For the most part, I'm indifferent to layoffs. Companies over hire and then course correct. It's part of the game. But for MSFT, it rubs me the wrong way. In the past 5 years, their stock has soared (150% on stock and doubled in valuation). They are insanely profitable ($82B profit). They are diverse (no existential business risk). The fact that they are unceremoniously laying off 30K of the people that helped them get there drives home it's just a paycheck, do your job, but know it can and will end when convenient for the company. I know folks will argue, low performers, but really. This "productivity apps" company hired them, onboarded them, made $82B in profit, surely they can figure out how to uplevel folks. Also how do you have a layoff every couple of months for 3 years. Thinking about the middle class in the previous generation, it was unions that effectively ensured a labor job meant a secure future. I wonder if that's the solution (again).
stego-tech · 12h ago
> Thinking about the middle class in the previous generation, it was unions that effectively ensured a labor job meant a secure future. I wonder if that's the solution (again).
It is, and they are. It’s why Reagan fired ATC strikers and blackballed them. It’s why private enterprise stockpiled machine guns and chemical weapons against strikers back in the Gilded Age. It’s why companies will spend billions to block Unions rather than just give workers the few million or so more they need over a decade to just maintain a standard of living. It’s why they’ll close down stores, warehouses, offshore jobs and outsource to contractors to penalize Unions.
Unions are a direct response to the inequality of Capital allocation and distribution.
aydyn · 11h ago
Unions are not effective when there's such a surplus of labor and people willing to break lines. It wont work in today's tech labor market.
silisili · 9h ago
Sure it would. There are way more employed tech people than unemployed. Imagine if every single person at a company like MS up and went on strike tomorrow.
Could MS replace them all with scabs? Sure, with enough time and money. But it wouldn't happen overnight, and things would get very dire if not company ruining in the meantime.
idkwhattocallme · 6h ago
A digital strike by all employees for a week to get a collective bargaining agreement in place to show companies just how far AI has to go as a replacement would be powerful.
ponector · 5h ago
I'd argue nothing happens if everyone go on strike. It's not an assembly line. No release? Great. Noone to attend meetings? Not a big deal! Cannot get a real person for support? Same as without strike!
ethbr1 · 1h ago
I think you underappreciate what SRE does on a daily basis.
eviks · 3h ago
> No release? Great.
What is great about your mission critical bug not getting fixed for a few more weeks?
WhyIsItAlwaysHN · 5h ago
Outages would not be picked up
billy99k · 3h ago
With remote work? good luck. Unions only work where all the work is localized.
I'm in tech and I would never join a union. Why do I need collective bargaining to set my salary (and not give me raise until it's collectively raised) when I can bargain for my own raises?
In addition to this, unions don't bode well for innovation and technology. Look at the Taxicab unions. We could only get a cab in person or through the phone, because the unions had no incentive to innovate. It look a non-union startup to push them to actually make it convenient and better for the customer.
ethbr1 · 1h ago
> Look at the Taxicab unions. We could only get a cab in person or through the phone, because the unions had no incentive to innovate. It look a non-union startup to push them to actually make it convenient and better for the customer.
OTOH, gig drivers are being paid below minimum wage, with no benefits, no retirement plan, and no stability of work.
As a customer, yay technology and UX! But as a human, it's objectively worse for society.
pmyteh · 10h ago
The traditional response to that was violence against scabs, for better or for worse: it keeps people from breaking picket lines even when otherwise willing.
> The traditional response to that was violence against scabs
And how are you going to do that when the scabs are in India? Unions work in “physical” domains (like plumbing, factory work, etc.), not so much in “virtual” domains where all you need is a computer to do your work and there’s an entire world full of workers who would think they’ve died and gone to heaven if they could make half your salary.
franktankbank · 3h ago
> when the scabs are in India
Lol good luck with that.
mancerayder · 6h ago
Exactly. What are unions going to do, prevent H1B workers from replacing them?
ponector · 5h ago
Why to bother with H1B workers if they are hiring directly in India?
wingspar · 12h ago
Wasn’t the PATCO ATC strike illegal?
stego-tech · 11h ago
That didn’t make the strike or its messaging any less valid. Employers frequently strongarm politicians to make strikes and organized action illegal, at which point a dangerous precedence is set and violence is often the ultimate outcome.
If your job is so important that a strike should be illegal, then that job should also compensate you and your colleagues so well that a strike isn’t even a remote consideration. ATC was being treated like shit, weighed the pros and cons, and decided to strike.
And now in 2025, literally everything they struck against (outdated tech, short staffing, high burnout, low wages) is still here, and still causing harm.
I know, I know, "union bad." I guess people will say that until all that is left is a person to watch the Machine, and a dog to bite the person if they touch the Machine. Or all the jobs are offshored to the cheapest labor on the globe.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 13h ago
> until all that is left is a person to watch the Machine, and a dog to bite the person if they touch the Machine
Hey that's actually a great line. It might be even better than the original, where the person is there to feed the dog.
10 unions was evidently not enough to avoid this outcome. Perhaps if it went to 11, it would be “unions good”?
toomuchtodo · 13h ago
It took us decades to get to this outcome (since the Reagan era), I assume it'll take decades to get out of it. Mental models are rigid, progress occurs one funeral time (Max Planck), ~2M people 55+ in the US age out every year (~5k per day), so the opportunity is with young folks who will or already are in the workforce, etc. It ain't happening overnight.
Solutions such as "try harder," "be more lucky," or "just find another job" are...not very actionable when you consider that ~60% of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life and the current labor macro.
If someone wants to work in a union shop, they can choose a job that is unionized or try to unionize their current/next workplace.
People who don’t want to work for a union shop should have the same amount of voice as people who do (1 vote per employee). I think unions have struggled to gain traction because it’s obvious that they cost money to run (which is fine and proper) but it’s not obvious that that expense pays off for the typical member. If a median tech worker pays $1300-2600/yr in dues (1-2% of median salary), I think it’s reasonable for them to expect more than that on a net-present-value basis.
Plenty of people are strong advocates; plenty are strong detractors; I suspect that a well-run union (efficient in its own ops and partnering effectively for the long-term health of the company and its union members) would be good on balance and also fairly “under the radar” making it hard to know how good it actually was.
Konnstann · 12h ago
When I first started my current job I was upset that I'd have to pay $20/paycheck to get some unknown level of benefits, which comes out to around $500/year but all I had to do to understand the benefit was compare my health insurance premium to someone working a non-union gig for the same employer and realize that they're paying a way higher percentage of the monthly premium than I was. Not to mention that the union provides guaranteed unemployment benefits if you get laid off and help finding jobs, transportation funds, childcare funds, and guaranteed me a salary increase this year when the employer has declared a freeze on raises for non-union positions. I agree there should be more advertising on the part of the union with regards to benefits but they are pretty obvious if you do any reading.
A lot of the benefits my union provides might not matter to the average HN user making $X00,000/yr though so who knows?
toomuchtodo · 12h ago
I agree on all of your points. If the majority supports unions (citations in my above comment), and everyone has the same vote (as you mention), it's just a matter of time of continuing organizing efforts while the folks who don't support it either exit the labor force [1] [2] or filter out of orgs attempting to organize who don't believe in it (younger workers with a longer labor participation time horizon). I fully admit there are lots of people who believe they're special, who have been or believe they will be lucky, ignore the data on the benefits of organizing, etc; you might never win them over. It's going to be a long slog, but wages and job security for the broad majority of people will not go up without it. Startup founders grind for delusions far more grandiose than this imho, so while I recognize being at the foot of a mountain on this topic in this specific socioeconomic system and point in time, I also don't think it's impossible.
And I really want to touch on your point about dues and unions. Workers should absolutely have high expectations for what their unions deliver, and should not tolerate any sort of drag, apathy, or lack of effort. With that said, it is another political process one must participate in, it isn't ordering an Uber. I have zero tolerance for union grift. Perhaps this calls for something like a non profit ratings agency, but for unions.
[1] https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/08/are-older-work... ("In 2000, only 17.6% of the 55 and older populace had a job. Now the percentage is 37.5%. A 20% increase in the percentage of 55+ who are employed in a 20-year span is unprecedented. If the percentage of employed 55+ had stayed the same, there would only be 17 million 55+ workers today. Instead, there are over 37 million.") [2022]
[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-closing-gender-... ("Gen Zers are the most supportive of unions, with a mean approval rating of 64.3 compared with 60.5 for Millennials, 57.8 for Gen Xers, and 57.2 for Baby Boomers." [death and retirement rate is progress rate in this regard by age cohort; the faster the older cohort(s) who don't support organizing exit the workforce, this should potentially reduced the lift required to organize forward looking])
(demographics + culture + advocacy + time is my mental model on this, and I have arrived at this model from first principles, as a macro and demographics scholar)
sokoloff · 10h ago
It’ll interesting to see if GenZ support changes as they become GenX’s age.
aksss · 10h ago
Liking unions in the abstract is very different than wanting to be part of one.
