https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-cut-thousands-jobs-sky-news-2023-01-17/
9 replies (most recent on top)
All companies are firing but nobody wants to be the first to pull the trigger, Elon eventually did and caused all this. Before that nobody wanted to be the bad guy that laid off first.
All the pandemic hiring was stupid. Complete bubble.
3B a year in salaries?
Ms probably spends more than that on diversity training and ESG projects
Egad, MSFT has 221,000 employees!
Satya is a good looking dude and is doing a good job with Azure and Dynamics. Best MSFT CEO.
Satyas microsoft is ruthless. Dude keeps riffing people left and right. My senior/principal level colleagues tell me of how many people him+amy has laid off together.
Buckle up!
Look, the stock is going to go up with this move. MSFT is already up a buck plus change today. This is good news. The bottom line will go up, stock options will be worth more, restricted stock unit awards will be worth more, provided that you are not layed off. For those that stay, this is a good thing.
It's hard not to read some of these stories and not think that somehow some of these companies are free-riding on the ability to do some firings with minimal pushback because of the "well, look at what everyone else is doing!" climate that exists now.
I'm having a hard time teasing out how much of this is driven by some sort of fundamental analysis of the economy, some collective BigCo CEO shared thinking, or, at my most cynical, an Overton window that's been pushed outwards by Elon firing an extremely significant quantity of the (comparably tiny) workforce of Twitter with seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product.
11,000 people - let's say an average loaded cost of $250k/yr. That's... ~$3b/yr these folks cost MSFT. Granted, it's per year, but ... keeping these people on for another 3 years would cost ~$10b.
MSFT currently have $100b cash on hand. It's gotta be a little... frustrating to get be part of a 5% cut when there's so much free cash sitting around. I know, it's a narrow view of corporate finance, and I don't have the 'big picture', but... still doesn't sit right with me.
That said, I don't know what severance packages people are being offered. That might help soften the blow for some folks.