Microsoft Lays Off TypeScript Compiler Veteran Ron Buckton | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Lays Off TypeScript Compiler Veteran Ron Buckton

outlookbusiness.com

33 pointsdenysonique8 comments

How to even process this? Like you're not an under performer and not a new joiner either.

Maybe a combination of being expensive and knowledge/skills can be replaced with LLMs?

I think fundamentally the problem is how many languages and developer-niceties are LLMs going to need? Over the last two decades there's been an absolute explosion in tooling to make development better but an LLM is just as happy to vomit out Perl or PHP. Once the code generation tools reach a good-enough state who's even going to check how the sausage was made.

The link (https://www.outlookbusiness.com/corporate/good-attrition-mic...) in the passage...

> Microsoft recently announced the layoff of approximately 6,000 employees from its global workforce, describing it as an organisational change to better position the company in a dynamic marketplace.

...was all about firing "underperforming" employees. So maybe his boss thought he was "underperforming"?

I'm reminded something TSMC Founder Morris Chang said in this podcast (https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc-founder-morris-chang):

> Morris: All right, so that was one problem. Another problem was the immediate one that trigger me to retake the CEO-ship, because the previous CEO had laid off, except he didn’t use the term layoff. He used bad performance review, the worst performance review, and there were about 600 or 700 of them, and he laid them off on the basis of their poor performance review.

> Well, we never did that. The worst we would do was to put them on probation for six months. Quite often at the end of the six months, everybody would go back to his or her old job. Some of them would get transferred because they were in the wrong jobs. So some of them would get transferred, but we almost never really fired people, even after the probation period.

> ...

> I was not a CEO. I was the chairman, but I just knew that anyone, any general manager, any CEO general manager without very much experience, what he or she would do in a situation like that is a knee-jerk reaction. Oh, he says, this is my test. I got to save all the money possible, and I got to lay off people.

> ...

> Now, I was the only one at Texas Instruments in the early 70s that said, no [to a performance-based layoff plan], that would not be a credible way of doing it. People would not respect us if we lay off by performance ratings.

> David: And why is that?

> Morris: Because it’s very subjective. The performance ratings are done by everyone’s own supervisor. Seven hundred worst-performing people in the company. Who gave the 700 people the bad ratings? Seven hundred supervisors. Very subjective.

Perhaps Satya Nadella is a "CEO general manager without very much experience" or wisdom. Which is kinda borne out by how their Microsoft's layoff policy is aping their competitors, embracing layoffs, and treating performance reviews as objective.

What if the 700 bad ratings were generated by one AI instead? Wouldn't it be objective then? /s

Objectively bad, sure

They're not still Stack Ranking, are they? Crazy.

This is scary. Sad that Microsoft has to resort to this.

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