Opinions about unions tend to “mature” and become more nuanced with age (after exposure to both as a member and as a manager of union staff), for worse and better.
Adjust expectations for human behavior accordingly.
toomuchtodo · 10h ago
Demographics had to change and belief systems had to develop for Mamdani to win the NYC primary. Huge turn out, 12 point victory over Cuomo. Democratic socialist policy platform. This is the future as young people remain economically disadvantaged and old folks with their beliefs and wealth to protect age out. Young people aren't going to get more conservative because they don't have something to lose economically as older cohorts might have had.
If workers are not seeing improvements in life over time, why would their viewpoint change? I agree a minority of workers might change their mind when they luck into favorable economic and labor circumstances, but luck will not find the majority, and when it comes to voting, a majority matters.
"Nadella addressed the recent layoffs, clarifying that the decision was not based on individual job performance. “This is a structural change, not a reflection of how people were performing,” Nadella explained. He emphasized that Microsoft is shifting its strategic focus, with a renewed emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), which the company views as a key driver of its long-term vision and growth."
atomicnumber3 · 14h ago
Also, if it were actually about "low performers", this wouldn't be in the news. They'd just be terminated during/before perf review.
pjmlp · 11h ago
Somehow on places like HN, people aren't worthy of a job, it is the inverse of Peter Principle, keep firing the low performers until they land a job where they manage not to get fired.
atomicnumber3 · 8h ago
That's literally how capitalism determines wages, yes. I too have critiques of capitalism. But I often refrain from enumerating them on every single comment that relates to labor because otherwise we never get to actually discuss labor in its current context.
pjmlp · 31m ago
Fortunately there are other ways to determine wages.
0cf8612b2e1e · 13h ago
Eh, it can take a lot of political willpower to actually get rid of a low performer. We had an infamous case where it took two years to finally kick some deadweight to the curb. Wanted multiple years of underperforming performance reviews, I guess. Despite what some may claim about market efficiency, this is a public, wildly profitable company, not government.
Unfortunately, I have never seen a layoff only remove weak people. Plenty of good gets thrown out with the bad every single time. The only signal I take from someone being laid off is that they were unlucky and probably not a total sycophant.
runjake · 11h ago
We had a case where it took 10 years to cut 3 FTE deadweights and it only happened because of the 2008 Crash and consequential tightening of money flow.
butlike · 12h ago
Think of it more as a "controlled burn wildfire," you want to clear land to let new foliage grow. Same with companies; you clear out some space and see what ideas flourish with the new crop
const_cast · 9h ago
Or, more likely, leadership is sloppy and lazy. They make mistakes and color outside the lines, and they pay for it. The hope is that they don't hurt themselves too bad.
Luckily for leadership, opportunity cost is completely invisible. They can't travel to alternate realities so they can just pretend they made a good decision and go with that. This is what causes the fun phenomena of "failing upwards" we see in modern American corporate leadership.
daxfohl · 14h ago
Shifting focus is not narrowing focus. They should be able to shift employees accordingly too.
darth_avocado · 13h ago
If you have a large sales team for products that are not selling, and you want to invest in building a brand new product, you are not going to be able to move the sales folks into R&D. If you end up building the new product, you may eventually need the sales team, but most businesses in the meantime would reduce the headcount in sales instead of retaining them. I’m not saying that not bad for employees, but shifting focus isn’t always about changing what employees work on.
daxfohl · 13h ago
True. I didn't get to the fact that it was sales due to pay wall.
dragonwriter · 13h ago
There's an economic slowdown without relaxing the monetary tightening (because inflation, while relatively mild, is still above target.)
Further cutbacks from the level reached by the prior cutbacks due to monetary tightening when the economy was still in robust growth are to be expected, as are relatively transparent rationalizations that try to put an upbeat spin on them instead of the honest “the cost of money has gone up and the return of spending it on higher staffing levels has gone down.”
belter · 13h ago
AI is the convenient scapegoat. Companies frame mass layoffs as a strategic shift toward AI to boost margins and excite investors, but in reality, it signals a deeper business crisis. Not one of these 9,000 jobs will be meaningfully replaced by AI anytime soon.
DebtDeflation · 10h ago
>how do you have a layoff every couple of months for 3 years
It has absolutely nothing to do with managing out low performers or managing existential business risk. It has everything to do with managing annual EPS to Wall Street's expectations. There was an inflection point at the end of 2022 where Revenue growth slowed so to maintain Earnings growth, costs had to be cut continuously, and this process is still playing out.
RajT88 · 10h ago
This was an interesting read which cropped up on LinkedIn for me today:
Layoffs have always been part of the game. There is reason to believe this latest set of layoffs are different (Scott Hanselmann himself said so on LinkedIn recently - "Laying off my staff is never easy, but this is the first time I've had to lay people off for someone else's business goals" whatever that means).
bitbasher · 13h ago
I'm indifferent to layoffs. I dislike layoffs these days because it directly fuels the "AI is replacing our jobs" brainrot and then fuels the "AI is the future" hype train.
It's not impossible for this to be Microsoft's way to keep the AI flywheel spinning.
justin66 · 11h ago
I think we can all agree that the real damage caused by layoffs is their effect on the publicity surrounding AI, not their effect on humans and their well being.
bitbasher · 4h ago
Correct, people can get new jobs. We are all forced to live through this AI hype for the next decade.
pjmlp · 13h ago
Well, it kind of tells why people shouldn't blindly side with their employers.
It is a service, one side gives work, the other pays the bills, nothing else.
Be a good teammate, that is all.
aeternum · 12h ago
Not everyone wants to be "upleveled" which often actually means work on something completely different.
This idea that companies must be the social safety net is deeply flawed, you want companies to take risks on new business lines that may not pan out. That's how we get innovation. In order to have that, you must not heavily penalize taking those risks.
heathrow83829 · 13h ago
the first responsibility of any company is profitability. they have no economic, moral or ethical obligation to keep employees (no matter how well they performed), if it doesn't help them be more profitable. this should not be news.
I think "low performance" is typically just a scapegoat. the real reason is they simply don't need that many empolyees to maximize profitability.
CommenterPerson · 13h ago
This is Milton Freidman hype and brainwashing. A company profiting in a society has a responsibility towards that society. In Germany, they accomplish this by having one union representative on the board. Profit at any cost leads to a society where workers are paid just enough to prevent starvation so that there are workers.
cloverich · 11h ago
Its not brainwashing though, how to properly regular this is as old as Adam Smith right?
Union leader is one approach. But really if the US had a proper safety net, universal healthcare, and progressive taxes on capital accumulation, layoffs in OPs framing would not be nearly as bad.
The real issue here isnt the layoffs. Its that the top are pulling up profits, theres no quality healthcare for the unemployed (and getting worse), SFH are all levered up making the price unattainable for the average worker and high risk bc layoffs, etc.
The frustrating part is how dead simple the solution is. Universal healthcare. Progressive taxation that applies equally to capital gains. Block SFH investments (by investors and average joes alike). Maybe not emough, but light years ahead of where we are.
UncleMeat · 10h ago
Smith actually wrote against this very concept. The idea that a corporation's only responsibility is to its shareholders is relatively recent.
heathrow83829 · 12h ago
I agree that companies who are monopolies (especially government granted monopolies) have a responsibility towards society. But this does not apply to companies that need to compete to exist. For example, if a restaraunt or airlines (highly competitive industry), did anything to reduce their competitiveness they would instantly loose marketshare. that doesn't work.
which one is Microsoft?
riffraff · 11h ago
It does not apply if regulation allows it, but this does not need to be the case, and has been debated for decades
> [the New Deal architect, A. A. Berle] argued that corporations should "serve ... all society" through legally enforceable rules
"profit is the only goal" is not a law of nature, it's the outcome of a specific system of laws.
DrillShopper · 10h ago
Yes, and who owns the politicians that make those laws?
It certainly isn't the worker.
dsr_ · 13h ago
Let me correct that for you:
corporations feel no moral or ethical obligation towards their employees.
Whether or not that should be the case -- and I think it should not be -- it is.
triceratops · 11h ago
> the first responsibility of any company is profitability
No that's what makes management the most money because they're paid in stock. So they want you to think it's legally required.
The first responsibility of a company is "act in the shareholders' best interests".
Is it in shareholders' best interests to have > 20% unemployment?
cosmicgadget · 4h ago
General financial health is a better goal.
sydbarrett74 · 11h ago
Unfortunately, none of this matters to Wall Street, which wants eternal profit growth.
geodel · 14h ago
Talking about stock price is in fact indication of layoffs being working not other way round. I don't think people are arguing against "job is just a paycheck" in last 5 years. In the same vein for company "employee is just a cost".
