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My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement.
I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent.
In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout.
I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
I also think there's been a drastic shift in the working culture of tech/engineering spaces, in general, over the last 15 years. From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.
I did used to work for a consulting firm about a decade ago, and I was leading a staff augmentation project with another company and I was once chastised for saying "hey guys" in a chat because there were women in the group. I was encouraged to use "y'all" but not wanting to sound like I was from the south, I just used "peeps" which was somehow okay.
I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.
Someone reported him for not warning the room about suicidal ideation before saying it and not considering that it might be triggering. He was actually reprimanded.
Unfortunately typical of the place. I left soon after.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47566898
This whole language purity test, whether from the left or right, is just a load of performative bollocks.
- the employee pulled off the impossible
- may be already burnt out or on the brink of emotional collapse
- the "jump out of window" would have been as much of a joke as it was a coping response
- the righteous language policewoman does not feel empathy to personally ask him, how he is doing
- instead, she goes to HR to report him
- this unexpected hostility breaks the camel's back and what might have been interpreted as a joke actually wasn't. Still emotionally drained and now backstabbed, the person commits.
In short: policing voice was more important than taking a potential signal seriously. How is it not a despicable behavior in this situation?
PS: I hereby permit the commenters to reprimand me for the stereotype-based guess.
It doesn't, this kind of language policing is all about control and power.
A friend of mine worked as consultant with a big bank in London. They would get weekly emails about what kind of "newspeak" is allowed or not.
They seriously banned terms such as an "all hands meeting".
Woke 1 was absolutely crazy.
Nothing about productivity or culture in there.
So invariably they spend far too much time and effort addressing the person who had an issue with handedness, without consideration of all the other people that's impacting.
You can't please everyone, but if you're HR, you try.
That feels like the covid amnesty thing to me. Say the previous "version" of x was insane and we should just blanket forgive and forget about it. Kind of a rejecting all responsibility.
(besides, i dont think there is a woke 1/2 in the first place IMO)
I still don't understand what happened.
She was told to not use "Latino"; but to use "LatinX" instead. What hurt more was the implication that she was being insensitive.
When I learned of it, I asked my Mexican friends which one they preferred. None of them had heard of "LatinX" and were as confused as I was.
I remember reading about some similar thing with French and the French president’s wife responding that the language was beautiful the way it was and they don’t need outsiders telling them how to gender (or not) their words.
I feel like the affluent just love to invent new words to show the “others” that aren’t using it how backwards they are, and how the affluent are truly enlightened.
Your measurements of homelessness are dumb and not representative of the condition most people think of when they are thinking of homelessness.
Someone who you generously take in now has a roof over their head but they have literally zero protections - you can argue with them tomorrow and be within your rights to throw them out.
Someone with nowhere at all to stay might die of the cold tonight.
Homelessness charities absolutely want to know which case you are in. They require different interventions with different priorities.
You miss my point so thoroughly, it can only be genius. I know that it's not true. My son's not homeless. The other guy implied it, because he can't come up with a logical test of who and who isn't homeless.
It's just so easy to mock terms and phrases of art, to spin up the general public.
People like Chris Rufo, who mine legal, bureaucratic, technical, etc. phrases, are trolls.
It’s essentially the same word too:
“Un” == “less” “Home” == “house”
It’s just another example of the Euphemism Treadmill.
LatinX is awful. An AIM screen name from 1998.
That x is generally pronounced as an “e” in Spanish (i.e. “latine”, not “latin eks” or “latinks” and most certainly not “latinj”, as the j sound of x is only before a vowel, e.g. xavier = javier).
But why write an x and not an e? Because there are consonants that change their sound with an “e”. So, say, the word “chicos” (boys) and “chicas” (girls) would be written as “chiques” in neutral because the c sounds like an s and not like a k with an e in front… but “chiques” doesn’t look like “chicos”… visually it’s not recognizable… while “chicxs” is much easier to parse.
This is how it works. I don’t care to enter a discussion of whether this is nice or not, good or bad. I’ll just leave with the anecdote that I once participated in a project that involved a big survey written in the traditional “neutral” form, which consists of writing “chicos/as” to covers both binary genders. That form quickly becomes very hard to read… “Los chicos/as están sentados/as con sus nuevos/as compañeros/as”. Use of the x has a lot of pushback from some people, but all in all, it’s easier to adapt to.
Judging something and understanding something are different processes. The RAE creates guidelines, but people often speak and write without following them, and that's still worthy of examination.
It is interesting how different locations find different things offensive. Only when I was living in Europe for a while (doing Blizzard Customer Service) did I became aware of how big a deal the usage of N word was, as over here the K-word (look up "South Africa k-word" if you don't know it) is the word of choice for the, unevolved, die hard racists.
Was similarly unaware, (but not really surprised in hindsight) how World War II references were much better left avoided and Nazi references an enormous no-no. Over here references to Nazism are very rare and while South Africans did fight and die for the Allies in Europe, the impact of WW2 over here was no where near what it was like for most of the rest of the world.
We don’t have much of an Arabic community here.
And no it's not just privileged white people. My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.
It often leaks information the speaker didn’t intend to share. e.g., “I met a friend. She was late.”
Did the speaker mean or care to share to gender of this friend? Is it relevant? I don’t think so.
And I find it especially interesting when people argue for gender-neutral plurals, but then happily use gendered noun. It sort of feels like “everyone must stay in their lane” type of expectation.
Even the patriarchy argument is weird. The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context. Wanna stick it to patriarchy? Nix the gender from all languages!
Did they? English used to be gendered but lost it ~1000 years ago.
Languages evolve in odd ways and don’t think the patriarchy or religion have much to do with it.
If English were to truly evolve to be non-gendered, there would be no "he/him/them" or "she/her/them", only "it/that/those".
"Spotkałem kolegę" - "I [male] met a [male] friend."
"Spotkałam kolegę" - "I [female] met a [male] friend."
"Spotkałem koleżankę" - "I [male] met a [female] friend."
"Spotkałam koleżankę" - "I [female] met a [female] friend."
