back to article Microsoft chucks bigger salaries and cash bonuses at staff

Cash is the new king in Microsoft's battle to recruit and retain talent against the twin gravitational forces of Google and Facebook. The world's largest software company told employees on Thursday that it's giving them pay raises and changing the way it awards bonuses beginning this September. Bonuses are getting bigger and …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Anyone working for any of those companies...

    is already a corporate tool who has no identity or purpose in the first place. Paying them more will not help (or hurt).

    Its Mono & Ubuntu from here on out...

    1. Alastair 7

      What a load of rubbish

      Just because you work for a big organisation does not make you a 'corporate tool'. I'd love to have Google's "20% time" in my job.

  2. Mikel
    Go

    Read the mini-msft link comments

    As always that's where the 'softies disgruntle. It's precious, their disconnect. You would not believe how far they are from the real world unless you read them yourself.

  3. David Gale

    Dear Mr Ballmer...

    Dear Mr Ballmer

    First you have to create an environment where employees have a shared vision of the way forward, THEN you have to pay them a competitive rate. Unfortunately, a large part of the talent has already left, leaving the corporate clones and lawyers that Microsoft took onboard as it moved to the critical mass of a self-replicating bureaucracy.

    My advice? Fight the war on your terms, not those of the opposition. Stop chasing point solutions in the Cloud and start leveraging the integration capability of your product stack. Do that properly and you can and will annihilate the opposition.

    David Gale

    CEO

    SITFO.org

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dont pay for Bloat !

    This post coincided with my daughters PC Crashing after a 30 minute download of .NET 4.0 all so she could run a 500KB program for her maths homework, I'm sure I'll sort it out as I always do but MS Seriously need to get back on the cutting edge, where they are paying staff for quality not quantity. I am so close to giving in to her and getting an iPad.

    MS May still have the hearts and mind of the corporate world but they are rapidly loosing it in the home market.

    1. Sentient

      dial up

      50mb download takes you half an hour?

      Downloads crashing your pc?

      I wouldn't blame it on .NET but on your daughters PC.

      http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=0a391abd-25c1-4fc0-919f-b21f31ab88b7

      BTW with .NET4 there's a client profile developers can use that requires a smaller than 50mb download.

  5. Asgard
    Unhappy

    About time, but too late for many.

    "Through our history, we have been THE place people came when they wanted to make a difference in the world through software, hardware and services." ... and ... "Microsoft chucks bigger salaries and cash bonuses at staff"

    It shows Microsoft didn't give a big enough reward to the people who created its products until now. Like so many bosses in so many companies, the bosses don't give their staff a good enough share of the money earned from the work of the staff, until the bosses are finally threatened with staff leaving and going to their competitors, who give their staff better opportunities. I've seen this pattern repeat in so many companies, so many times.

    The bosses don't reward the staff for the work they do, (the staff don't share in what they earn the bosses). The bosses only pay the staff just enough to hold onto the staff. So often its not a return on investment for the huge amounts of money some staff earn their bosses.

    1. jonathanb Silver badge

      It is not as simple as that

      Back when MSFT was a growth stock, its stock options were worth a lot more than they are now, so staff remuneration packages were worth a lot more, that means the remuneration package needs to be adjusted to reflect the new reality, and hopefully incentivise staff into turning the company back into a growth stock.

      Facebook is a pre-IPO company, so its stock options are potentially worth millions when the IPO does go ahead, and the company is far enough developed and has private equity offerings to indicate that it is a pretty safe bet that it will be.

      Google is still a growth stock that doesn't pay dividents - dividends are bad news for stock options as they take money out of the company, so its stock options are likely to be worth more than Microsofts. Probably less than Facebook, but they do have the advantage over Facebook that you can cash them in now.

  6. Doug 3
    WTF?

    not taking effect til Sept? Maybe waiting to bury losses in deferred revenue.

    Deferring something like this doesn't make sense because it's not going to stop people from leaving now. Deferring this into Sept( end of Q1 ) shows that they are more concerned with how to manipulate their financial statements. Deferring until Sept shows that they have something planned for Q2 which they can use to bury the cost of increasing expenses via a salary boost.

    What is planned for Q2 release? Can it be Windows 8 coupons with all Windows 7 based systems?

    WTF because do they really think their employees are this dumb?

  7. Zaxxon

    Can't Compare CA salaries vs WA

    You really can't directly compare salaries of engineers in largely California based companies like Google and Facebook, vs Washington state salaries. California (and especially the SF bay area where Google and Facebook are) has much higher cost of living and thus higher wages. 90K in WA is easily better than 100K in CA. MS employees are not missing out on anything there. Now the weather on the other hand....

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    it s clear to me...

    that america is paying medics better than engineers and i don t understand why... does america think that intelligence is easy to find and to grow? at medicine people have only to learn, at mathematics people have to think that s why mathematics have such a long history of unsuccessful geniuses - see poisson and galois! no wander fukushima happened

  9. cloudberry
    Flame

    why the tortured language?

    "Employees have gone over to the offices of rivals in Microsoft's back yard of Washington State as well as in other geographies."

    "Geographies"?! When I walk from A to B, I'm not going to another "geography". I'm going to another place.

    "Microsoft shares are not a growth commodity, ..."

    No stock is a commodity. Why not simply say that Microsoft's stock price is not growing?

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