Union may save job for few who have job but people who don't (and they are lot more and increasing) are not gonna get helped by any union.
hardwaresofton · 13h ago
> Union may save job for few who have job but people who don't (and they are lot more and increasing) are not gonna get helped by any union.
Note that in some countries, unions extend to cover workers who are not even part of the union. Heard about this from some french friends:
> Collective bargaining agreements (conventions collectives) may be negotiated between employers and labour unions covering a company or group of companies (accords d’entreprise), or between employers’ associations and labour unions covering an industry as a whole; in the latter case, the government may decide that the collective agreement covers even those employers who are not members of the employers’ association and is therefore mandatory throughout the industry.
Not saying it's the right solution for $COUNTRY, but I was certainly surprised when I heard of this
s1artibartfast · 13h ago
This is true on a workplace basis in the USA. Union contracts define terms for non-union workers.
daxfohl · 13h ago
They're still hiring though. If layoffs are a prereq for hiring fresh blood, maybe it's worth the cost? Especially if hiring is weighted toward new grads and junior engineers, which are in the midst of a historically bad employment market right now. It's a stretch, but just a thought.
Eggs-n-Jakey · 10h ago
it's not even that man, it shows insecurity in their growth and future business, they're terrified they took the wrong bet on their massive investments into Ai, or the perception of those investments.
A layoff is a complete and utter failure in leadership top down.
Then applying for 6k visas that are going to be compensated well below industry levels is just a complete joke.
heathrow83829 · 13h ago
a company doesn't keep you because you performed well. they keep an employee because they need them to be more profitable, nothing more, nothing less.
trod1234 · 12h ago
In fairness they aren't a real company anymore, they are more like state apparatus/granted monopoly.
The profitability they embraced was derived from surveillance capitalism which comes from a money-printer seeing as the government is the one paying for it.
It was short-term up-front profit, followed by what inevitably comes after where they pay it back and more. They are laying people off because they wanted that short term profit more than they wanted to do business. There is a potential that they may chase this having the same dynamics as deflation, given that free money is largely no longer available suddenly (which pops the bubble).
The people making those decisions knew the laws and countries would catch up to them eventually but they still did it.
_DeadFred_ · 14h ago
Love the modern lexicon, where people losing their livelihood is just part of a 'game'.
jimt1234 · 11h ago
I was raised in a union-supported household. I've posted about it on HN before, but the tl;dr is that I'm still conflicted because:
- Pro: My father only graduated high school, yet was able to support a middle-class family - a house, two cars, 3 children, healthcare, etc., all with his union trucking job. That is almost unheard of today.
- Con: My father often talked about the corruption, like work being throttled to meet only the minimum output requirements in the union contract, and guys just sitting around, playing cards for half-a-day because it only took them a few hours to meet the requirements. (And new guys would get "talked to" in the parking lot if they tried to do too much work.)
antifa · 9h ago
What's really the difference between union guys playing a little bit of cards on the boss's dime and the boss paying you poverty wages so he can upgrade to a bigger yacht? might as well pick the option that's going to have your back.
wonderwonder · 13h ago
The issue is they are laying off US workers and then importing Indian workers to replace them via 3rd party contractors. I saw a post on X today which essentially said "Ai will not replace your job, an Indian with Ai will replace your job" - this was posted by an Indian and he was completely right. Microsoft is actively laying off people with 150k salaries and replacing them with offshore workers earning a 10th of the salary.
At the same time our politicians appear to be looking everywhere for a solution to increasing US jobs except for right where the issue is. Everyone else sees it but our politicians are willfully blind.
darth_avocado · 11h ago
> Microsoft is actively laying off people with 150k salaries and replacing them with offshore workers earning a 10th of the salary.
I know the talking points on HN like to portray Indian developers as cheap, low quality labor, but contrary to popular belief, they aren’t getting workers for $15k. A Median senior developer earns almost $90k in India in Microsoft.
What do you think the salary would be for a US employee that those $101k H1B Software Engineers replaced? They obviously aren't saving 90%, but maybe 50% 33%?
timtom123 · 2h ago
It isn't just the $ savings. It is indentured servitude. I have more than one friend that quit the day they got their green card.
wonderwonder · 10h ago
To be clear, I never painted indian devs as low quality. Many of the ones I work with are very smart, skilled people
triceratops · 11h ago
How are they "importing" workers and still keeping them "offshore"?
wonderwonder · 11h ago
The are doing both friend. I am currently the last US employee on my project with a fortune 250 company. Started off with 60 devs. Half onshore, half offshore. Now I am the last on shore dev. Still 60 devs total
triceratops · 10h ago
So they've only offshored. Not imported.
wonderwonder · 10h ago
My company yes. Other companies do both
trod1234 · 12h ago
That is one of the issues, yes.
The main issue though is one of demographics.
Like Japan, we have insufficient young people to do the jobs and produce what's needed to support the old.
Worse, the old have utilized money printing and their privileged position to enrich themselves, and in the process it is tearing the country apart, and through economic manipulation force conscripting the young at suppressed wages to pay their debts off (i.e. social security).
Thomas Paine would have a lot of similar things to say if he were alive today, specifically about dead men ruling.
The economics given such lopsided movement cause chaotic disruption and deflate and are unsustainable.
You are wrong insofar as they'll be earning a 10th of the salary. That may happen upfront, but in terms of purchasing power it will reach parity much more quickly given the macro monetary dynamics going on.
When reading history, I could never imagine how bad it would need to get to make a multi-generational citizen abandon their home country and immigrate elsewhere.
I have my answer today. They do so when there is no reasonable path to a survivable future.
There are times where a reasonable person can see and know everything will burn, because there is nothing that can stop it, and the only thing you can do is remove yourself and your family from the path of that burn.
wonderwonder · 12h ago
While I agree with your overall point, I don't think the current issue with US jobs being outsourced is due to demographics. I think its simply one of cheaper wages. The fact that they are actively laying off US workers proves that there are existing US workers that can and have been doing the job. They are letting them go though so as to boost their bottom line to drive "shareholder value". This is an entirely self inflicted issue separate from the demographics issue that is affecting the west as a whole. We have more than enough qualified people willing to perform the tech jobs that the companies are outsourcing.
mathverse · 10h ago
It's not only about cheaper workers but an army of controllable drones.
sitzkrieg · 14h ago
staying in tech is career suicide
wing-_-nuts · 13h ago
What nonsense. I've been in tech for ~ 20 years and it's literally taken me from living below the poverty line on ssi disability to fully financially independent. This is the one career where I could have accomplished that. It's basically 'disability proof'.
sitzkrieg · 7h ago
ive been in tech just as long. im a craftsman who cares about my work. i work for myself. no big tech company will ever prioritize the right stuff ever again, that is pretty clear everytime i make the mistake of updating any software ever.
i guess the real message is the boom is over if you want cushy or easy money
trod1234 · 12h ago
Past performance generally speaking does not indicate future prospects.
I agree with you, but that is only for right now.
7-10 years from now, I see no new tech jobs and the same work shouldered by a decreasing number of people until they vanish with no replacement.
Chaotic whipsaws from disruption or other things can break brittle systems. Resilient systems don't have these problems, but they are only resilient because of their decentralization and lack of single points of failure (SPOF).
Profit through money printing optimizes for SPOFs, and there are no existing incentives that can produce any other behavior. Its a terrible fate of societies which embrace money-printing.
Not to hate on immigrants… but shouldn’t H1B’s be the first on the chopping block of layoffs? Hard to imagine all those H1Bs are so unique that others already employed can’t replace them.
MangoToupe · 13h ago
You don't need to pay H1Bs as much. They're a bargain deal.
Group_B · 12h ago
Yep, you need to get sponsored to work so we have thousands and thousands of workers trapped with low salaries. Nothing they can really do. It’s too risky trying to find another company to sponsor you because otherwise you get deported back
ActionHank · 11h ago
They also can't as easily job hop.
cosmicgadget · 4h ago
And so they can't push back on a crazy workload.
RajT88 · 10h ago
The spice must flow.
Preferably at a lower cost, though...
darth_avocado · 13h ago
So you are hating on immigrants…
onlyrealcuzzo · 12h ago
It's not quite that reductive.
If the point of the program is A, and you think it's being used as B, it's fair to ask if the point of the program is really A or if it's actually B.
Just pointing that out or asking the question does not mean you "hate immigrants".
You might! But I don't think it's guaranteed.
darth_avocado · 12h ago
> Hard to imagine all those H1Bs are so unique that others already employed can’t replace them.