Notice the different ending (em/am) depending on whether a male or female is speaking.
Yes, many languages have no gender or have a generic option besides genders.
I always find this very annoying in Roman languages, where every object has an arbitrary gender, and to make matters worse it's not always the same. A word that is female in Spanish could be male in Italian or Portuguese. It trips me up a lot and it's annoying because the gender is just some arbitrary thing there, it has no meaning because objects have no gender. If we're talking about people I can understand but things?
But languages are not very logical. They are something that melted together over centuries out of habit.
It’s no surprise that the strongest (mainstream) gendered languages are also known as the ‘Romance languages’.
Is it logically simpler in some ways to not have it? Of course. Let’s not even talk about how complex gendered verb conjugations are in Spanish or Portuguese, for example.
But it does allow a lot of beautiful flourishes that add a lot of color.
Nonetheless I appreciate a perspective from someone who has an affiliation with the culture term refers to.
But my friends and in the LGBT+ communities chat groups I only see people using the x and @.
I find it interesting that the Hispanic LGBTQ+ community would use LatinX. How is this even pronounced in Spanish? Latin-equis? Or is it the English Latin-ex?
Like I said nobody pronounces either option because it's unpronounceable. That's why the 'e' is a better option IMO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261926
I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.
Grammatical gender is not intrinsically sexist and doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you try to analyze it to tease out what patriarchs were thinking when they added these forms, because largely they never thought about it at all. The forms evolved over hundreds of years.
I can't say I follow these things too closely, and I do find them silly, but I think that, at least for languages that have "genders", this mostly comes from words describing professions that "seem gendered". I don't think many people care if a bag is feminine or masculine.
For example, in French, a doctor is "masculine", but a secretary is feminine. The point was that young girls would see these words and figure, "I can't be a doctor because I'm not a man. Guess I'll just be a nurse (which is feminine, but also has a masculine form)".
Now, I think there may be some kind of truth to the fact that many such professions were traditionally held by people of the "same gender". And, now that these traditions don't hold as much anymore, especially for "prestigious" professions, people want to make a point that there's a difference, especially in things like politics and medicine.
Of course, I don't remember much noise being made about how to call a woman who picks up garbage (though there are quite a few) or does construction work (haven't seen that many).
Nachweise erbeten (citations, please). :)
My phrasing was ambiguous and my German is rusty, hence the archaic translation.
1. [https://www.dwds.de/wb/Maid]
If you look up the list of exceptions to the whole "-a = feminine, -o = masculine" in Spanish, it's incredibly long (and covers many of the most common words). Similarly there are a whole bunch where the gender is correct, but the article is swapped because it sounds better. The gender of specific words is also arbitrary, and doesn't agree between the various Romance languages.
This whole thing is just the leftover pieces of Latin's 3x linguistic genders hanging around in our languages, and ceased to be related to actual gender centuries ago.
Yes, like "el agua" but agua is a female word. Soo confusing when you are learning it.
Was the eye roll part of the sarcasm or...? Colombian and other related Spanish speaking cultures do the same things, so what's her point, to feel like she's sticking it to the invisible spanish dude?
I'm Dutch myself and I hate many things in Dutch culture. Especially those stemming from the calvinist influences. It's one of the reasons I don't live there anymore.
And they are also catching up on feminism. Until recently here in Spain a woman would have to prove there had been violence when claiming rape. There was a big headline-making case where some rapists went free (well until supreme court appeal): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Manada_rape_case It led to the "only yes is yes" law which was already prevalent in other countries.
Also, convicting people without proof, that’s not something to be proud of. (This also proves they live in a matriarchy)
They literally videotaped it and shared the video in a group chat.
There was no question of whether the assault happened, only whether it met the bar for the more severe crime.
that's just biology and it's the case the world over, not only spanish countries.
Classifying a Latina as a Latino or vice-versa will get you in a pretty serious fight in a lot of places.
I'd recommend getting out a bit more or reading a bit more:
> According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[7][21][22] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language."[20][23] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.[24][25] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.[21] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
> Despite the increase in awareness, use of the term to describe oneself has not greatly increased over time.[4] As of 2018, use of the term Latinx was limited nearly exclusively to the United States.[29] Manuel Vargas writes that people from Latin America ordinarily would not think of themselves using the term unless they reside in the United States.[29]
Maybe it didn't technically originate in privileged English speakers but it certainly seems to have arisen in popularity among them.
As someone who lives in a 99% hispanic region in the US, I've never heard anyone use this term to identify themselves. We're right on the border and that sort of thing seems to mainly happen in larger cities north of here.
To the extent that the term has become widespread, it seems to have piggybacked on other diversity and inclusion efforts. People who identify as Latino/Latina seem overwhelmingly to dislike the term.
> Among Hispanic and Latino Americans, knowledge of the term is not widespread, and reception to the term as a potential classifier for the entire Hispanic/Latino population has been overwhelmingly negative. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly half of U.S. Hispanics were not aware of the term Latinx; of those aware of it, 75% said it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, preferring instead the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" by large margins.
Ironically, the also relatively uncommon “Latine” is in decline but still more popular than Latinx for all of recorded Google trends history. Except in the US. Of course.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=latinx,L...
9/10 Latinos would roll their eyes and get back to doing actual work, they don't have time to be offended.
It's all a performance to them anyway, and I'm not playing the game.
and then
> I was encouraged to use "y'all" [..] I thought that was a bridge too far.
I wonder if there might be a small bias on your part. The criticism you deem constructive everyone shall endure, but the other criticism you deem a bridge too far you yourself shall not endure.
People get lumped into "guys" and feel excluded. That's such a different bar than feeling offended.
It's ok for you to say, "I'm sorry my language makes you feel excluded, but I'm not going to change" and it's ok for someone to think less of you as a result.
Why does everyone jump to the idea that people who want more inclusive language are offended? Or that the critique being offered here is that the language is offensive?
(Granted, sometimes that is the critique. Plenty of casual racism or ableism is offensive. But that's not the case with "guys".)
