Comments

1
"our" = shareholders value.
2
Cutting jobs at one of the largest employers in Seattle is only "good" when viewed through the myopic, self-serving lens of the investor class.

For everyone else, just imagine how many jobs that each employees salary created based on their purchases in and around Seattle.

Now, eliminate all of those jobs and all of the businesses that will fail and close because of the lost customers and income.

Doesn't feel so good, huh?

That's because most of us aren't really part of the investor class no matter how much you may wish to believe that you are. When your neighbor loses his job it actually does impact you.
4
Well, I suppose a few of them will just cross the lake to Amazon, where they've been on a hiring spree.
5
At least some of the layoffs should be Nokia's Android division.
7
Terribly painful as it is, businesses have to contract at times in order to expand in newer and better ways. I used to be an MSFT FTE and have been a vendor the past few years - so I've been through one of their earlier layoffs.
It is not the responsibility for Microsoft, Boeing, Apple, or a restaurant for that matter to hire people. It is their prerogative to hire and fire people just as it is for us to quit a job whenever we want. Isn't that how capitalism works? So yes @1 - you are quite right: our = shareholders of MSFT stock, that's the way it is and always will be.
I have some friends and colleagues that were axed today. I feel badly for them. But they'll survive. I survived. I'm paid less but far happier and healthier and thinner.
Again, painful, but a wise decision for us shareholders and for a more agile and less bloated company with less duplicated and tangential projects. Nevertheless, laying off talent is a risk, and they laid off a lot of great brains today.
8
Brendan, the article you linked to puts Microsoft employes as 259th most loyal out of 500. They were "among" the "ranked", so you're technically correct (the best kind of correct), but it's misleading.
9
@2: You're more than welcome to participate in the investor class. Do some research, get an account at a brokerage or do eTrade or something like that - buy a few shares and watch what happens. Good luck!
10
What this article and comments totally miss is the fallout that will occur when contract workers' agreements are not renewed. That is not being widely discussed as it is not part of the 18,000 Microsoft corporate jobs being cut. These are workers who do not work under the Microsoft corporate umbrella. This region is likely to be much more impacted once these folks lose there jobs. My guess is that we will have a better idea how onerous this will be on the area economy by around October. I suspect it will be ugly.

11
Productive, lean, efficient, agile = firing employees.
12
While it is fair to criticize the company for massive layoffs during record revenues, I do think it would be responsible to note that of that total number, 12,000 were from recently-acquired Nokia which was hemorrhaging money, and only about 1,400 were laid off in the Puget Sound area. Seems like pertinent context if we're going to discuss the impacts to our local economy.
13
@10 What you are missing is that most vendor and contractor projects were renewed at EOFY which was the end of June and the majority of us most likely won't be affected at all before next June.

Now there is a chance this could affect contractors that fall under an -a umbrella, but very unlikely to affect most -v as we aren't budgeted employees, but employees of someone else that has already been paid by MS.
14
@13
I wish you Good Luck.
15
The company has been adrift for awhile now. Their corporate culture offers no incentive for new ideas or hard work, the middle management chokes both creativity and productivity and the upper management is a classless, clueless and arrogant bunch of dullards lacking both vision and communication skills. Their way of doing business has been to all but ignore developing market trends, and to release broken software and fix it when the complaints roll in, using their customer base as frustrated, fucked-over beta testers. Mix in their practice of moving jobs off shore and screwing their talented spear carriers and you have a dinosaur with a heart murmur and a hacking cough that can only be saved through unnatural and artificial means.

Let's not forget that nothing here has changed at all since this article was first published a couple of years ago:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/…
16
The majority of workers in Redmond are contract workers who don't need to be laid off, their contracts can be canceled without warning.
17
@2: Cutting jobs at one of the largest employers in Seattle is only "good" when viewed through the myopic, self-serving lens of the investor class.

The other argument is that the cuts will release more talent "into the wild" to fuel start ups and early stage companies. I don't buy that, however - the talented engineers and product designers aren't going to be among those laid off.

As for the investor class, this sort of trimming won't make a significant difference in the tech business. MSFT needs ideas and execution if it's going to make any money for its shareholders.

It'll be interesting to see what kind of earnings they report next Tuesday.
18
Fuck, Brendan, do some research of your own. These one-off spur of the moment opinion pieces just don't deliver.
19
@15: Let's not forget that nothing here has changed

Ballmer is finally gone. Having worked at MSFT from 1996 - 2005 (4 years before he took the reins, and 5 years after), I consider Ballmer to have been the biggest obstacle the company faced in keeping up with Apple and Google. He's a foolish businessman, and a clueless product guy.

I have no idea about the new guy, however.
20
@16
I truly hope that this won't be the case, and I am hopeful that @13's experience becomes the norm. It is damn hard to quickly turn a big ship, and the continuous use of contract workers might well be a pathway to Microsoft's ongoing success in the near future.
21
@20 The most important thing about contract workers is they can be denied health and retirement benefits.
22
@21

No, they get health and retirement benefits from their contract employer, so it's priced in. What they don't get is stock, and that makes them cheaper than blue badges. That plus the fact they can be fired at any time (v- and a-) makes them less of a commitment.
23
@21

clueless much?
24
@ 18, keeping up with Apple and a company that didn't exist in 1996? I bet you never thought you'd write those words back when you started.
25
@ 19, not 18.
26
Half the layoffs from Nokia, which was failing on its own.
27
Vaguely related tangential anecdote:
A new computer program was recently introduced at my work. There was the usual brief corporate training, and off we went to use the new system. People quickly became frustrated because they couldn't get the program to perform the actions it was designed for reliably. IT came in to see how we were using the interface. It quickly became apparent that we were all following an intuitive path that skipped some step. Some times it worked, sometimes it didn't. I looked at the IT guy and said, "so what's happening is everyone is trying to "apple" it, but its Microsoft?
He thought for a moment and said, "that's actually a pretty good analogy."
28
@22 - In addition, most agencies for Microsoft vendors do not compensate their workers for holidays and sick leave.
29

Well we're living here in Allentown...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyO…

30
@24: No, neither I nor anyone else at the company would have predicted it. MSFT was invincible my first 4 years there. It wasn't an especially creative company, but once they set their sites on a market, they executed with ruthless efficiency, and woe to anyone else competing in that space (Netscape, Word Perfect, MacIntosh).