I think the language speaks for itself
amendegree · 11h ago
Yes, it’s pretty clear that MS is abusing the H1B program. Which is supposed to be used only when no local talent can be found… if you’re firing 1000s of local people I have a hard time believing they are truly less skilled than the H1Bs being hired.
Most engineers (H1Bs, and not) I’ve met aren’t exceptional. Saying that isn’t xenophobic.
darth_avocado · 11h ago
They are firing people in the sales, gaming etc and the H1B hiring is in other orgs. AND the layoffs are global, not just in the US.
mathverse · 10h ago
It's also bizarre...all those american-indian or indian CEOs firing americans and replacing them with indians.
I mean lol..have u heard of american-czech CEO doing that to americans with czechs. Not really right...
darth_avocado · 8h ago
American-Whatever CEOs cut American jobs and ship them abroad all the time. For software American-whatever CEOs use India as a hub for offshore hiring, because that’s where they have options. If tomorrow Mexico or Latin American countries have a lot of software engineers available and are cheaper than India, the jobs would go there.
What’s really bizarre is that when the CEO happens to be Indian American, there’s a problem and a conspiracy.
onlyrealcuzzo · 13h ago
I will just comment that MSFT felt the need to get 1264 approvals for NEW H-1B petitions THIS year.
darth_avocado · 13h ago
The layoffs are mostly in the sales division as pointed out by other commentators. H1B filings most likely would not be in sales.
DebtDeflation · 10h ago
How does that even work? You take away thousands of people in the market selling (presumably these were enterprise sales, not low end consumer stuff that "sells itself") and what happens to revenue? This strikes me as classic bean-counter logic that sees all sales and marketing effort as pure cost and assumes it can be eliminated while simultaneously viewing revenue as a constant, with no relationship between the two. Really an extension of the view that you should just eliminate all of the engineers first, because they're the most expensive. Too many people in the C-suite detached from their products and their customers, who see their company as just numbers in a spreadsheet.
InkCanon · 8h ago
Also: Microsoft India untouched by layoffs, actually hiring
I am in India with friends in their last year in college. Hiring is effectively ice cold. Companies like TCS, Infosys wouldn't come to his college but now do. I just want to say good luck, these projects and products are on autopilot with no hiring in India and layoffs everywhere.
InkCanon · 8h ago
That probably has more to do with the absolute tsunami of CS graduates India produces.
gsky · 9h ago
They need employees to serve their Indian market.
crmd · 13h ago
Earlier in my career I worked for a tech industry-famous CEO who is long retired.
One of the most unconventional things he taught me was that “our highest obligation is to employees and their families. Second is to investors. Third is to the communities we operate in. Obviously don’t ever say this in a board meeting or investor conference”.
And he meant it. When products got cancelled, people got reassigned. Terminations for poor performance happened but were individual cases.
I’m quite sure the idea of firing people to goose the share price never even crossed his mind.
htrp · 13h ago
He retired before the business climate could move against him
mxuribe · 11h ago
Hi @crmd For that tech industry-famous CEO, did the company that they used to run continue/preserve even a little bit of that good and common-sense approach? Because if so, then I'd love to know the name of the firm...so that i can immediately apply for a role there. (My profile has my email address if you wish to keep the company name sharing private.) Mind you, I'm employed, but, ahem, less than enthused with my current state of affairs. :-)
nly · 11h ago
Aren't most MSFT employees also shareholders thanks to stock awards?
RajT88 · 10h ago
That's how they retain them.
eastbound · 12h ago
Did the company crash? In other words, was it a sustainable way of working, or was it a way that did not only end up removing the jobs of those who would have been fired, but also those who wouldn’t have been, destroying more jobs than it saved by reassigning people?
crmd · 13h ago
I don’t remember when it became normalized for profitable companies to casually execute major layoffs. It used to be a “shameful” last resort that CEOs turned to as a last ditch effort to save a company facing bankruptcy.
I suspect it’s related to the stock buyback safe harbor rule (Rule 10b-18.) Layoff announcements used to be a sign of a company in crisis, now the stock price often immediately rises, perhaps because shareholders are anticipating a short-term windfall.
jimmydddd · 13h ago
The Wall Street bros love layoffs. They think it makes a company more efficient. They don't see it at all as a problem with management, they just think it's a great idea. So the stock often goes up with a layoff announcement.
rl1987 · 10h ago
Twitter layoffs of 2022 might have been the Lehman Brothers moment that marked the end of programming gold rush.
disqard · 1h ago
I think you're spot-on!
It was a first, and then the entire collection of CEOs showcased their herd mentality by jumping on that bandwagon. It's kinda like the anti-poaching collusion that happened... gosh, 10 years ago!
...only, this time, there's some bullshit "economic headwinds" arguments being advanced as reasons for these layoffs.
I remember experiencing actual belt-tightening in 2008-09, where it was disgraceful-but-necessary-to-save-the-company. It's nothing like that this time around.
heathrow83829 · 13h ago
well, as productivity per employee increases you need fewer of them. So lay offs can be seen as a sign of a healthy productivity increase.
FAANG total headcounts have been trending down for years now (2-3).
sokoloff · 13h ago
So, 43 years ago?
pseudosavant · 13h ago
Microsoft's most recent quarterly numbers, for those interested:
- Revenue was $69.6 billion and increased 12%
- Operating income was $31.7 billion and increased 17% (up 16% in constant currency)
- Net income was $24.1 billion and increased 10%
How can you justify needing layoffs when you made $24B in net income on $70B in revenue?? I guess $24B and a 10% YoY increase is almost failing?
devjab · 8h ago
I'm not going to defend Microsoft, but you don't budget based on current achievements. You budget on future prospects, and right now Microsoft is facing some tough times in Europe. The biggest IT expense in my country is the public sector buying various Microsoft licenses, and everyone from the top down are looking into replacing Microsoft with Open Source alternatives due to digital sovereignty.
I doubt that has a big impact on Microsoft's gaming divisions, but it would help explain why they might not think the previous decades of growth will continue.
onlyrealcuzzo · 12h ago
That's not good enough for a P/E of 40....
trollied · 12h ago
The answer is shareholders.
pseudosavant · 11h ago
It is like we need to find a "post stock market" capitalism? The stock market is kind of the original crypto scheme after-all. Capitalism doesn't require a stock market.
cosmicgadget · 3h ago
Privately held companies exist too. They also do layoffs.
seatac76 · 14h ago
Xbox has really become a sore point in the MS portfolio. Their pivot to a marketplace model where their games run everywhere is an admission that they lost the race to Sony. Block buster acquisition like Activision further have exacerbated their conundrum.
What Xbox is now can be done by a much smaller number of people.
tjpnz · 13h ago
>Their pivot to a marketplace model where their games run everywhere is an admission that they lost the race to Sony.
Don Mattrick has a lot to answer for. Microsoft was killing it during the seventh generation and he was able to burn everything down over a period of two days. Xbox never recovered after that.
anonymousab · 12h ago
Don Mattrick isn't the reason that so many Microsoft studios have repeatedly shipped poor products or failed to ship at all over the past decade. Don Mattrick isn't the reason reason that Microsoft still seems to have the worst taste-testers in the industry. Don Mattrick isn't the reason that internal studios like 343 have messed up 18/6 requirements. Don Mattrick isn't the reason that Microsoft kept acquiring, messing up and then firing studios, ending with a massive acquisition that can't even pay itself off for over a decade. And above all, Don Mattrick isn't responsible for the relentless drive for a weird fusion of unprofitable subscription service and cloud streaming offerings at the cost of overall game sale profits.
Don Mattrick's mistakes were near-fatal, but Phil Spencer's done more than his equal share of torpedoing the Xbox division. The blame at this point can rest squarely on his shoulders.
Well, him, and the person who refuses to replace him.
sylens · 12h ago
Both are true.
Mattrick's missteps were not just about two days of revealing the XBox One, but really the entire second half of the 360's lifespan. The focus on Kinect to chase the Wii audience and the shuttering of many of their development studios left them thin on the exclusive front, which became a huge liability as they transitioned to the next generation.
But Spencer has a lot to answer for. He has been acquiring studios for 7 years now with little to show for it besides Obsidian having prolific output. Game Pass is flat, Xbox Cloud is flat, and their hardware is being outsold by Sony month over month, year over year. They seem to be pivoting to "Play Anywhere" which feels like the first phase of a three phase plan to retreat to the moat of Windows, where they can use Steam's momentum to ensure that games will at least appear on the platform. He inherited a mess but has made plenty of his own mistakes as well.
amendegree · 13h ago
The Kinect was super cool as a demo but totally failed to actually make compelling gameplay in the standard living room
RandallBrown · 13h ago
I dunno, Dance Central was really fun.