As a woman in this industry, being told that using “guys” to address mixed groups is non-inclusive/insufficiently considerate/worth thinking less of me for (just wow) is much worse than being addressed by “guys” when I’m in a mixed group.
Like… we have real problems with equality in tech, right?
People deliberately choosing not to try to honor those preferences are making a choice with a small impact. No one is claiming it's a big deal. But honoring preferences can make people feel unhappy.
As can honoring a preference that you find silly.
It turns out, this is pretty simple human negotiation stuff -- we can all express a preference and we can all choose to not honor it. And we have to be comfortable with the idea someone might think less of someone else a little bit as a result.
"I interpret a commonly used word or phrase as meaning something other than what the dictionary says that it means, and differently from what pretty much everyone, for hundreds of years, has intended it to mean when they say it, and so every time I hear it used by anyone that makes me unhappy so please stop using that word or phrase around me" is a pretty strange request that some people might find a bit unreasonable. At least it might not be too hard for some to constantly remember to alter their vocabulary around specific people.
In terms of human negotiation, part of working in a professional environment, or any large group of mixed company, involves understanding that you may not have your every preference catered to and that for some preferences it can even be impolite to impose on the group by asking them to take your weird hang up into account. The strength/impact of the preference, the size of the group and how well you all know each other will have to factor into that though.
I suspect that "I'll just try to remember and understand that people who say 'you guys' use it to mean what the dictionary says that it means" is a more reasonable position than "Every one of the 200,000+ people who work for the same company that I work for should alter their vocabulary to accommodate my personal preference because I want to cling to a non-standard definition of that particular phrase and I'll judge anyone who refuses to comply"
You are free to consider my request unreasonable. The consequence is a minor one -- I'll know I asked and you declined, and you'll lose some fractional amount of social capital with me.
Where in that does it say I expect my preferences to be catered to?
The whole interaction goes like this: "I feel excluded by 'guys', any chance we could settle on something else?" "No" "Ok" (-1 reputation with me)
Why do you make this out like it's some major thing to have someone ask, and then decline? You have agency, you are allowed to say no. I genuinely don't understand the intensity with which you and others respond with.
> "I feel excluded by 'guys', any chance we could settle on something else?"
In agreeing to your preference this person can no longer use the word 'guys' at all, ever? Or they can, but before doing so must first scan the faces of everyone in the group and if they see you then use an alternate?
This is the problem with personal preferences. They are personal to you, not to anyone else.
If your company orders pizza for lunch and your personal preference is for no pepperoni, then expect that the person placing the order asks for a cheese pizza and several pepperoni pizzas. Don't expect that everyone gets cheese pizza.
I'll try to explain. I think it's a very strange request to make, especially to people you aren't close to like random co-workers. Imposing on others can put them in an uncomfortable position. It would be easier for them to say "No, if you choose to feel excluded by an explicitly and objectively inclusive phrase with full knowledge that it isn't being used with any intention to exclude you, that's 100% a 'you' problem. Please handle your shit and don't make your problem into everyone else's problem.", but most people probably won't want to be rude, so many will just agree. Depending on the power dynamic in play, some people may feel that they have little choice at all, or that the consequences of non-compliance could be career limiting.
For you the whole interaction is the request, followed by their response, followed by your judgement, but for the polite others it involves making an active effort to be conscious of every moment where you're within earshot, remembering the common and innocuous phrase that upsets you for some strange reason, and then actively changing the way they'd normally express themselves to others in order to accommodate you. In addition to having to constantly remember to self-censor, it also means risking feeling like shit if they happen to slip up, or worse, worrying about the impacts their mistake might have on their career or the work.
It's absolutely not the most demanding demand you could place on another person, but it isn't nothing either, and when the reasons for that demand don't make a lot of sense, having to actively make and continuously maintain that effort can feel like a larger imposition than it might otherwise, especially in a busy environment where there's work to be done and people's heads are already filled with other concerns.
A request like that could easily be seen as rude, self-centered, or off-putting in a professional environment even when the same request made to your friends and family would likely be better received. Being able to clearly explain why you have the issue you do in a relatable way might help avoid some of those negative feelings. If it isn't a deliberate choice on your part to twist other people's innocently spoken words by willfully ignoring the very definition of them and turning them into something that makes you feel bad inside, and you find that even if you try you can't help but feel that way about it, in all sincerity, I'd recommend finding and speaking with a therapist about it.
Another way to think about this is as a parallel to microaggressions. Little things that may seem innocuous or not that big a deal on their own, but that add a little bit of emotional or cognitive load to someone's day.
Notice how in China, which has its shit together and is gradually outpacing the West, no one is asking others if they could avoid using a common term that makes them, individually, uncomfortable. That is one reason your behaviour seems a "major thing": it shows from your part a disrespect of social harmony, which is an important thing for a productive society.
They are doing damnatio memoriae on a footballer (who plays for Real Madrid), canceling his branded products, no longer mentioning him in news stories, and saying he should stay out of China, because he indirectly implied that Mao was a dictator.
So, OK, that's a kind of social harmony: they're very unified in telling you what you mustn't even suggest.
China is outpacing the West but it's not all on the good metrics.
“I’m not going to do that. Moving on.”
Everyone is out here thinking I'm policing, correcting, eradicating, or some other verbing. When really I'm asking you to inconvenience yourself to stop inconveniencing me.
You are well within your rights to be like, "no". I don't understand this compulsion to make either party into some villain.
If someone replies as the GP suggested, they will be villainized by some subset of the people who hear that reply. In a professional setting, that could involve a visit from HR and/or be a career-limiting move, depending on the company culture.
It doesn't matter if you understand it or not. It happens, and that's what matters.
Yes.
> solve
No that's not solving anything.
Other folks, myself included, do feel excluded by "guys" as a gender neutral term. I'm not offended, but I do appreciate when people offer something else.
But to your later point, I don't think it's either/or. We can do both.
I’m sorry that you find it exclusionary. What I find exclusionary is people telling me that it’s justifiable to think less of me for using that term, or comparing continuing to use the term to their grandmother who still uses the N word.
