Microsoft Lays Off Employees After Slowdown in Earnings Growth

next time negotiate for a sign up bonus.

Imagine a country where they cannot lay you off without a good severance package.

Sounds like they should have planned for the obvious

It’s all about growth against expectations: how much they expected to grow, and where they expected to grow.

The best companies try to offer people shots to apply internally. If they behave too boorishly they will struggle to recruit on the other side.

> most middle “managers” are what Steve Jobs referred to as “bozos”.

I'll humbly submit that we should offer more grace to middle managers: these typically end up as the first few steps into management for ICs. The role is new, and they face difficulties managing up to upper management and clients, and down to their subordinates. In some orgs, I suspect they are not set up to succeed, but more to diffuse responsibility and hopefully compartmentalize some of the chaos.

That said, I've had a handful of [middle] managers who weren't fun to work under, and it was their personalities/vices combining with various organizational pathologies.

> We went out and hired a bunch of professional management; it didn’t work at all...they knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to DO anything.

Leadership is instantiated within a business/cultural context. Without knowledge of that context, leaders will not be as effective as they could be. This makes the concept of a professional managerial class that purports to be able to swoop into any industry and "manage" rather ridiculous.

>If you are a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you cannot learn anything from?

What's the alternative? The truly great contributors don't want to be managers; they want to do real work. You can't be a manager and also do real work; there's not enough time. I've seen good managers actively quit their role because they wanted to do interesting work, not manage.

>And you know what’s interesting - you know what the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never ever wanted to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is able to do as good job as them.”

And then they can't do any interesting work, because their days are full of meetings. They eventually get tired of this and switch roles (or companies if they have to) and return to IC roles.

Someone has to be the manager; you can't have a company with thousands of engineers and a handful of executives managing them. Asking great ICs to do as you suggest isn't scalable or sustainable.

> you know what the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never ever wanted to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is able to do as good job as them

That's mostly not true, with occasional exceptions. The skillset to be a great manager is completely different from a great engineer, so having someone excel at both is very rare.

A great manager needs (1) very good people skills to truly understand what makes each individual optimally happy and productive, and (2) the political skills to manouver within the organization in ways that allows them to make (1) happen.

This is almost a certainty in large organizations, because these people spend their time on advancing their career, office politics and place in the organization as opposed to producing things / "doing their job". And unfortunately but unsurprisingly in most organizations it's a much more successful strategy when measured in power and compensation.

Snapchat has nothing to do with a general 'growth slowdown'. People have left Snapchat for TikTok[1]. Social media users, especially youth, are fickle and the industry relies heavily on network effects. Once you're no longer perceived as cool and/or lose enough users that the network effect isn't as powerful, it tends to snowball, and is hard to get that back.

"But there could be a bigger reason the company[Snapchat] has seen revenue deflate. Its reputation as the social media platform for young people has faded—particularly in the eyes of advertisers."

Not denying that growth slowdown is happening to some extent. But Snapchat has problems beyond that, and isn't a great example for it.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-01/snap-i...

As for Roku, I'm not as well-versed there, but I do see that in October 2021 they announced that they're losing 85 channels, including the behemoth YouTube, so that may have contributed significantly to its decline this past year.

Not to mention lots of TVs now tend to have the same type of channels as Roku built-in, rendering it a bit unnecessary. Mine has everything I care about for streaming, for example. Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+, etc.

[2] https://bestlifeonline.com/news-roku-losing-channels-youtube...

The elite is lying to you and always have been. I know this first hand as my company is heavily invested in the travel industry and we have been bleeding money during the pandemic like crazy AND YET we have also been hiring like crazy.

All of this is just to tell the pesky employees to know their place.

The narrative was that Snapchat and Roku were worth those previous validations, this is just back to reality.

To play Devil’s advocate, perhaps that team never delivered anything, despite consisting of (presumably) talented engineers. I’ve seen several “brilliant but unaccomplished” teams that never actually ship anything but nonetheless manage to hang around due to the raw intelligence of their team members. It can be hard to let someone go who talks like an accomplished CS professor at every meeting, but does little besides that.

>It looks more like a spreadsheet driven culling of the product lines.

You’d think a company as successful as Microsoft would be above such ineffective, morale-crushing moves (also profit-crushing, assuming the people being fired were actually productive), but then again, if this article [0] (and associated HN comments) are to be believed, Microsoft isn’t exactly optimizing [fh]iring decisions based on performance.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33165844

Whats the rationale of cutting a guy like that? He was probably on the phone with Sony or Nintendo before his desk was cleaned out. He's probably value to Sony (maybe not so much Nintendo) just for the intel alone.

> very public PIP ejection

A layoff and PIP (performance improvement plan) are very different things. Nobody thinks that lots of people were being PIPped and suddenly MSFT decided to cut and run.

https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/pip-meaning

The Xbox 720? I haven't heard that name in something like a decade. Are you referring to the console that eventually became the Xbox One?

Xbox One was a fiasco. I wonder if it is a good characteristic for a person.

Oops, edited my post to remove that extra zero that snuck in.

I don't get it, are you trying to imply that's not the case? Tacking inflation involves raising interest rates, which causes a pullback on the economy.

Compared to pretty much every other country it is.