ModernMech · 10h ago
The real legacy of the Kinect was that it revolutionized vision in robotics, as it made sensors that used to cost thousands, cost $150.
bitwize · 12h ago
The dream of the Kinect lives on in the Nex Playground... the Mattel HyperScan of the 2020s.
strict9 · 14h ago
Surprisingly no mention of AI in an article about mass layoffs at a tech company. Wonder if that line has finally had all the juice squeezed from it to explain away layoffs and outsourcing.
mjr00 · 14h ago
AI works as a smokescreen when doing product development layoffs, but you can't really use it for sales, which is still very human-to-human, or when canceling entire projects like they're doing in XBox Game Studios.
999900000999 · 14h ago
I knew this was coming when Microsoft brought Activision. As ex game industry I nearly started crying at the news.
Mergers always lead to layoffs, games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.
Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall and cutting internal studios. It's much cheaper to just pay 3rd parties to release on Gamepass vs having to fund an entire games development.
I don't think we even see a real "Xbox" in the future. You'll have Xbox branded living room PCs with Windows. They're working on a gaming mode that I guess optimizes Win 11 a bit.
Getting a AAA games job will be much more difficult in the future.
staticman2 · 13h ago
Xbox has been a declining brand for a while now.
They are struggling to make the case for buying games from the Windows Store instead of Steam and they are struggling to make the case to buy an Xbox Console instead of a Sony or Nintendo Console.
If we see Xbox branded PCs in the living room- that's more a sign of pivoting due to failure than anything else.
keyringlight · 13h ago
The aspect I wonder about for windows vs xbox(console) is that I find it hard to imagine they make much money on the consumer side for windows, yet they have a certain support burden for maintaining/advancing the windows platform and DirectX. I assume xbox contributes heavily to making it worth their while to work on DirectX, but without it there seems to be a lot of beneficiaries that don't contribute back - so what's Microsoft's motivation to have their own API?
Even when D3D12 came out there was commentary how very close it was to Vulkan, which was supposedly largely the work of DICE engineers working for AMD to create the preliminary Mantle implementation.
OkayPhysicist · 11h ago
I don't think consumer spending power is the limiter in the games space at the moment. They've simply run out of new customers.
The explosive growth of the gaming industry over the 90s-2010s was fueled by continuously unlocking new swathes of consumers. Games went from being for kids, to being for adults and kids, to people who would never consider themselves "gamers" with mobile, which in turn created the "whaling" industry of microtransaction fueled F2P. But there's only so many new, large groups of people with money. What we're seeing now is a correction, with growth estimates collapsing back down to what you'd expect from a mature industry.
ToDougie · 8h ago
I don't know all of the economics, and I certainly hadn't considered what you laid out in your 2nd paragraph until I read through it--but as a father, I am certainly spending far less on games for my children/self. We just don't have the money.
surgical_fire · 14h ago
> Getting a AAA games job will be much more difficult in the future.
If it's outsourced to 3rd parties, in theory, shouldn't the number of jobs be the same?
Or are you alluding to AAA games not being as viable to the industry as it once was?
I am asking mostly because I seldom play AAA games (for some reason most of them turn me off), and I mostly play indie or retro titles. But I always recognized myself as an outlier, and I would presume most people are primarily interested in the big releases.
ffsm8 · 13h ago
> games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.
Historically, games have actually performed extremely well in economic downturns.
Likely because they're extremely cheap entertainment if you count $ per hour of entertainment, but that's just my view on it.
And gaming as a whole is doing great. The only part that's falling off a cliff is the woke garbage life service games AAA studios have been releasing for the last ~10 yrs or so.
Whenever the studios didn't make dumb political messaging the core of the game... And instead made a good gameplay loop first, they've generally succeeded pretty well. It takes skill to make a game centered around political messaging and have it be good, (e.g. spec ops the line, MGS, metaphor:refantazio ), and none of the woke garbage that flopped ever had anything even attempting to create a world in which this messaging made sense. So we're left with completely nonsensical catering to politics no average person cares about whatsoever.
I mean we've even got single dev games that got to the charts of steam (schedule I).
arbitrary_name · 10h ago
Who gives a flying toss about political content in a game? That sounds like a weird right wing thing. Either the gameplay is good, or its not. Why does woke matter, and why should anyone care?
ffsm8 · 1h ago
I guess you didn't read my comment then
ricoxicano · 14h ago
Most of today's layoffs at Microsoft are affecting MCAPS, Microsoft's sales division.
daxfohl · 13h ago
I don't recall reading any official statements, ever, that said layoffs were due to AI replacing engineers. Do you have examples? I think that line gets thrown in by reporters that don't know what they're talking about, or HN/LinkedIn users that haven't actually read the statement.
I could easily be wrong; I can't say I've thoroughly perused every layoff statement from big tech, but I frankly don't even see how it would be positive PR that you're replacing workers with machines, much less worth outright lying about.
ActionHank · 11h ago
They've all done so many layoffs that they've realised there is no need to give the public a reason anymore, they don't need a scapegoat.
trashcan · 14h ago
The first sentence of the article is:
> Microsoft Corp. began job cuts that will impact about 9,000 workers, its second major wave of layoffs this year as it seeks to control costs while ramping up on artificial intelligence spending.
And AI is a bullet point in the "Takeaways, powered by Bloomberg AI" section as well.
strict9 · 14h ago
Yes. But in most messaging the layoffs are a result in productivity gains supposedly from AI. Not the same reasoning as capex costs.
trashcan · 7h ago
I'm just responding to what you said:
> Surprisingly no mention of AI in an article about mass layoffs at a tech company.
Sorry if I misunderstood.
aaomidi · 14h ago
Their HC still keeps growing so…
jajuuka · 13h ago
These recent Microsoft layoffs make no sense. Hitting all across the organization, performance, and tenure levels with no real pattern. Are the layoffs going to continue until moral improves or what?
InkCanon · 8h ago
I really want to destroy this blatant lying by tech CEOs that these are layoffs because of AI, tax laws or interest rates. Most tech companies have headcounts at their peak or slightly below. Whenever these amounts are fired, often near equal amounts are hired in India (and not counting L-1 transfers into the US, H1Bs etc). AI is a fiction invented to cover up the true reason: tech companies have adopted a long term strategy of profit making by wage arbitrage. They have identified their largest cost to be people, and are working to fix this.
slake · 1h ago
This is how I don't get when some predict that we'll have a shorter working week when AI improves productivity. If productivity gains are 50% the companies would rather have 50% lesser employees rather than 50% shorter work weeks.
This appears to be sales and marketing layoffs. If AI is worth its salt, theoretically the sales and marketing people should be able to prompt they way into grabbing Microsoft's market.
slake · 1h ago
This is just MSFT (as did others) acknowledging the future has a lot less workers in it.
nyarlathotep_ · 13h ago
I do wonder if these trends continue (paired with the offshoring and H1B replacements they're all in on (otherwise mentioned in this thread), how this effects the local housing markets in places like, in this case, Seattle.
If every third 22 year old isn't making 200K, how are you going to sustain a market of crapshacks "worth" 1M?
InkCanon · 8h ago
I predict many areas will eventually become like old mining/factory towns. Middle class jobs are being offshored at an astounding rate. Just doing some math - if a tech company lays off 7% of its employees for six years and sends the jobs overseas, nearly half of its American employees will be fired
nyarlathotep_ · 5h ago
I don't think it'll get that bad.
My mostly uninformed worse case estimate is a large portion of these companies become something like the "body shops" (I believe MS has some association with Accenture, so that'd fit) where they maintain a minimal US presence for (mostly) customer facing "sales"/"high touch" positions so they have someone to broker deals and contracts with the (often clueless, IME) F500s, and then outsource all implementation work offshore. Same goes for some large portion of "important" managers.
For the "deep"/important/critical technical work, there will likely be staff retained on-shore, while the "boring" CRUD-type work that comprises some portion of the FANNAGS (whatever) is done overseas.
It's unlikely, say, for Google Search or AWS EC2 or something critical at MS (M365 maybe?) to be totally off-shored, but lesser services/functions are a likely target. (I know this is already happening to some extent at these companies; I've heard from reputable sources there's some large services that were nearly entirely built by staffing firms)
Basically, I think it's two things: we've reached the end of stratospheric growth in "tech" (sorry I just don't see the LLM wave getting there; a million SAAS thingys to "vibe code" a React calorie tracker ain't it), there's a massive surplus from the ZIRP era paired with some sort of obvious recession happening (or that's been going on for a while).
It's also a reset of sorts--look I'm as "pro software" as the next commentator here, but it's pretty absurd to think that there's loads of people making 200K+ to write CRUD stuff. There's just not a "shortage" in any way for any of these skills, as anyone doing a job search can attest.