For what it’s worth I have stopped using “you guys” at work except for in “safe spaces” because I don’t want to deal with this sort of judgement. But I find the “it costs you nothing!” defense of word policing to be completely unconvincing.
You are, in essence, saying, "I want you to think differently."
I made no claim that it costs nothing. Changing language use is non trivial. Which is why I never demand it. I make a preference known, you can act on it or not.
I made the claim that: a) it does not offend me and b) I prefer others not use it and c) if I've expressed my preference and you choose not to honor that preference, it will diminish my opinions towards you.
This is how preferences work. We communicate them. Others find the request reasonable or not and act accordingly. If my preference was no music playing in desk areas, and you played music in the desk area, I'd think less of you as a result. If you gave me a nickname and I asked you not to use it, and you still used it, I'd think less of you.
I try my best not to offend anyone at work, but policing my language to match the preferences of everyone around me would be exhausting. I grew up speaking a non-prestige dialect. I have a lifetime of experience policing my words. It can be exhausting. It’s easy to underestimate the mental cost if you speak a prestige dialect.
I spent a few decades being made fun of for saying y’all. I now find it a bit weird people who would have made fun of me for using it 20 years ago now use it themselves. I’m not offended by it, but my preference would be that non-southerners don’t use it.
However, I realize that it would be a bit much to ask that of everyone I interact with. And if I did it would be insane to label people who didn’t comply assholes.
I prefer that people that people don’t use learnings instead of lessons. I prefer not to be referred to as a USian. But I don’t expect people to follow my preferences.
Not the person you're replying to, but my take on it: because in the grand scheme of things it's small potatoes, and putting even a minor burden onto someone else to change their language seems unreasonable and unnecessary.
People aren’t assholes just because they don’t accommodate your every preference.
> Why is it unreasonable to say, "I'd prefer something other than USian"?
Because all I’ve done is to fix my minor annoyance by making it the speaker’s minor annoyance.
And many people don’t like the term American, so now the speaker has to decide whether to please me or other people in the group, or come up with some ridiculous compromise like Citizen of the United States.
A big part of being an adult is dealing with minor annoyances.
This is both trivially true (I recognize that everyone has the right to form their own opinions of everything) and still counter to things I assume you believe (such as: people shouldn’t make assumptions about others based on their gender or skin color).
I do want you to think differently. I want you to think that people who continue to use a phrase widely considered to be gender neutral are not in fact your enemies. Some of them probably are your allies.
For what it’s worth, if I knew you in real life and you made that preference known to me, I would try to respect it, but that respect would depend on the closeness of our relationship. It’s hard to remember every preference of someone you meet once every two months, but I don’t like to be an asshole and try to respect the preferences of people I interact with.
The problem though is that somewhere along the line, continuing to use “you guys” became a sort of reverse shibboleth among a certain set of people who try to use things like whether someone uses “you guys” or whether they have their pronouns set on their profile to determine whether they are allies or, presumably, enemies. And yeah, I do object to that sort of mindset.
From there, if I only see you once every few months I don't expect you to remember flawlessly. The only time I judge someone is if they say no.
As for pronouns, they are a useful signal, but not the entire signal. Like, their presence indicates "this person might be safer", their absence indicates nothing.
I would also take issue with reasonableness of the request. You concede it does not offend you, and that it's merely a preference. I also have a myriad of preferences about speech: the intonation, accent, the grammatical constructions, the words, etc. To ask of other people, whom I don't even know intimately, to match my preferences is something else altogether. It's to impose my preferences over that person's dialect or ideolect, which is also rightly frowned upon.
And it's never couched as a correction. It's always an expression of the impact on me, "Hey all, I know this is a bit of a hang up, but the use of 'guys' feels exclusionary to me, any chance folks would try alternatives? Folks, peeps, y'all, etc?"
My personal experience in a UK/US company as a non-native English speaker includes this specific case. I still remember this very example (I.e., the use of "guys") being used as an example of noninclusive language from day-2 in the company (it was in some policy), 5 years later. It requires a nontrivial amount of energy and attention for me to self-police in a language that is already not my own, and I personally stress about it (including the few times I had slip-ups where I automatically said "hi guys" to a mixed group and corrected myself in a clumsy way). There are countless ways I could express my preference (speak slower, less accent when speaking, don't use idiomatic expressions or metaphors that are very language specific, maybe learn to pronounce my name how I pronounce it rather than english-ize it). I personally never expressed any of these because I wouldn't want to cause stress to anybody for something so minor, and I believe people will feel less free to talk with me.
This is just my opinion, but being someone who cares about not making others uncomfortable, I think we should all be realistic about what it really means to express such preferences at work, because it's not just a personal matter.
The scenario here is, "I feel excluded by 'guys', would you all feel ok using something else?"
You are a grown up, you can just say "No".
The consequences will be me having a slightly lower opinion of you as a person.
There's no eradication. I'm not asking you to stop using the word guys.
I get what you're saying on paper, but in the workforce, that's not how things go down.
What do you think of the scenario in which you ask someone to stop using “guys” when you’re around, and they comply but think less of you going forward?
That's an incredibly naive take. In many places, especially professional ones progressive/liberal/woke places, the consequences are much more than you having a slightly lower opinion of someone.
On the flip side, someone unwilling to do even the “small stuff” pretty much already lost the goodwill that they would be willing to do the “big stuff.”
Put another way, if you ask someone to take a small step for you, and they refuse, would you feel like they are more or less likely to take a big step?
Stop saying 'guys' is performative, it is not moving the needle at all on the big stuff. The strongest people also have strong wills, taking it or leaving it. They could be the best people to have on your side.
The majority of most jobs is performative and doesn't move the needle (mindless "How was your weekend?" chitchat, loads of unnecessary meetings, sales people saying "LFG", etc.). Getting so worked up about this one seems like an odd line in the sand.
> They could be the best people to have on your side.
It might be hard to know if they are so adamant about something so small.
You are reading into the words a message that was never intended, and that is on you, not the speaker.
