>

Good for their bottom line, good for the stock price, bad for the people.
Another example why the stock market is not the economy.
Per TeamBlind they're doing so over 3 months.
Instead of a 5% staff reduction they get 100% of their staff panicking and interviewing elsewhere. Great thinking! >

If they quit and find a new job no severance! >

But then you get good workers, who weren’t going to get cut, leaving for elsewhere. >

But now they can hire cheaper less experienced people to do the same but lower quality work while making more profit! This is how large companies decline in quality. >

I wish we would hire some young developers, we have entire teams where everyone is over 40 because they don't want to spend time training anyone. >

I'm over 40.  Where I work, management tries to accomplish "training" by throwing the younger workers right into a complex task, and telling the more senior people to be on-call for questions and support.  Inevitably what happens is that the younger folks never ask questions, then when the SHTF, the senior folks have to scramble to figure stuff out in the remaining schedule.  It's pretty stressful. >

Do the older staff take questions well? I guess I'm getting closer to the old crowd now, but as a youngster coming into a job, I ALWAYS asked a LOT of questions because I'd rather learn to do it right the first time than do it wrong for months and get in trouble and have to correct now ingrained habits. Some people were very helpful, others were complete ass holes about it. I kept asking questions either way, but the environment where questions were discouraged, I got a reputation for being inept rather than curious and diligent... Jobs that answered my questions got a hell of a lot less questions pretty quickly along with good work product from me. When a team is constantly putting newbies down for asking questions, you get shitty work product from probably well meaning but poorly trained people. >

I get your point, the way I view it is this:  My employer expects me to answer questions and help colleagues.  My employer expects me to ask questions and seek answers when I'm lost/stuck.  If anyone has a problem with either of those things, then they are not doing their job. >

This is the way. >

Lol so Microsoft CEO got a 10% raise in 2022 making $55 million. When will these bum executives ever take a pay cut?
Their lowest paid executive made $12 million last year >

They won't even adjust the regular worker's salary for inflation. >


Meanwhile, the total compensation of the median Microsoft employee rose 7.6% to $190,302

From here >

But from your own link:
“Meanwhile, the total compensation of the median Microsoft employee rose 7.6% to $190,302, to push the CEO pay ratio up to 289-to-1 from 282-to-1 in 2021. The CEO pay ratio has now increased for five-straight years, including 257-to-1 in 2020, 249-to-1 in 2019 and 154-to-1 in 2018.” 
Satya also started in 2014, who knows what the ratio was back then? 100-to-1? Maybe even lower?
Edit: full quote plus formatting >

That's fair, but the point I was responding to was

They won't even adjust the regular worker's salary for inflation.

Which is just... false >

7.6% doesn't account for promotions or new hires that were typically hired at higher compensation. >

downvote away but that sounds like the job market doing its job at being a market. >

Job market doing its job has nothing to do with irrelevant figure you used to support your argument. >

I don't really get your point. Median wages at the company are up 7.6%. >

You can easily increase the median with the new employees.
That doesn't mean you're increasing the average wage by that much.
You don't have to increase existing employees at all if you hired over 15% of the employees in 2022. >

They were also hiring like crazy for no apparent reason last year. Headcount went up 40,000 from 2021 to 2022.
Cutting 10k and the other minor previous cuts still adds up to significantly more employees remaining than they had in 2021 AFAIK. >


“No one can defy gravity and gravity here is inflation-adjusted economic growth,” he told WEF founder Klaus Schwab in a livestreamed discussion.

Interesting, since A Kansas City Fed report found that corporate price markups were 58% of 2021's inflation. The same year, U.S. corporate profits surged to their highest level since 1950 >

Yeah isn’t it funny how inflation is usually 7% (and is more this year) but everything has gone up at least 30%? These poor companies are making record profits since Covid hit! What a world!
Edit: My wife paid $5 for a dozen eggs (not even free range, no anti biotic, blah, blah, blah). They used to be the cheap option for protein and fats, may as well eat beef for every meal now. I guess I should add that I live in central NY
Edit 2: inflation is not normally 7% and eggs have gone up due to avian flu >

Though with eggs there's an entirely different problem, where they're mass killing chickens off due to a bad year for bird flu, so the supply itself is way down. >

Yeah, but that's not the entire truth of the situation.
There is Avian Flu, but one of the largest producers of eggs (Cal-Maine Food) has had an increase of 68% in PROFIT in final quarter of 2022 compared 2021 because they have had 0 cases of avian flu and have decided to raise their prices on their eggs as well.
They are taking advantage of a tragedy and the spread of a disease to create even more corporate profits for themselves when they could easily just continue selling eggs as they were. >


They are taking advantage

No, commercial farmers don't even set the price they sell at. It's a commodity market, the price is set by the market down to a regional level. The distributor that the farmer sells their eggs to determines the price the farmer gets paid based on whatever the market price is. >