This type of pay is really only "rational" in the markets where the cost of living has skyrocketed in the manner it has (largely/entirely a function of the "growth" era in SF/Seattle/Austin). It never seemed sustainable, and I suspected there would be some abrupt end when the "learn to code" era really took off.
On a positive note, perhaps those cities would be more affordable, but the in-elasticity of housing prices on the "way down" are always a problem for buyers.
InkCanon · 4h ago
This assumption is a pretty Western view, in that you assume that SV/USA still has technological primacy. I believe this to be generally true, but leadership has no incentive or reason it should. And if I'm being frank, there may be some bias here because it seems like companies with indian CEOs are offshoring at a much faster rate than non indian CEOs (e.g. Google vs Netflix). And non core roles could effectively be perceived to make up the majority of the company. So some cultural fondness for India plus a somewhat low view of the bulk of employees could result in most jobs being offshored.
Meanwhile my buddy at Microsoft working on AI tools to "increase employee and engineer productivity" just started ramping up sharing job postings for their department.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 13h ago
$3tn market cap and can't find anything for them to work on? Yikes.
Sounds like a Monopoly. Why bother building something new?
elcritch · 11h ago
Given I’ve been trying to use some of Microsoft’s various productivity SaaS tools for a new job lately, and well, they need those workers.
Teams is sort of tolerable now, but still feels terrible and lacks many of slacks niceties. The rest of their productivity stuff is terrible and slow. It’s embarrassing really.
From what I read Azure is a border line dumpster fire.
Then what LLM integration do they really have in their software apps?
mxuribe · 11h ago
Here's what i learned: the person buying software/services at many enterprises cares very little whether the thing being purchased is actually any good or not. They either pick based on some brand awareness (who doesn't know who IBM used to be, and who Microsoft is nowadays?), or they defer to someone else in the org...and that "some other senior leader person" in the org may or may not be the proper person to make the decision, etc....and then, the rest of the employees from said enterprise are stuck using something that very few might have chosen. Do i think there are good purchasers out there? Sure, but my direct experience is that the good ones are very few and far between sadly...and then momentum takes over in perpetuity.
And, then of course there's the "do as the competitors do", where when employees DO BRING UP good alternatives, the same aforementioned type of purchasers use the argument: "Well, lots of other firms and even our competitors use Microsoft...so why not stick with Microsoft...etc?"
Years ago, there used to be the phrase: "No one got fired for buying IBM...". I suppose nowadays you swap that brand out with "Microsoft", or "Google", etc. This rabbit hole goes really deep....but i encourage the interested to look up this IBM phrase, and you'll get tons of literature on why companies make purchasing decisions, and more importantly why they're often poor decisions.
nyarlathotep_ · 5h ago
This is also how the contracting firms maintain business.
Accenture, Deloitte, et al are some of the only businesses that are "trusted partners" for the big F500s* or the only firms that are sufficiently capitalized/insured etc etc such that they can "win" the big jobs. Quality and such doesn't matter much--if you and I could spin up and LLC tomorrow with the ability to deliver something at 10x the quality in half the time, it literally wouldn't matter, for exactly those reasons. It's an identical situation to buying services/software from MS.
*the amount of work outsourced at these places is staggering, speaking from experience.
eviks · 2h ago
The bad state you're describing is what happened with all those workers. So why would they need them of you want a different state?
TurkishPoptart · 11h ago
American employees are, for the most part, being replaced by H1-B visaholders via off-shore contracting companies. This needs to change.
mxuribe · 11h ago
> American employees are, for the most part, being replaced by H1-B visaholders via off-shore contracting companies...
American companies have been trying to replace American works for decades....this is not new. I wonder if trying to stop folks trying to make a simple decent living in the U.s. is not the right approach? ...Rather, i think the focus should be against the leaders of the American companies...Because they seem to be the ones pushing to get rid of ALL workers...sure, for now, they're trying to replace American workers, but soon enough they'll want to get rid of the H1B workers too...and eventually get rid of ANY/ALL workers if it means they can squeeze as much money for themselves.
If/When AI and robots come en masse to "steal jobs", would you blame the workers who get kicked out of the companies (even if they had upskilled themselves), or would you blame the leaders who kicked the people out? With all due respect, my opinion is that i think you're blaming the wrong people.
It is, and they are. It’s why Reagan fired ATC strikers and blackballed them. It’s why private enterprise stockpiled machine guns and chemical weapons against strikers back in the Gilded Age. It’s why companies will spend billions to block Unions rather than just give workers the few million or so more they need over a decade to just maintain a standard of living. It’s why they’ll close down stores, warehouses, offshore jobs and outsource to contractors to penalize Unions.
Unions are a direct response to the inequality of Capital allocation and distribution.
Could MS replace them all with scabs? Sure, with enough time and money. But it wouldn't happen overnight, and things would get very dire if not company ruining in the meantime.
What is great about your mission critical bug not getting fixed for a few more weeks?
I'm in tech and I would never join a union. Why do I need collective bargaining to set my salary (and not give me raise until it's collectively raised) when I can bargain for my own raises?
In addition to this, unions don't bode well for innovation and technology. Look at the Taxicab unions. We could only get a cab in person or through the phone, because the unions had no incentive to innovate. It look a non-union startup to push them to actually make it convenient and better for the customer.
OTOH, gig drivers are being paid below minimum wage, with no benefits, no retirement plan, and no stability of work.
As a customer, yay technology and UX! But as a human, it's objectively worse for society.
This photo in particular captures something of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Strikers_Riot
And how are you going to do that when the scabs are in India? Unions work in “physical” domains (like plumbing, factory work, etc.), not so much in “virtual” domains where all you need is a computer to do your work and there’s an entire world full of workers who would think they’ve died and gone to heaven if they could make half your salary.
Lol good luck with that.
If your job is so important that a strike should be illegal, then that job should also compensate you and your colleagues so well that a strike isn’t even a remote consideration. ATC was being treated like shit, weighed the pros and cons, and decided to strike.
And now in 2025, literally everything they struck against (outdated tech, short staffing, high burnout, low wages) is still here, and still causing harm.
I know, I know, "union bad." I guess people will say that until all that is left is a person to watch the Machine, and a dog to bite the person if they touch the Machine. Or all the jobs are offshored to the cheapest labor on the globe.
Hey that's actually a great line. It might be even better than the original, where the person is there to feed the dog.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/
Solutions such as "try harder," "be more lucky," or "just find another job" are...not very actionable when you consider that ~60% of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life and the current labor macro.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/what-you-need-to-kn...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/12/majoritie...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.asp...
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Labor-Unions-And-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...
(i am once again asking you to think in systems)
People who don’t want to work for a union shop should have the same amount of voice as people who do (1 vote per employee). I think unions have struggled to gain traction because it’s obvious that they cost money to run (which is fine and proper) but it’s not obvious that that expense pays off for the typical member. If a median tech worker pays $1300-2600/yr in dues (1-2% of median salary), I think it’s reasonable for them to expect more than that on a net-present-value basis.
Plenty of people are strong advocates; plenty are strong detractors; I suspect that a well-run union (efficient in its own ops and partnering effectively for the long-term health of the company and its union members) would be good on balance and also fairly “under the radar” making it hard to know how good it actually was.
A lot of the benefits my union provides might not matter to the average HN user making $X00,000/yr though so who knows?
And I really want to touch on your point about dues and unions. Workers should absolutely have high expectations for what their unions deliver, and should not tolerate any sort of drag, apathy, or lack of effort. With that said, it is another political process one must participate in, it isn't ordering an Uber. I have zero tolerance for union grift. Perhaps this calls for something like a non profit ratings agency, but for unions.
[1] https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/08/are-older-work... ("In 2000, only 17.6% of the 55 and older populace had a job. Now the percentage is 37.5%. A 20% increase in the percentage of 55+ who are employed in a 20-year span is unprecedented. If the percentage of employed 55+ had stayed the same, there would only be 17 million 55+ workers today. Instead, there are over 37 million.") [2022]
[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-closing-gender-... ("Gen Zers are the most supportive of unions, with a mean approval rating of 64.3 compared with 60.5 for Millennials, 57.8 for Gen Xers, and 57.2 for Baby Boomers." [death and retirement rate is progress rate in this regard by age cohort; the faster the older cohort(s) who don't support organizing exit the workforce, this should potentially reduced the lift required to organize forward looking])
(demographics + culture + advocacy + time is my mental model on this, and I have arrived at this model from first principles, as a macro and demographics scholar)
Opinions about unions tend to “mature” and become more nuanced with age (after exposure to both as a member and as a manager of union staff), for worse and better.
Adjust expectations for human behavior accordingly.
If workers are not seeing improvements in life over time, why would their viewpoint change? I agree a minority of workers might change their mind when they luck into favorable economic and labor circumstances, but luck will not find the majority, and when it comes to voting, a majority matters.