There are words we use because they are familiar that are nevertheless hard to hear for some groups.
When that happens, one absolutely can share the impact of the words AND acknowledge no malicious intent. When I was a kid, "gay" meant bad. Tell you what, didn't feel good to hear it. "Hey, I'm gay" was met with, "Oh I didn't mean it like that". Like, sure, but also can we find another word for bad?
If this level of pedantry can be considered acceptable, how on earth do these folks justify/cope with terminology used in "empowerment" initiatives who often use very non-inclusive wording more so than "guys".
I've also worked with a woman who was extremely displeased to be greeted with "you guys". I found her absolutely insufferable.
The reason it feels bad to people who use "you guys" in a gender neutral way is what it says about the offended person. The offended person has a pet peeve, and if you don't accommodate it, it will be a problem. That's pretty much the definition of an insufferable person.
A person who is well-regulated wouldn't make a stink over something so trivial. Which then tells you that the person is going to make a similar stink over other trivial things. Ad infinitum.
She was, without a doubt, offended.
If another cis man was suddenly uncomfortable with "they", I'd attribute that to some fragile sense of masculinity or a weird anti-woke crusade, as was the case with most such cases in my life, and find it personally annoying.
I don't want to deliberately make other people uncomfortable with my language, but it does feel exhausting to second-guess yourself, having to double-check if any innocuous phrase might be misinterpreted as an underhanded aggression, preempting a correction we know will be awkward for both sides.
I think we'd do better to consider context more than the specific language...
Now you make him think twice about what he’s saying, of course he’s going to nitpick everything.
anyway I have always considered Hey guys as gender neutral.
Merriam Webster seems to agree by listing this as a secondary meaning.
used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex saw her and the rest of the guys.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/guy
and then
Somehow you missed: They did deal with it. The one they criticized did not.
Centuries ago, "thou" was singular second person and "you" was plural second person.
"Thou" got abandoned and "you" lost its original meaning to replace "thou" as the new singular second person.
"You guys" or "y'all" are simply attempts to re-introduce a needed pronoun.
I think it's all just normal evolution of language. I actually think it's kinda neat how different English-speaking subcultures found different ways to reintroduce the pronoun.
The normal way for languages to evolve is for words to spread into different (adjacent) forms in order to express more nuances of their original meaning(s). The collapse of words' meanings, and for basic things as (nominative case) pronouns no less, like it happened in English for "thou" and "you", is not fitting the definition of "normal" in the larger context of linguistics domain.
> All y'all is used in the Southern United States when a speaker wishes to include everyone being addressed. Y'all may refer to an indefinite set of members of a group, but all y'all definitively includes everyone in the group.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_y%27all
Also, is it just me or does that Wikipedia entry have zero citations? I thought Wikipedia was allergic to citation-free claims..
I'm guessing it's regional and/or group specific.
> guy: (...) person —used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex
This kind of culture is harder to achieve in a corporate environment IMO, but a good manager or two can keep the team spirit if they have a strong hand in the hiring process. But I think it is a much harder thing to do than at a small org.
But at a simple organizational level, the basic idea is that one manager shouldn't have more than 7 reports stands.
I kinda lucked out on my current boss, because this is basically how he approaches stuff. Going above that 4 person limit is how you get into no fun zone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes
Guy Fawkes is most notorious in the UK today as the progenitor of Guy Fawkes Night, where children solicit "a penny for the Guy?" and the funds raised ostensibly go to construct and burn a large straw effigy of Guy, in order to celebrate his defeat and the survival of the Parliament. He was executed, not by burning but by hanging, but nevertheless Guy Fawkes is the original Burning Man.
Guy Fawkes Night was imported to the United States during our independence, and it became Pope Night, a night of mayhem and anti-Catholic vandalism and hooliganism. George Washington once told his military troops to knock it off with the Pope Night shenanigans, because it was alienating Canadians.
So the term "guy" became genericized, beginning in Australia it seems, to refer to a grubby lower-class Catholic boy. After a few centuries of circulating in this way, it lost most of its derogatory connotation and became a generic way to refer to men or boys, and by extension, girls and women.
I don't take offense at being called "guy", nor would I if I were female, and especially because today in the USA, it is so generic and inoffensive. Nobody recalls its sordid roots, even if Pope Night is making a resurgence around here.
I'm sceptical of this alleged Australian connection. As far as I'm aware, the term started in England, spread to the US, and it is in the US that its usage really took off. In Australia, "guy"/"guys" as a term for a male or gender-neutral person was imported from the US in the second half of the 20th century.
Presumably you haven’t been living on “the other side” for a whole life. Try living decades in environments where you’re constantly devalued in little ways, and you too may grow to become resentful.
Now, maybe you were chastised, or maybe you were just asked politely and interpreted it as a reprimand. I wasn’t there, I can’t say, all I have is your side. But let’s say the person did chastise you. They could probably have been more polite about it, but how many times have they been polite before with no results? That’s maybe not your fault, but you did unwillingly contribute to that person’s exasperation that day.
All I’m saying is let’s have a little empathy towards others, even when they don’t have it towards us, because we all have days when we’re our best and days when we aren’t, and we don’t know what the other person is going through.
Edit: I want to thank the downvoters for not letting me forget HN has turned into a cesspool and spending long here isn’t healthy. This is the website where calling other people subhuman and cheering for their extermination is upvoted (I’m not referring to the parent comment, but something I’ve seen more than once) and calling for empathy and union is downvoted. With such a backwards inhumane cheering squad, it’s no wonder tech companies are what they are.
Empathy is important in a workforce but there's a difference between empathy and just policing language for no discernable reason. I think the reason you were downvoted wasn't the call to empathy but it was the insinuation that I somehow was not being empathetic in my comment, which perhaps I was not being empathetic but it seems irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Again, because you don’t have to deal with it constantly. Women are constantly being undermined.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91630773/theres-a-career-tax-on-...
> there's a difference between empathy and just policing language for no discernable reason.