The next 5 years were like working for a completely different company.
31
@28 - I don't know about 'most'. Some do, some don't. Some of them also have truly terrible health plan choices. One of the big topics of discussion when contractors get together is "who offers the best pay and benefits". The last vendor company I worked for was headquartered in the City of Seattle so I got the benefit of the sick leave law.

I believe compared to stock benefits these are small change items as far as Microsoft was concerned.
32
I think the Microsoft refugees here in Puget Sound will be OK. But is anybody else as disturbed as I am at the robotic spewing of cliches on the part of the new Microsoft CEO? I can't even remember his name even though I've read several versions of this story that named him. And he looks like some weird composite of a smart geek who went into management and then hit the fast track. Could it be the new Microsoft CEO is a borg?
33
@32
Yes.
But I read it as a special language which would be understood by anyone inside M'sft.

@27
Just out of curiosity, why do you use screen name of "Pol Pot"?
(Or maybe your real name is Pol Pot?)
For Cambodians it might be like Hitler for Germans or Stalin for Russians.
Pol Pot was a stupid wicked vicious despot.
Or is your use of Pol Pot to demonstrate kool hipster irony?

34
What is interesting about this is that the process did NOT start in 2008, it started heavily in 2002 during the "tech bubble burst" aka Bush Disaster Battle of the Employee Layoff for Stock Profitability. This is the new way of doing business, cut those working to increase profitability for those doing the least work.
35
Just a little note here. The idea of saving money by laying off workers started a long time ago. It was a rabid process during the Bush Disaster. Most CEOs that make the decision to axe a large number of employees is merely cutting from expenses so his severance pay will be available from that savings. I worked at Microsoft as a temp and loved working for them. However, a temp employee is counted against the bottom line they are just paperclips.
36
@19 & @30 - thanks for another insider perspective.
37
In Slogland, companies can only ever hire, never lay off, because socialism!
38
"Or is your use of Pol Pot to demonstrate kool hipster irony?"

No, he's a straight up racist.
39
@33- back in the Pleistocene era, when The Stranger first required registration for commenting, I sort of felt it imperative to pick the snarkiest screen name I could think of. It was after all, SLOG, the wild west of the interwebz. Years later I wish I had chosen something else, but too late. I'm Pol Pot now. C'est la vie.
40
@33- also, while I was contemplating my SLOG nom de guerre, the Dead Kennedy's song "holiday in Cambodia" came on.
41
While I, along with a lot of people, am obviously concerned about the effect this is going to have on Seattle's economy, I have to admit that cutting out a lot of middle and upper management has been long-needed and a long time coming. I was at MSFT in 2010-2011 as a vendor working in the financial area, and I found the department, as well as most of our company partners, to be poorly organized, managed and bloated with middle-level management who amassed huge teams of vendors so they could feel powerful and important. Meanwhile, most of us sat in our cubes shooting emails back and forth, or in meetings where much was discussed and little done. No sort of efficiency review ever happened. Huge waste of people's time and the company's money.

And @22, a great number of the vendors I worked with had no insurance, retirement benefits, sick time, vacation time, etc from their consultancy. Lucky for them, most of them were paid enough that they could afford private insurance, etc but I know I spent 18 months without insurance or any other benefits (aside from sick leave/vacation time, which I had to negotiate for with my company).
42
@ Pol Pot

OK. You were young.
Why not change it to something like
"Pol Pot was an asshole"
or
"Pol Pot was a vicious psycho"
so we'll know who you are and yet you won't look so...out-of-date? Praising vicious psychopaths is not very kool, not even ironic.
43
@39-40 - Thank you for the background on your name. I've also wondered how you chose that. Unlike the trolls, I like your name and can't think of you as anyone else. You completely succeeded in your goal.

What's amazing though is somehow I can manage to read it without once forgetting that pol pot was an asshole but also while recognizing you are not that person! Shocking, I know.

Kinda sad that caution&daring(butnotreally) for some reason can't also understand that and/or that they think so crap of the rest of us sloggers that nobody else can either.
44
Just don't get on Pol Pot's bad side.

(I guess that was also said years ago in Cambodia too.)
45
Are they ever going to change the Xbox pad so the buttons correctly match up with the Windows icon colors, or what?
46
Like Pridge, I had always assumed "our" Pol Pot chose his name ironically {shrug}, and not to praise the despot.

Sort of like Undead Ayn Rand is nothing like Ayn Rand and SRoTU, is well, lol... you know.

Anyway, it's not really my business why someone chooses their screename, but if I were to ask I would not insult/criticize in the guise of "asking."
47
@46
I was asking and hoping maybe there was some good reason such as "My name is, in fact, Pol Pot."

So I was definitely asking but also by way of heaping scorn in case I received the answer I did receive -- "I chose 'Pol Pot' because I thought it was cute to praise the name of a monster."

Ayn Rand may have been a fool but she didn't kill millions.
48
@47 - I bet you're super fun at parties.

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