How the US Is Destroying Young People’s Future | Scott Galloway | TED - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E
Part 2: Scott Galloway’s Viral TED Talk on How the Old Are Stealing from the Young - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjNV6JwlV2s
Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics: Western conservatives are at risk from generations of voters who are no longer moving to the right as they age - https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767... | https://archive.today/lQoLa
IOW, “this time is different!” Maybe that will be true this time, but it’s far from a given.
https://d4pgq7fazddwpa.archive.ph/lQoLa/f1886c78af8eb03745a8...
https://careers.augsburg.edu/blog/2024/03/18/gen-z-does-not-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/05/14/on-the-...
Edit: Allegedly not.
https://www.financialexpress.com/life/technology-microsoft-c...
"Nadella addressed the recent layoffs, clarifying that the decision was not based on individual job performance. “This is a structural change, not a reflection of how people were performing,” Nadella explained. He emphasized that Microsoft is shifting its strategic focus, with a renewed emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), which the company views as a key driver of its long-term vision and growth."
Unfortunately, I have never seen a layoff only remove weak people. Plenty of good gets thrown out with the bad every single time. The only signal I take from someone being laid off is that they were unlucky and probably not a total sycophant.
Luckily for leadership, opportunity cost is completely invisible. They can't travel to alternate realities so they can just pretend they made a good decision and go with that. This is what causes the fun phenomena of "failing upwards" we see in modern American corporate leadership.
Further cutbacks from the level reached by the prior cutbacks due to monetary tightening when the economy was still in robust growth are to be expected, as are relatively transparent rationalizations that try to put an upbeat spin on them instead of the honest “the cost of money has gone up and the return of spending it on higher staffing levels has gone down.”
It has absolutely nothing to do with managing out low performers or managing existential business risk. It has everything to do with managing annual EPS to Wall Street's expectations. There was an inflection point at the end of 2022 where Revenue growth slowed so to maintain Earnings growth, costs had to be cut continuously, and this process is still playing out.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/zoology-us-microsoft-old-time...
Layoffs have always been part of the game. There is reason to believe this latest set of layoffs are different (Scott Hanselmann himself said so on LinkedIn recently - "Laying off my staff is never easy, but this is the first time I've had to lay people off for someone else's business goals" whatever that means).
It's not impossible for this to be Microsoft's way to keep the AI flywheel spinning.
It is a service, one side gives work, the other pays the bills, nothing else.
Be a good teammate, that is all.
This idea that companies must be the social safety net is deeply flawed, you want companies to take risks on new business lines that may not pan out. That's how we get innovation. In order to have that, you must not heavily penalize taking those risks.
I think "low performance" is typically just a scapegoat. the real reason is they simply don't need that many empolyees to maximize profitability.
Union leader is one approach. But really if the US had a proper safety net, universal healthcare, and progressive taxes on capital accumulation, layoffs in OPs framing would not be nearly as bad.
The real issue here isnt the layoffs. Its that the top are pulling up profits, theres no quality healthcare for the unemployed (and getting worse), SFH are all levered up making the price unattainable for the average worker and high risk bc layoffs, etc.
The frustrating part is how dead simple the solution is. Universal healthcare. Progressive taxation that applies equally to capital gains. Block SFH investments (by investors and average joes alike). Maybe not emough, but light years ahead of where we are.
which one is Microsoft?
> [the New Deal architect, A. A. Berle] argued that corporations should "serve ... all society" through legally enforceable rules
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berle%E2%80%93Dodd_debate
"profit is the only goal" is not a law of nature, it's the outcome of a specific system of laws.
It certainly isn't the worker.
corporations feel no moral or ethical obligation towards their employees.
Whether or not that should be the case -- and I think it should not be -- it is.
No that's what makes management the most money because they're paid in stock. So they want you to think it's legally required.
The first responsibility of a company is "act in the shareholders' best interests".
Is it in shareholders' best interests to have > 20% unemployment?
Union may save job for few who have job but people who don't (and they are lot more and increasing) are not gonna get helped by any union.
Note that in some countries, unions extend to cover workers who are not even part of the union. Heard about this from some french friends:
> Collective bargaining agreements (conventions collectives) may be negotiated between employers and labour unions covering a company or group of companies (accords d’entreprise), or between employers’ associations and labour unions covering an industry as a whole; in the latter case, the government may decide that the collective agreement covers even those employers who are not members of the employers’ association and is therefore mandatory throughout the industry.
https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publication...
Not saying it's the right solution for $COUNTRY, but I was certainly surprised when I heard of this
A layoff is a complete and utter failure in leadership top down.
Then applying for 6k visas that are going to be compensated well below industry levels is just a complete joke.
The profitability they embraced was derived from surveillance capitalism which comes from a money-printer seeing as the government is the one paying for it.
It was short-term up-front profit, followed by what inevitably comes after where they pay it back and more. They are laying people off because they wanted that short term profit more than they wanted to do business. There is a potential that they may chase this having the same dynamics as deflation, given that free money is largely no longer available suddenly (which pops the bubble).
The people making those decisions knew the laws and countries would catch up to them eventually but they still did it.
- Pro: My father only graduated high school, yet was able to support a middle-class family - a house, two cars, 3 children, healthcare, etc., all with his union trucking job. That is almost unheard of today.
- Con: My father often talked about the corruption, like work being throttled to meet only the minimum output requirements in the union contract, and guys just sitting around, playing cards for half-a-day because it only took them a few hours to meet the requirements. (And new guys would get "talked to" in the parking lot if they tried to do too much work.)
At the same time our politicians appear to be looking everywhere for a solution to increasing US jobs except for right where the issue is. Everyone else sees it but our politicians are willfully blind.
I know the talking points on HN like to portray Indian developers as cheap, low quality labor, but contrary to popular belief, they aren’t getting workers for $15k. A Median senior developer earns almost $90k in India in Microsoft.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/microsoft/salaries/software...
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=microsoft&job=software+eng...
What do you think the salary would be for a US employee that those $101k H1B Software Engineers replaced? They obviously aren't saving 90%, but maybe 50% 33%?
The main issue though is one of demographics.
Like Japan, we have insufficient young people to do the jobs and produce what's needed to support the old.
Worse, the old have utilized money printing and their privileged position to enrich themselves, and in the process it is tearing the country apart, and through economic manipulation force conscripting the young at suppressed wages to pay their debts off (i.e. social security).
Thomas Paine would have a lot of similar things to say if he were alive today, specifically about dead men ruling.
The economics given such lopsided movement cause chaotic disruption and deflate and are unsustainable.
You are wrong insofar as they'll be earning a 10th of the salary. That may happen upfront, but in terms of purchasing power it will reach parity much more quickly given the macro monetary dynamics going on.
When reading history, I could never imagine how bad it would need to get to make a multi-generational citizen abandon their home country and immigrate elsewhere.
I have my answer today. They do so when there is no reasonable path to a survivable future.
There are times where a reasonable person can see and know everything will burn, because there is nothing that can stop it, and the only thing you can do is remove yourself and your family from the path of that burn.
i guess the real message is the boom is over if you want cushy or easy money
I agree with you, but that is only for right now.
7-10 years from now, I see no new tech jobs and the same work shouldered by a decreasing number of people until they vanish with no replacement.
Chaotic whipsaws from disruption or other things can break brittle systems. Resilient systems don't have these problems, but they are only resilient because of their decentralization and lack of single points of failure (SPOF).
Profit through money printing optimizes for SPOFs, and there are no existing incentives that can produce any other behavior. Its a terrible fate of societies which embrace money-printing.
1 - Microsoft investing 3bn USD in India-based developers: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-invest-3-bln-ex...
2 - Microsoft having 4700 H1B filings for fiscal 2025: https://www.myvisajobs.com/employer/microsoft/
Utterly predictable behavior by Satya Nadella.
Preferably at a lower cost, though...
If the point of the program is A, and you think it's being used as B, it's fair to ask if the point of the program is really A or if it's actually B.
Just pointing that out or asking the question does not mean you "hate immigrants".
You might! But I don't think it's guaranteed.
I think the language speaks for itself
Most engineers (H1Bs, and not) I’ve met aren’t exceptional. Saying that isn’t xenophobic.
I mean lol..have u heard of american-czech CEO doing that to americans with czechs. Not really right...
What’s really bizarre is that when the CEO happens to be Indian American, there’s a problem and a conspiracy.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mic...
One of the most unconventional things he taught me was that “our highest obligation is to employees and their families. Second is to investors. Third is to the communities we operate in. Obviously don’t ever say this in a board meeting or investor conference”.
And he meant it. When products got cancelled, people got reassigned. Terminations for poor performance happened but were individual cases.