And what I said in my comment is that I don’t know which happened to you, but that it’s important to understand that because you’re not suffering the everyday repercussions which are treated as “normal”, maybe you don’t really know which one it was either. That’s where the empathy comes in, it’s you reaching out to the person and talking about it, rather than just complaining about it on the internet.
> I think the reason you were downvoted wasn't the call to empathy
I was not referring to an isolated incident. In fact, I can fairly often predict when the worst people will come out to downvote and run (they never have the courage to comment). At this point I can assert with a good amount of confidence that HN has a severe dipshit problem.
> the insinuation that I somehow was not being empathetic in my comment
There was no such insinuation, but it is increasingly common on HN that people just read anything and foam at the mouth thinking they are being attacked. For a community which prides themselves on objectivity and correctness, there sure are a lot of assumptions and wrong interpretations.
In the last few years, I ended up at a bigtech co through an acquisition, and had been someone who was a go-between for solving issues across teams by having a good understanding of everyone else's codebases, tests, build processes, deployment, infrastructure etc. This papered over the culture of siloed development, refusals to think beyond single services etc. I would submit tests and patches, along with tickets describing the bug, impact statement, fix, test coverage, risk, and make myself on-call or directly supervise deployment, etc.
Attempting to continue that in an org x25 larger was met with people firing off angry emails to executives saying their authority was being undermined and made to look bad, when long standing issues were made trivial and fixed by "someone they had never met before", and wherever they came from can they please go back to. I have no idea what a lot of these people were spending so long doing, their commit history was often full of changes that would make you go think "???". I guess it's lucrative to run out the clock year after year on a 180k package, attending meetings where you argue that things are difficult and lets meet again in 3 months? After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.
If we asked your coworkers to tell us what happened, would they say "he was easy to work with and so generous with their time by fixing issues all over the org"?
Or would they say something completely different?
I don't think this is hard or complex. It's an easy question with a simple answer: do you like working with user foo? Whether you answer yes or no, why?
If virtually all your coworkers answer no, and the org feels it's in their interest to kick you out, then what lesson do you take from that?
And let's not forget that someone going around inventing fires to put out that he alone can put out is also something that fits the description of an agenda.
So no, sometimes the world is not our to get you. Sometimes you cause grief to everyone around you, to the point that it's a net benefit to get rid of you.
People need to stop confusing geeks and nerds with being socially awkward and outright sociopaths. Enjoying tinkering with things doesn't require you to be abhorrent or lack any social skills. You're not smart or intelligent if you believe it's a good idea to go around telling others to fix problems they don't have and being obnoxious about it. Being able to fix a bug does not change that.
You might 'care' to add features nobody asked for? Or 'care' to spend longer than necessary to refactor something that doesn't need it.
One case I recall was an SRE that was quite intelligent asking smart questions and management took it as insubordination. The thing is he was fighting against shipping crap that later would ruin oncall.
Another time a coworker solved a big problem, saving time. But because management was not too involved, she got a pip.
One would assume making the system more reliable would get rewarded, in some contexts this is true. Others, it has to be blessed otherwise it can cut against.
Usually it's one outspoken engineer with lots of experience and anecdotes but not a link between cause/effect.. just a lot of war stories and slowing others down.
What does this even mean? This sounds like an euphemism for someone being a jerk just because they wanted to unilaterally push changes to the code.
> It saddens me when management supports egos more than the product. It shows up years later to the customers.
Management are hired to support the people that maintain the product, and help them work together. If a developer fails to work together with coworkers, it's the manager's job to either help that developer right their wrongs, or support other developers by getting rid of the problematic one.
If you've seen it you've seen it. If you haven't, it'll be tempting to interpret this as some kind of garbled or one sided story.
IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve.
I go back to this article on the failure of US steel: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...
Sure, they can spend money on R&D, but then they’re competing with every other new venture in the world - the only benefit they have is money, but collectively, everyone else has more money than they do.
This is why when private equity takes over a mature business, they almost always shut down any R&D the company is doing. Silly mature business, that’s not the reason for your existence!
From the first World War up to around 1980, a very large number of the most important technological innovations have been made in the research laboratories of a few giant companies, like ATT, IBM, General Electric, Westinghouse Electric.
For some reason, since around 1980 almost all big companies have focused much more on the financial results of the next quarter than on long-term research, so much less innovations were done in them (with a few exceptions, IBM has still produced a few very important innovations until around 2000, but those innovations were less important for IBM products, their impact was due to being licensed to others).
"How many failed to evolve", on its own, is a bad metric for success, because it misses the how many new giants the US economy managed to create, which IMHO is the more important metric of a healthy economy.
Companies are like people, the old ones die out and are replaced by new young ones, as it should be. Worst you can do is be like Europe where all you do is try to keep ancient dying companies on life support for the sake of "stability", instead of creating new ones to replace them, which is also a fitting metaphor for EU demographics where a third of the state's budget goes to keeping boomers pensions higher than the salary of average worker(in France).
Perhaps what you perceived as someone being emotional was actually someone who spent a long time barely functioning due to things that have been happening in their life, and that small event just so happened to be a straw that broke the camel's back.
People around you are going through stuff. Everyone is. Someone's stuff is easy to carry, someone else's stuff isn't. "Back in the day" people also carried their burden with them. This is nothing new. Perhaps you never noticed because so far everyone you dealt with was great at masking, and desperately want to avoid having to see coworkers like you worsen their burden by doing what feels like kicking them while they are down.
Of course we should be compassionate, but anyone needs to be able to function enough so that they can internalise criticism and evolve.
Like how "the boys" in engineering would made jokes about having sex with the female office manager in the middle of meetings. It was only a great time for certain people.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...
Personally I was not aware of that and I feel like something like that should have come up during the entire time he was being deplatformed.
But, was he referencing actual testicles or did he just use the term "balls" in a tongue in cheek manner (to mean like, chutzpah or something?)
If you wanted to get rid of the assholes - incredibly difficult, because they take many forms - you'd have to reinvent corporate culture in the US to make it less extractive and performative and more substance-based and cooperative.
