I’m an long time Microsoftie advocate and was an FTE for over 10 years before I left MS long ago.
During that time, when I was first hired on in 2000, there was a feeling of pride, a safety net, a bragging right of being a MS employee of “Microsoft has never had a layoff and never will”. This in itself was a major drawing card for employment and of course all the benefits therein.
Fast forward a handful of years, enter stage left Steve Ballmer. Everything he laughed at, turned out to be a huge success. Let’s go through them all.
- ) He laughed at google for investing in a search engine, until google stock went through the roof. Immediately there was a huge push to develop Bing.
- ) He laughed at the Ipod. His words (paraphrasing) were “I thought Apple was going to be a serious competitor and here they are putting their money into music. We already have portal music.” Boy was he wrong. Ipod sales went through the roof. Balmer pushed to throw out Zune to the masses to play catch up.
- ) He laughed at the Ipad. “We were the first ones to come up with the tablet. There’s no money in it”. Ipad sales went through the roof. He then pushed for Surface to counter that.
- ) He laughed at the Iphone but after a healthy track record of having no vision, clearly, his laughter was not so robust anymore. It was more of a nervous laughter of concern.
Stock became flat for a long time. Then one day, Balmer had the great idea to lay some employees go. It wasn’t that MS needed to but it was what some investors thought should be done to prove that MS was serious about change. So they let some folks go and thus the trend began. Thank you Steve for all that you’ve done.
It was at this time, I decided to leave as they also started trimming down benefits. Insurance was no longer 100% coverage but instead dropped down to 80%. Ok, now, the pay and benefits are no longer competitive with other companies. So, I started looking elsewhere. I found a job making more money but only required a 40 hour per week instead of the average 60-80 per week as MS did. I left on good terms and the year I left, was ranked a “1” but even still the hours put in to get that “1” ranking vs the dwindling benefits was not worth it.
Now it saddens me to read that MS is letting people go like they have in such a fashion. I hope the part about no severance for those let go is NOT true and\or a media misprint.
I know that the AI race has everyone on edge and that the stakes are high and its crunch time to throw some serious capital at AI and I hope that THIS is what is NOT driving the layoffs.
The performance rankings vs layoffs, as I remember, was the bottom 10% has to be put on a performance plan. Ok, so if you are on a team of 10, no matter how stellar everyone is doing compared to the rest of the world in the tech, still there has to be 1 person who is chosen as the bottom. So a low performer at MS is still better than most people in that same tech outside of MS but still has to be looked down upon by the MS gods. Makes a lot of sense…again sarcasm.
I miss the old Microsoft where it was fun, and you learned, and couldn’t wait to go into work. It’s sad to me what the work environment has turned into from what I’ve both read and am told by others still there that I’ve kept up with. I long for the days of yore but alas, I fear they are gone never to return.