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Comment by utopianmonk | Hacker News Reader

Can someone with experience in hiring and firing help me understand something? Microsoft has many open positions listed on their website[1]. Why would they lay off people they've already invested time and money into hiring and developing, instead of offering these employees the open positions within the company? Doesn't this seem counterproductive? Why are big tech companies so quick to fire employees?

[1] https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/search?rt=profe...

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> Why are big tech companies so quick to fire employees?

Because the co believes they can be replaced tomorrow, with adequate help, costing the same, or less.

Because they're "too old", or have a chance at retirement benefits.

Because they're politically active.

Because they've been around for 14 months and they seem complacent, compared to the new hires killing themselves for the role.

It's the law regarding redundancies where I live (currently going through one now) that everyone should be evaluated against all open positions. Not just open, all remaining ones as well. So you can't just axe a specific team, those people could lay claim on the same role in different positions, and be evaluated against objective criteria (like experience, tenure etc).

So it's a huge thing we're going through in my company now. Last week lay offs were announced, and by end of this week everyone will have been evaluated against the remaining positions.

Because they are afraid to do performance reviews and fire people.

So they layoff and try again, sometimes hiring the same people back.

Funny, probably have no communication between these departments either, the people hiring them think they are excellent and then the ones firing them don't.

But the problem never gets solved because the hiring people just go "I don't know at all why this person got laid off, looks great on paper! Let's re-hire them."

They're not real positions

This, too, is often a component of the grey-area, (bordering or rhyming strongly with fraud,) that a lot of these firms are finding themselves in.

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