The people who are loyal to the company, and believe in the mission, and obedient to the leadership, they are the ones most likely to amend their language and adopt the new terms. They will apologize for their mistakes and correct themselves. This will be looked upon with widespread favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
Others will not comply. Perhaps they are too old and set in their ways, or they just don't care about other people's feelings, or they are disobedient to the leadership already, and disloyal to the company. For whatever reason, they are the ones who will begin to distinguish themselves with language. When the rest of the company has adopted the acceptable terms, the Missing Stair people will be left behind. Then, they can simply be treated as Missing Stairs.
The bad apples don't necessarily need to be fired or exiled. Simply having a way to distinguish them in a crowd is very helpful in any organization.
It may be a bit controversial, but I believe the male tectonic shifts going in right now under our feet are also driving much of the shift regarding “immigration” because billionaires don’t need immigrants as much anymore and they’re also causing systemic problems in things like the housing market. In fact from what I’m hearing, there is concern that immigration is now becoming a potential cost due to the major changes in society rather than a profit center by scaling up marginal returns from every immigrant you can import by hook or crook, i.e., the more people you import, the more you can undermine salaries and increase revenues and thus, profits.
The rest of your post sounded rational. This part doesn’t.
Failure to build more units (NIMBY) and properties being held as investments (non-US nationals are significant in some markets) are the two causes I would point to. Of course every additional family that needs housing drives up the cost a little, but I really don’t think that can be responsible for the massive increases in housing valuation.
The other big issue is density is expensive; it costs much more to build an apartment at the 10th floor than a detached house. Combine that with density being inherently a bit shit, you get less quality and less housing for the money spent.
There are several issues with your position. Of course there are other factors, but it is inherently disingenuous and dishonest to ignore the fact that just alone since the year 2000 at least 45 million foreigners and their children are in the USA that would not have been here just based on natural population growth. So it's up to you if you can rationalize hard enough to ty to make an argument that adding 45 million additional people to the population would not have had some measurable impact on the "massive increase in housing valuations".
Genuinely, were you at all aware of just how many foreign people had come to the USA and then had children?
Not sure I can say the same for UK.
Companies used to have elaborate processes for quality, reliability and all that and it flew out the window on day 2 of LLMs. So of course you'll find people who no longer are productive because the context is now being created for machines, not for humans.
Was it about displaying the user's birthday?
I think now LLMs might play a part of those dismissals but also I think those companies are embracing for thin cows season.
The record profits and etc are the last few for a while I am guessing. My guess they might have up to a year of positive numbers as consequence of deals and layoffs up to this moment.
I think at some point it will be clearer what are the real productivity gains of LLMs. My opinion is that there is a gain but we are already on the phase where there is a deceleration on the improvements and the costs have not yet caught up. The reason for this is the frequent change in the reporting of results. Now they hide the models, they hide the harnesses, they hide the results. They would not be doing that if they were 100% confident it was working perfectly. Also they have been putting too much effort on blocking other initiatives by hiring important researchers with no clear proposition on what they will be doing. One might argue that when you hire Karpathy you never know what he will might be doing anyway, but I digress. We also see some of the huge investment funds starting to switch strategies.
Unless there is no breakthrough, we might see LLMs results in a couple of years. The company I work for and others from friends I know have all started restrictions on costs. Some even started hiring people back.
My prediction is that the low AI cost per token era will end very soon when investors realise that the market is broken and they want their money back for leverage themselves or other businesses.
I even think this is why Elon Musk is merging all his companies. He might making himself artificially richer, but I think he is focusing his efforts to smart weapons and robots.
I think there will no way back to the inflation of people as in 2020/2021 but probably we are going back to early 2010s number.
A lot of people has this feeling because the work at a big corporation is different than in starting technologies.
When you start a new technology everything is new, and a lot of stuff is added at the edge.
When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements, following new rules or regulations, incorporating products from merges, maintaining technology up to date with new releases... nothing feels important and nothing feels challenging. At the same time, your company fails if it is not done. Quality is also incredible important, to break a tiny component may send thousands of companies around the world spinning.
Maybe you should work for a startup instead of a stablished company. You can move fast and break things when you have no customers, or just very few of them.
This is part of it, but it's also true that in a lot of massive enterprises there is an absurd amount of inefficiency that leads to people effectively having nothing to do.
I had one such role at Splunk, pre-acquisition, which had a mere ~2k or so employees at the time. My entire office was effectively doing nothing; we were the result of another acquisition and management had no idea what to do with us. More hours were logged at the foosball and ping-pong tables than in front of an IDE. I'm not even exaggerating. I left after 9 months because I was bored; I did not write a single line of code that got used in any real application, internal or external.
When I went to AWS, it was closer to what you're describing; it took a lot of work to do seemingly very small changes for the reasons you mention. But I would never say that my team there had too many employees doing not enough work; everyone was busy all the time, it just took a lot of work to do very small changes.
At what point is a company established? I recall that the early years of Google, it produced not only Search but also Gmail, Maps, Translate, Android, and Chrome. That was all between 1998-2008. At what point did most of Google's work become refinements?
My point being, it is a culture issue. Google could have become "established" and focus on "refinements" after Search. Or Gmail. Or Maps. Or Translate. But each of those times, it did not.
It's possible for both things to be true at once: a huge company can contain pockets of innovation, pockets of people doing nothing, and a lot that's somewhere in between.
I would argue my examples were (much more) fundamentally innovative (Search, Maps, Translate, etc) since GCP was not particularly innovative and Google failed to build a meaningful product even though they invented a revolutionary technology that powers the current AI craze.
But I think we are actually in more agreement than disagreement. A huge company can contain pockets of innovation because it contains pockets of an innovative culture. It's possible we fundamentally agree - it comes down to culture and values, not size and age of a firm.
That is not to say that nothing since then has been impressive, but I do think it's fair to call just about all of it incremental.
Andy Rubin, the founder of Android had already made a name for himself in mobile technology. In 1999, he co-founded Danger Inc. Microsoft bought Danger in 2008.
