Microsoft staff cuts due next month? Microsoft is rumored to be preparing for redundancies, with staff expected to be cut on January 15. MiniMicrosoft, a blog dedicated to watching the company, has reported snippets of reports talking of internal reorganizations amid budget cuts and staff interviewing for their jobs in the server and tools business and in the …
We're starting to see the labor dearth caused by the dot-com bust, and it would be nice if students are further discouraged by some newsworthy cuts at Microsoft.
I get annoyed by the large number of junior programmers that think they have a potential career track into Microsoft (or the video games industry), and I would enjoy posting the eventual El Reg story on the cafeteria corkboard to crush their dreams and make them less likely to leave.
To quote the article:
"meetings and interrogations about the work they are doing"
It's taken this long for M$ to realise that their organisation is top heavy, bloated, slow, expensive, people who are hanging around but wtf are you doing taking resource - does this sound familiar folks ?
It amazes me that it takes 91,000 people to write a half arsed OS, shite browser, wayyyyyyyyyy overpriced office suite, a search engine that can't find dick and an inferior games console. If anyone can add to this list please feel free.
M$ wasting YOUR money !
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You must have worked for Lehman Bothers with your wonderful degree of foresight or maybe a farmyard judging by your debating skills. Ever heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns or Diseconomies of Scale ?
Oh and how much more do you think M$ would have been in it, after dumping such a lemon on the World as Vista, to pay $47.5 Billion for Yahoo? Even a blind,deaf, one legged baboon could have seen this coming. So where does that leave you ?
:0)
The numbers being talked about internally are around the 10% range. The "interrogation" comments are spot-on... and rather disgraceful that a company can treat any human being the way that they are. But for most of Microsoft... they dwell in a right-to-work state so nothing can really be done about it.
-anony
I'm not a Microsoft Employee, but know a few former and current ones. "Career maximum" is not “age-related discrimination".
Career Maximum means your management believes you are at the highest level you are capable of handling. If you are a great coder, but unable to handle the running meetings to bring together multiple groups to agree on common functionality for a feature, and you are considered unlikely to develop this skill... Well, you can't really expect a promotion to the level where that would be your job, can you?
Now, the actual implementation of this isn't perfect- How long do you wait before you decide someone is unlikely to develop a skill? How do you decide that someone can't, say, run a meeting? You even have a bit of a skew, in that an older employee is likely to have been promoted a few times, so they are more likely to have reached whatever maximum they might have. And what do you do with an employee who has reached their maximum? Keep them happy, well fed, and in the same level of a job, or get rid of them and hire a new person who might top out higher?
Of course, individual managers might use this as a tool to discriminate against older employees, or even blue eyed employees with six fingers on their left hand, but that’s true of any tool with any sort of subjective metric.
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