A previous co-worker just got shit canned from MS. He was on the "neuro-diversity committee" and claimed to be autistic (he wasn't), and was doing everything to play the system. He's been bragging the last 18 months how he doesn't really do shit there but was making 240k a year. >

Good. Fuck that guy. >

Yes, fuck that guy.
Also, asking for a friend—
How exactly might one go about getting such a $240K do-nothing job? >

Well, first you have to pretend to be autistic... >

who said anything about pretending? >

Right? Everyone's on the spectrum after all... >

Not everyone, but won't deny that several people born pre 2000 are probably not diagnosed.
I don't have proof available, but I've seen within my circle adults that after fighting for months, finally got a certificate that says they are in the spectrum. And several others than so show signs of ADHD that are also not diagnosed. >

That's not what I mean. I always understood spectrum when used to describe autism to mean something like a graph of the hight of a population or grades of the class of student. People who have autism are outside the standard deviation. >

For reference, this is about a 5% staff reduction. Old M$ under previous leadership used to do yearly 10% layoffs to "get rid of the chaff". I feel for anybody that loses their job, but this isn't exactly a bad signal. Especially since they are doing it over a period of time instead of slashing them all at once.
EDIT: Fixed saying. Thanks u/Eknoom >


Old M$ under previous leadership used to do yearly 10% layoffs to "get rid of the chaff".

Citation needed, as I believe you are incorrect.  The stack ranking system was indeed a horrible system, but there were no regular 10% layoffs.  Consistently poor performers would be put on a PIP and pushed out, but that was it.  Manage up or manage out is a strategy, but that doesn't sound like the seemingly fictional accounting you're giving. >

He's right in a very broad sense; they identified the bottom 10% for removal in one way or another. It didn't always play out this way practically, but that was the general idea. >

Yeah, I read it as an urban legend-ish interpretation of how the Jack Welch stack ranking bullshit worked.  As stated, it reads as inaccurate: people on PIP were managed out or fired.  Those weren't layoffs, and it wasn't 10%.  Stack ranking was bad, if that's what they were referring to, but it was nothing like what they're describing. >

Yesterday MSFT:  We don't respond to rumors of this layoff
Today MSFT: Surprise, we're having layoffs
My company did the exact same thing recently.  Deny Deny Deny, then "oh yeah, it's true".  It bugs me that companies do this.  Just confirm and move on. >


It bugs me that companies do this. Just confirm and move on.

Isn't that because they are a publicly traded company, though?  I believe the SEC forbids the type of off-the-cuff communication you're referring to. >

They do, but these executives are getting paid bank. Why can't they take months of inflation and recession predictions and prepare a statement, like, what exactly are they being paid for?
The answer is less to do with the SEC and more to do with corporate control. They only ever want things to happen on the timeline they want that is best for them and the company. Screw everyone else downstream. >

Let's see here, we've got record corporate profits (the primary driver of that inflation), historically low unemployment, and steady GDP growth, but "economic uncertainty" is the stated reason for mass layoffs all over the place. It's almost like the CEOs and bankers WANT the recession that doesn't exist despite the best efforts of the Fed and media to create one. "Hey, I know what might slow down the labor market and wage growth! Let's fucking fire everybody!" >

Seems like a lot of the layoffs during this impending recession are all from tech companies 🤔 >

SAAS companies specifically. 
When you run a high retention business like most successful SAAS products, when the economy goes down you can get rid of a lot of people in the sales org and not reduce current revenue by THAT MUCH. You just lose growth. >

There are still tons of SaaS companies hiring though. 
​
Honestly, a lot of it is leadership that hired a ton during COVID so they could have tax write-offs.   
It's all bullshit, I work in the sector. >

how do those tax benefits work?  curious if they are a short-term benefit or if they can be stretched out over several years. >

That's not remotely how it works.
I'm going to over simplify here, but if you hire some guy at 100k but get a 30% "write off" you're spending 100k to save 30. It is absolutely a benefit, but unless you're getting 70k of value, you're not keeping that person. >

Unless you're the government and you start printing money and decide to hand it directly to corporations.   
There was a huge uptick in hiring during COVID. It's not like the economy started booming. Certainly, companies like Shopify benefited from people staying home, but the majority of these larger tech companies had more money to burn. They either do that by hiring or investing in smaller companies, which end up hiring more people.   
You can't sit on cash with low-interest rates.  Doesn't matter how much revenue you're taking in. >

The SaaS space actually grew significantly during COVID because of lockdowns. A shockingly high amount of American (and likely global but I won't assume things I don't know) businesses were not remotely ready for work from home and had to quickly increase tech spend to make up for it. >

maybe SFC /scannow would help >

If that doesn't work, try a dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth >

All of these Tech & Financial companies laying off people "in preparation of a recession", are gonna cause a fucking recession
Everybody remember... when they seek bailouts after years of record, predatory profits..  tell your elected leaders NO