it out.
> the employee develops problrns like alcohol abuse you have to attempt to get them to sort it out.
that seems to be beyond what an employer should have to bear. If an employee develops problems, it doesn't make sense for an employer to help them (unless it's from their job - e.g., a wine taster getting addicted to alcohol). They aint running a charity!
They aint running a charity, but they are running inside the society that these laws are trying to protect. As such they have to do their part. What that part is most countries define differently. Australia apparently defines it as seen above.
Ah yes, good point, of course there are exceptions and different circumstances for various industries and levels of employment or what have you.
My comment was intended in the context of a regular employee in the scope of "unfair dismissal"[1] which you may have a claim to if you believe your dismissal was "harsh, unjust or unreasonable manner." Slightly different rules for small businesses under 15 employees etc.
I found it weird that a lot of people in Germany are expected to work the first 2~3 days for free, as like a trial. Is that common? I knew people who had to do that for Subway.
Most likely illegal. Its only legal if the workplace is not making you do actual work and is only keeping you there to observe. (and you can come and go as you like)
By that token, if being laid off is a terrible hardship for an employee, wouldn't one say that they should have made better financial decisions (eg, saving more)?
So why do you think that anyone is entitled to have the rest of the world take care of them? Is nobody responsible for the outcome of their own actions in your worldview? Why is there no onus on individuals to save and take responsibility for their own financial well-being?
I don't see why you think being a libertarian or not has anything to do with anything, by the way.
No one is "forcing" you to keep an employee on pay roll. Just be reasonable and give them 4-6 weeks notice of termination of employment, with a valid reason of dismissal.
Yes, that's part of it. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, but when it's easy to fire people, it also makes it a lot easier to hire them, because there is less of a risk when you make a mistake or need to change direction of your business.
While it's an upheaval to be sure, the vast majority of these laid-off employees have in-demand skills in a growing industry. Who I really feel for is people who get laid off in shrinking industries, where it's basically a game of musical chairs and there are fewer seats each round.
No, it's because the companies aren't encumbered with a million layers of bureaucracy and regulation ensuring every single employee has every single possible safety net in the world preventing every single type of failure known.
Sure that must be the only reason, no-one would think of ever creating a company in socialist Europe. Having access to a huge, uniform market must not factor into this at all. Or any 100 other good reasons you're ignoring from a complex spectrum; no it must be the one and only one that fits your narrative.
Many great companies are started overseas. Many great companies are also started in America. To suggest there is a correlation between startup success rate and at will employment would require, by golly, empirical data.
A concept that is utterly foreign and bizarre to most other people in Western countries, including myself in New Zealand.
Great, now you know one reason that Americans prefer America to other countries. A lot of us are quite happy with the "at will" rules that are common in the US. Note, however, that these rules are largely at the state, not federal, level, and not all state are "at will".
I worked in NZ for three years. The company I worked for rarely had redundancies. But we did have two classes of people who left. People who got a big card and gave a speech at weekly drinks, and people who just left during the day and said "goodbye" to everyone on their teams.
Once one of the former said goodbye after all the announcements after work drinks. It was really awkward.
We had a guy on my team just tell us "today is my last day," out of nowhere. He was in the director's office earlier.
We suspected these people were given some money and told to quit, rather than keep them on. It was usually people who turned out to not really be great engineers and I think they just wanted to get rid of them without having to fire them.
I also worked in Australia for a year. My first day on the job, my hiring manager, who had been with the company for six years, was made redundant.
Personally I prefer the Danish idea of "Flexicurity", where it's easy to hire and easy to fire, but there are strong welfare protections guaranteed by the state if you do end up unemployed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
How is that sad? I love the fact that I can quit my job and go take another job at any time. If the flip-side of that coin is that I can be fired at any time, then so be it.
What, you think having a family means you want to be stuck in the same boring job for the rest of your life? Or that you won't still want to seek higher pay down the road? What if you have another kid? Job flexibility could come in handy...
So? We should end at-will employment so a few people don't have to experience the occasional "stressful and demoralizing experience"? I'm not buying it. Nobody said life was all sunshine and rainbows...
Works well when it's easy to find a job, doesn't work well when you get fired for no reason and you were working in a profession where you don't just get a job the next week.
Also there are more possibilities to employment than American "any time for any reason" and European "at least a month either way". In Canada you have to have a justified cause to fire people or just give notice, and for quitting you customarily give 2 weeks notice (I'm not even sure if you're legally bound to).
Works well when it's easy to find a job, doesn't work well when you get fired for no reason and you were working in a profession where you don't just get a job the next week.
Isn't putting aside savings to account for possible interruptions in employment simply prudent management of one's personal finances?
Most likely these people will get a decent severance package, in startups when they have layoffs often you're laid off being owed salary even though the salary may be 80% below market rate and you could be laid off simply to save money at the end of the project, engineers used to be precious back when everything required its own custom apache c module but these days engineers are very much disposible.