I’m quite sure the idea of firing people to goose the share price never even crossed his mind.
I suspect it’s related to the stock buyback safe harbor rule (Rule 10b-18.) Layoff announcements used to be a sign of a company in crisis, now the stock price often immediately rises, perhaps because shareholders are anticipating a short-term windfall.
It was a first, and then the entire collection of CEOs showcased their herd mentality by jumping on that bandwagon. It's kinda like the anti-poaching collusion that happened... gosh, 10 years ago!
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
...only, this time, there's some bullshit "economic headwinds" arguments being advanced as reasons for these layoffs.
I remember experiencing actual belt-tightening in 2008-09, where it was disgraceful-but-necessary-to-save-the-company. It's nothing like that this time around.
FAANG total headcounts have been trending down for years now (2-3).
I doubt that has a big impact on Microsoft's gaming divisions, but it would help explain why they might not think the previous decades of growth will continue.
Don Mattrick has a lot to answer for. Microsoft was killing it during the seventh generation and he was able to burn everything down over a period of two days. Xbox never recovered after that.
Don Mattrick's mistakes were near-fatal, but Phil Spencer's done more than his equal share of torpedoing the Xbox division. The blame at this point can rest squarely on his shoulders.
Well, him, and the person who refuses to replace him.
Mattrick's missteps were not just about two days of revealing the XBox One, but really the entire second half of the 360's lifespan. The focus on Kinect to chase the Wii audience and the shuttering of many of their development studios left them thin on the exclusive front, which became a huge liability as they transitioned to the next generation.
But Spencer has a lot to answer for. He has been acquiring studios for 7 years now with little to show for it besides Obsidian having prolific output. Game Pass is flat, Xbox Cloud is flat, and their hardware is being outsold by Sony month over month, year over year. They seem to be pivoting to "Play Anywhere" which feels like the first phase of a three phase plan to retreat to the moat of Windows, where they can use Steam's momentum to ensure that games will at least appear on the platform. He inherited a mess but has made plenty of his own mistakes as well.
Mergers always lead to layoffs, games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.
Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall and cutting internal studios. It's much cheaper to just pay 3rd parties to release on Gamepass vs having to fund an entire games development.
I don't think we even see a real "Xbox" in the future. You'll have Xbox branded living room PCs with Windows. They're working on a gaming mode that I guess optimizes Win 11 a bit.
Getting a AAA games job will be much more difficult in the future.
They are struggling to make the case for buying games from the Windows Store instead of Steam and they are struggling to make the case to buy an Xbox Console instead of a Sony or Nintendo Console.
If we see Xbox branded PCs in the living room- that's more a sign of pivoting due to failure than anything else.
Even when D3D12 came out there was commentary how very close it was to Vulkan, which was supposedly largely the work of DICE engineers working for AMD to create the preliminary Mantle implementation.
The explosive growth of the gaming industry over the 90s-2010s was fueled by continuously unlocking new swathes of consumers. Games went from being for kids, to being for adults and kids, to people who would never consider themselves "gamers" with mobile, which in turn created the "whaling" industry of microtransaction fueled F2P. But there's only so many new, large groups of people with money. What we're seeing now is a correction, with growth estimates collapsing back down to what you'd expect from a mature industry.
If it's outsourced to 3rd parties, in theory, shouldn't the number of jobs be the same?
Or are you alluding to AAA games not being as viable to the industry as it once was?
I am asking mostly because I seldom play AAA games (for some reason most of them turn me off), and I mostly play indie or retro titles. But I always recognized myself as an outlier, and I would presume most people are primarily interested in the big releases.
Historically, games have actually performed extremely well in economic downturns.
Likely because they're extremely cheap entertainment if you count $ per hour of entertainment, but that's just my view on it.
And gaming as a whole is doing great. The only part that's falling off a cliff is the woke garbage life service games AAA studios have been releasing for the last ~10 yrs or so.
Whenever the studios didn't make dumb political messaging the core of the game... And instead made a good gameplay loop first, they've generally succeeded pretty well. It takes skill to make a game centered around political messaging and have it be good, (e.g. spec ops the line, MGS, metaphor:refantazio ), and none of the woke garbage that flopped ever had anything even attempting to create a world in which this messaging made sense. So we're left with completely nonsensical catering to politics no average person cares about whatsoever.
I mean we've even got single dev games that got to the charts of steam (schedule I).
I could easily be wrong; I can't say I've thoroughly perused every layoff statement from big tech, but I frankly don't even see how it would be positive PR that you're replacing workers with machines, much less worth outright lying about.
> Microsoft Corp. began job cuts that will impact about 9,000 workers, its second major wave of layoffs this year as it seeks to control costs while ramping up on artificial intelligence spending.
And AI is a bullet point in the "Takeaways, powered by Bloomberg AI" section as well.
> Surprisingly no mention of AI in an article about mass layoffs at a tech company.
Sorry if I misunderstood.
If every third 22 year old isn't making 200K, how are you going to sustain a market of crapshacks "worth" 1M?
My mostly uninformed worse case estimate is a large portion of these companies become something like the "body shops" (I believe MS has some association with Accenture, so that'd fit) where they maintain a minimal US presence for (mostly) customer facing "sales"/"high touch" positions so they have someone to broker deals and contracts with the (often clueless, IME) F500s, and then outsource all implementation work offshore. Same goes for some large portion of "important" managers.
For the "deep"/important/critical technical work, there will likely be staff retained on-shore, while the "boring" CRUD-type work that comprises some portion of the FANNAGS (whatever) is done overseas.
It's unlikely, say, for Google Search or AWS EC2 or something critical at MS (M365 maybe?) to be totally off-shored, but lesser services/functions are a likely target. (I know this is already happening to some extent at these companies; I've heard from reputable sources there's some large services that were nearly entirely built by staffing firms)
Basically, I think it's two things: we've reached the end of stratospheric growth in "tech" (sorry I just don't see the LLM wave getting there; a million SAAS thingys to "vibe code" a React calorie tracker ain't it), there's a massive surplus from the ZIRP era paired with some sort of obvious recession happening (or that's been going on for a while).
It's also a reset of sorts--look I'm as "pro software" as the next commentator here, but it's pretty absurd to think that there's loads of people making 200K+ to write CRUD stuff. There's just not a "shortage" in any way for any of these skills, as anyone doing a job search can attest.
This type of pay is really only "rational" in the markets where the cost of living has skyrocketed in the manner it has (largely/entirely a function of the "growth" era in SF/Seattle/Austin). It never seemed sustainable, and I suspected there would be some abrupt end when the "learn to code" era really took off.
On a positive note, perhaps those cities would be more affordable, but the in-elasticity of housing prices on the "way down" are always a problem for buyers.
Sounds like a Monopoly. Why bother building something new?
Teams is sort of tolerable now, but still feels terrible and lacks many of slacks niceties. The rest of their productivity stuff is terrible and slow. It’s embarrassing really.
From what I read Azure is a border line dumpster fire.
Then what LLM integration do they really have in their software apps?
And, then of course there's the "do as the competitors do", where when employees DO BRING UP good alternatives, the same aforementioned type of purchasers use the argument: "Well, lots of other firms and even our competitors use Microsoft...so why not stick with Microsoft...etc?"
Years ago, there used to be the phrase: "No one got fired for buying IBM...". I suppose nowadays you swap that brand out with "Microsoft", or "Google", etc. This rabbit hole goes really deep....but i encourage the interested to look up this IBM phrase, and you'll get tons of literature on why companies make purchasing decisions, and more importantly why they're often poor decisions.
Accenture, Deloitte, et al are some of the only businesses that are "trusted partners" for the big F500s* or the only firms that are sufficiently capitalized/insured etc etc such that they can "win" the big jobs. Quality and such doesn't matter much--if you and I could spin up and LLC tomorrow with the ability to deliver something at 10x the quality in half the time, it literally wouldn't matter, for exactly those reasons. It's an identical situation to buying services/software from MS.
*the amount of work outsourced at these places is staggering, speaking from experience.
American companies have been trying to replace American works for decades....this is not new. I wonder if trying to stop folks trying to make a simple decent living in the U.s. is not the right approach? ...Rather, i think the focus should be against the leaders of the American companies...Because they seem to be the ones pushing to get rid of ALL workers...sure, for now, they're trying to replace American workers, but soon enough they'll want to get rid of the H1B workers too...and eventually get rid of ANY/ALL workers if it means they can squeeze as much money for themselves.
If/When AI and robots come en masse to "steal jobs", would you blame the workers who get kicked out of the companies (even if they had upskilled themselves), or would you blame the leaders who kicked the people out? With all due respect, my opinion is that i think you're blaming the wrong people.
meanwhile revenue is up 15% YOY