Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to a quarter of its workforce

mlinhares

The market is depressing.

ipsum2

60,000 employees. That's crazy.

sleepybrett

buyouts also went out for skydance today.

MiroslavPokorny

I always thought leadership was about undersstanding consequences and having a backup plan. It seems these one sided thoughts have no backup, they are the greatest poker bet in history, especially without first proving the tech first.

Aeolun

> A Microsoft spokesperson said the offer will be comparable to the company’s standard severance package Very enticing Microsoft.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245524

650

my thoughts: - bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways - yes philosophically and economically, who will buy X product if all employees are laid off is a thing - some of these will be rehired, some will be layed off if the voluntary buyout percentage is not large enough - opinion: Microsoft as a company is a has been dinosaur, soon to be IBM, its (engineer) salaries were on the lower end and were very PM (Program Manager) heavy - there is a lot of entrenched bureaucracy and top down mandates at this company. - i personally use Macbooks/MacOS over Surface/XP, Google Docs over Word, GMail over Outlook, Slack over Teams, Firefox over Edge, etc. their user facing products are severely lacking in user experience. - from my time in the tech industry/friends I understand their bureaucracy existing for the needs of the bureaucracy. their c-suite/leadership is a bunch of world salad morons

anuptalwalkar

You should be more concerned about what comes next. Either senior talent leaves, people who are close to retiring, or just can find a job easily outside. Low hanging fruits take the bait and head out. Mid level people live in fear of either scared to find another job, or worried about layoffs. Either way the company morale is down the drain for a long time, and a culture is lost.

beloch

Is this because: 1. MS over-hired, has too many employees, and not enough work? 2. MS is reaping the benefits of AI and can do the same work with fewer employees? 3. MS has over-invested in data-centres and needs to conserve cash to stay in the game during it's unprofitable phase (assuming it's not a bubble)?

hdgvhicv

What does such a package look like for a typical long term employee?

gigatexal

what're these buyouts like? what does it entail? What kind of package are they getting?

s1mon

At a former employer, a voluntary buyout resulted in many of the best people leaving. Better people are more likely to find new work elsewhere and also they are better at recognizing the disfunction which produced the situation in the first place. In this case it sounds like they are offering it to lower ranked employees (its own dystopian situation), but within that range of people, I still expect that Microsoft will lose more of the better ones.

antics

Tech corporations have always been enormous stores of (1) capital and (2) people. MSFT's flavor of this has always been "tech Berkshire Hathaway": a holding company for a diversified portfolio of a couple-dozen billion-dollar businesses. MSFT in particular is willing to park ~300 people on a seemingly-dead-end product, just waiting for the incumbent to mess up. Sometimes it eventually succeeds commercially (Teams, PowerBI) and sometimes it doesn't (or hasn't, yet, see Bing). What is happening here is a sign they are changing their view on how this capital allocation works. To what? We don't know, and I think they might not know yet, either. If you are spending > $4M for a top-end engineer and $8M on their tokens (this refers to a person know personally, it is not hearsay), this will necessarily change the how this allocation works. Maybe it doesn't make sense to park 300 people on tomorrow's PowerBI any more. What is clear is that we are not in anything approaching an equilibrium state. MSFT (and others like them) clearly do not have enough conviction to fire all the line engineers and only keep the so-called "elite" ones. It's not even clear that they think we're on that trajectory. I think what we are seeing, though, is that they have enough conviction to try to clear the way for more of this kind of spending on these so-called "elite" developers.