They lost their most skilled staff from the 1990s era due to early retirement. They fired all QA staff. Nowadays they have a big piles of legacy codebases. They outsourced or better say moved development of many products to India. Nowadays you really feel the lower skilled work force (compared to 1990s staff) and no QA to speak of everywhere in there products. Their product feel like designed by people who have little engineering knowledge, a far cry from 1990s software UI. Well it already started with WinXP that contained already HTML based UI parts like "software" control panel, and many more parts - an undocumented new UI API where the EU fined them. Plus the 1984 style spyware features their Nadella CEO introduced and forces upon end consumers like there is no tomorrow.
Users may have flagged this comment because of the downvote taunt, something we've already asked you many times not to do. We have to ban accounts that refuse to stop violating the guidelines.
That's not what's going to happen. All the new proposed legislation will do is drive up wages (and therefore income inequality) for both Americans and H1-B holders. It will also allow the big firms to shed their worse employees and hold on to only their best, thereby making it incredibly difficult for smaller competitors and public entities to find staff:
> All the new proposed legislation will do is drive up wages (and therefore income inequality) for both Americans and H1-B holders. It will also allow the big firms to shed their worse employees and hold on to only their best, thereby making it incredibly difficult for smaller competitors and public entities to find staff.
Anecdotal, but I work for a small company and this would make it easier for us to find staff.
Right now, huge companies like Cognizant, Tata & Infosys submit a huge amount of H1B applications. The lottery system means that small companies like my own simply cannot get H1B visas.
Something like an auction system would actually benefit us because we pay engineers competitively compared to the best paying large companies and a lot more than most large companies.
No, the key problem is that the big contracting sweatshops are able to muscle out far more deserving applications from employers who are in fact willing to pay a lot more. See the salaries:
I'm pretty sure the parent was willing to pay more than the $76k that Infosys offers -- an amount that pretty much proves that H1Bs aren't being used to find the "super rare talent" that the program is ostensibly for.
That's why we should go toward a highest-bidder system. No need for the government to try to learn the difference between DB admins and deep learning specialists, and it would ensure that the slots are going to the immigrants creating the most economic value, rather than the ones best at pretending to look real hard for qualified Americans.
I'm not sure I understand your comment. It is not obvious to my why you think that we underpay. Can you help me understand by elaborating?
We just end up hiring people who already have some form of work authorization instead of sponsoring new H1Bs. The current system for sponsoring new H1Bs is dominated by large companies.
The lottery system means that we do not even attempt to sponsor new H1Bs. An auction system would mean that our small company would probably get approved H1Bs because, as I mentioned, our pay is competitive with the best paying large companies and higher than the majority of large companies.
I think he is referring to citizen hires. i.e. offer more money for the job and US citizens with the right qualifications will magically appear at your door.
It is a rather simplistic view of how the labor market works, but some people can't seem to not think this way.
I mean right now we hire people who already have work authorization.
Right now we can't sponsor a foreign new grad who goes to Cambridge and has an IMO gold medal because their H1B has a high probability of not being approved. We'll lose time interviewing and we'll probably lose other candidates while we wait.
If H1Bs were allocated by pay then our H1B would probably get approved because we're really desperate to make those hires.
Instead those visas go to megacorps who are not as desperate as we are. How do I know that they are not as desperate? They pay less.
We are so desperate to make these hires that we are opening an office in a jurisdiction with friendlier immigration laws. This is extremely expensive in terms of direct costs. I also think we lose out on ad-hoc communication by not having everyone in the same office.
The net effect is that the US loses out on a ton of tax revenue. Not only will the employees' personal taxes go to a different country, but taxes on some our profits will also shift to that country as the company will have to make transfer payments for the work done in the overseas office.
Why should Americans be concerned about foreign worker's ability to find a job in the American job market? Are People in Australia, Japan, India concerned with the ease or difficulty Americans have finding jobs in those respective economies?
Certainly Americans should be concerned with income inequality at home, or at least concerned with decreasing poverty among all Americans.
> Why should Americans be concerned about foreign worker's ability to find a job in the American job market
Income taxes from an employee hired at Microsoft U.S. office flow to U.S. federal government. If the employee passed the interview rounds, got the offer, but was unable to procure a proper visa, he'll be hired into Microsoft U.K., Microsoft Switzerland, Microsoft Ireland or any other major office which is successful in obtaining such visas.
As larger amount of such jobs concentrate in foreign offices, they spur more local hiring due to the office's ability to handle larger projects, growing importance within the organization, larger budgets, etc.
There are some ancillary benefits to the local governments such as ability to collect local sales and property taxes on a hire residing in Redmond, WA vs a hire residing in Dublin, Ireland.
That presumes Google, MSFT, etc. cannot or would not be able to find an equivalently talented American.
As far as I know, there are few and far between advanced economies promoting the benefits you speak of in their own counties by favoring American (or other foreigners) workers in their countries. So it seems yours isn't a very well understood proposition by other economies.
> That presumes Google, MSFT, etc. cannot or would not be able to find an equivalently talented American.
Multinational product companies are not really constrained by geographies. Once somebody passes the interview bar and is deemed desirable, a hiring process kicks in to solidify that hire. Sometimes the specific geographic office is critical (small and concentrated team), sometimes they're hiring into generic "software engineer" position, where personal preferences and ease of visa procurement decide the specific office of employment.
International outsourcing companies, however, are very geography-constrained and skills-oriented, as their needs are driven by clients. So if they are looking for someone with 10 years of Oracle RDBMS and specific integration experience with SAP, Siebel and Microsoft Dynamics back-ends in Kansas City, the skills most of the time are very specific and the employment must occur in Kansas City at client headquarters.
> there are few and far between advanced economies promoting the benefits you speak of in their own counties
Ireland and UK have fast-track immigration procedures for technology employees and buy ads in technology magazines claiming they're "open for business". Canada bases their entire immigration system on education, qualifications and employment availability where someone with technology skills and an employment offer is almost guaranteed to gain Canadian residency.
Some other countries do not have revenue dependence on personal income taxes, and thus couldn't care less if employees within their jurisdiction earn large salaries. Others derive majority of the revenues through natural resource exploitation with entire economies based around those industries.
Because that affects willingness for others to come and work in the country. If country relies on foreigners to bring in required skill sets, it better not to allienate the very same people.
Then industry and our academia might put an effort into training our own people --the many women, minorities and rural Americans who are sometimes underrepresented in various sectors of our economy. But, no, they want the easy way out.
We have lots of our own people who could benefit from the US favoring its own workforce to its fullest potential before looking outward.
I'll see things your way when other governments care about American workers.
And if immigration numbers are any indication, the US does not suffer from a lack of interest from foreign skilled workers, students or laborers.
> Then industry and our academia might put an effort into training our own people --the many women, minorities and rural Americans who are sometimes underrepresented in various sectors of our economy. But, no, they want the easy way out.
They certainly do not. There are an incredible no. of programs that encourage American students to take up the sciences and more specifically, computer science/programming. There are an equal no. of other programs that promote women in engineering, minorities in engineering etc. So academia and industry are most certainly trying.
There is already exactly such a tax that needs to be paid with every visa application that had collected 2.3B as of 2011.
>The American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (ACWIA) established what is commonly referred to as the “training fee.” This fee is currently set at a level of $1500 for companies with more than 25 employees; the fee is reduced to $750 for companies with 25 employees or fewer. This payment must accompany most H1B petitions. The amount collected, totaling more than $2.3 billion between fiscal years 2000 and 2011, is used for funding training and scholarships for U.S. workers. The report cites a statistic from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that a portion of these funds has been used for 58,000 college scholarships for U.S. students in the fields of science and math.
This is simply not true. I was there when my entire org got rid of its test team and the people who stayed were not more likely to be H1B holders. If anything, the reverse was true.
More like mis-informed assertion on your part. The filing employer is REQUIRED BY LAW to prove that they couldn't find an equally qualified person in USA.. They are required to post a job listing and vet applicants. The H1B abusers like Microsoft, Infosys skirt around this by putting an ad in an obsure local newspaper that no-one is going to read. And even if someone applies the Hiring Manager finds some grounds to reject the applicant without legally getting into a pickle ("ex: candidate failed verbal tech interview etc).
As someone who doesn't have deep background knowledge of the issue i brought up, i ask you: Please refrain yourself from tone-policing.
If he is correct, then that is a valuable and interesting point to bring, and i would prefer to learn about it regardless of the words it is stated in. If he is incorrect, i would rather learn what the actual facts are. Downvoting him because he did not speak in a way you like is not conducive to learning in either way.
I don't think it's "PC and ridiculous" so much as it's self-serving censorship. Tech employer types who frequent this board are generally pro-visa while the rest of the country is suspicious of it. Some are suspicious for xenophobic reasons, others for economic ones.
And before anyone accuses me of xenophobia, I think if we need their skills we should give them citizenship so they have the same rights, same mobility, and same negotiating power as the rest of us. If they don't have that parity, it lowers the bar for the entire market (citizen and resident alien).
>Down-voters, explain yourself. You are being PC and ridiculous.
The irony of that statement.
I would recommend you read the HN guidelines, the part about trying to keep HN a place for discussion and not flame baiting. Its fine to disagree and carry on an argument, but the regressive mentality you're displaying in this statement is to make you feel good, not to present information.
Why wouldn't they just fire the underperformers and reassign the others? Mass indiscriminate layoffs are bad.