Google acquired Android in 2005, before the iPhone was unveiled in January 2007.
The rumor here is Eric was shown an early iPhone product, and saw how much better it was than the then-current beta builds of Android. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Android_1.0_April_2007_build
Chrome was based on WebKit, which was based on KHTML, the browser engine from KDE. The only reason we have WebKit as an open source engine is because Apple had to open source it. https://blogs.kde.org/2007/10/26/web-diplomacy/
They released "just" enough of it that WebKit could be replaced in Safari. That's it. Their patch would not compile or run on Linux. It would be _years_ before KDE had a WebKit browser. KDE took months to implement many changed from WebKit into KHTML.
Sequoia Capital introduced the Where2 team to Google. https://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/neural-notes-how-...
Sequoia were freaking out. They had signed a term sheet with the Where2 team, and backed out because Yahoo! just released a map product. Yahoo was involved in both Google's early history and the events that led to Google Maps. Yahoo had an early opportunity to license Google's search technology, rather than acquire Google outright. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were introduced to Sequoia investor Michael Moritz through Yahoo co-founder David Filo.
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel reportedly offered around US$3 billion to buy Google, but Page and Brin declined.
Sequoia withdrew its proposed investment in Where 2 in 2008. Thinking Yahoo would dominate the market, and it was not a safe investment.
Sequoia then introduced Where 2 to Google. CIA, Keyhole, it's all a fun little rabbit hole :)
Recently we've hired a few startups for PoCs regarding to data analytics and they all get deeply frustrated at the pace it takes us to even agree basic details.
OP might have been stuck in a dept that is winding down to prep for a layoff or something. I probably would have stuck around unless I found a different role. Who knows, you might just get some severance.
I'm ISO27001'ing my company and I wonder if some day, we'll find a better way than written policies, procedures, forms, evidence and audits. To me, it seems like our current world's biggest flaw: We're losing 2/3rd of our workforce to maintaining procedures, they make the work boring and unbearable, and they're not even efficient, even if they do provide upside in systematically organizing things. Standards (when pushed to procedures, forms and audite) are the regression-to-the-mean of collective organizations.
On call 24/7/365.
My mental health took such a beating that I resigned without giving two weeks.
Multiple reorgs (7 in last three years).
HR moving requirements for what it takes to get rated a 100.
Service security review was just me. Guy asked where the rest of the team was. I shared it was just me and said he’s seeing same thing across all the services he reviews, wondered where everyone was going.
Place ended up being stage four cancer and haven’t regretted my decision at all.
Combine that with each company having effectively invented “Not Invented Here” before anyone else in the world had heard of that term, and you have massive amounts of bloat.
Two jobs ago, I was working at AWS on the EC2-Chronos team that was responsible for managing all NTP time sync across all Amazon and AWS regions, availability zones, and data centers. Including the classified and isolated regions. The people I worked with were some of the best I’ve ever known, and I thought we had really good managers. I even liked my skip-level manager. And I knew some of the others as well, and had even spent a fair amount of time listening to Peter DeSantis and other internationally known luminaries on the weekly ops calls.
From Peter on down, I never saw anything or anyone that I would call bloat. If anything, I felt that his organization was too lean.
Problem was, while I had extensive experience with the NTP protocol going back to 2003, it turned out that > 99.999% of the daily job involved dealing with ancient proprietary build and deployment tools that were created twenty years ago, and had done nothing but accumulate cruft since then. And I think that was true for just about everyone who worked at AWS. There are much more modern tools and methods that have been created in the decades since, but people in AWS weren’t allowed to use them, because they weren’t the blessed proprietary tools.
And RTO had to come from somewhere. And after that, it was mandatory co-location with your boss.
And then some person thought it would be a good idea to start measuring performance by lines of code committed per developer per week, and everyone had to commit code. Didn’t we kill that idea like nearly twenty years ago, too?
Anyway, I got out of there as fast as I could.
There are things that are deeply, deeply wrong at Amazon. And AWS. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the low-level technical people.
I argue you still need communication for the "why" to get to the "how", otherwise you will just get the wrong thing.
I don't mean in a forum where everyone bashes AI, but actually discusses how to navigate this?
It's not here at HN.
The AI bashing is a response to the "AI is superintelligence and can write a kernel that's better than Linux" mentality, that is tiring, reeks of gross incompetence, and is almost maliciously wrong.
SOTA LLMs can't reliably implement a single, small feature without producing overly complex code. They don't do engineering.
My approach is two-fold: 1. frontload every conversation with a lot of guidance on how to approach things "like an engineer" (those terms are never uttered, but the guidance basically encodes my workflow as an engineer), to focus on only the problem at hand today, not overbuild things, etc, and 2. not trust a single line of code it produces.
It's mostly around navigating these nuances at work. Even what words to use "I built this" vs "LLM built this"
I know how to design large multi PR projects with multiple agents, but the ORG/LLM navigation , you can't learn by talking to AI.
All spaces turn into echo chambers with enough people. I could be wrong.
The larger it gets, the more fringe/outlier groups start to take over.
Ironically, every large company I have worked for has chosen Microsoft partially because of their size and a perception that they have an enormous amount of top talent developing best-in-class products.
My reaction to that has been that, if a company is so large, then they can't all be in the top percentiles of talent. And when you look at how many products they have, relative to the number of software engineers they have, their can't be that many software engineers dedicated to any given product.
So I'm curious: how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?
There are high talent density orgs at MSFT too. I do not want to give the impression that everyone at MSFT is low calibre. I was at the beginning of the Security org being formed (back then it was a tiny part of E+D). I was a minion who witnessed Security transforming into a 10B+ USD business so there are very qualified people at MSFT. We went from a few hundred devs and PMs to ~10K devs, PMs, Support etc to work on a mature business. There are a host of talented people still at MSFT, also MS continues to publish impactful research in AI, Systems etc. The great Leslie Lamport is still at MSFT. I am not comparing myself to these titans, I am nowhere near that level but just saying that there are oodles of talent at MSFT.
On the other hand, here is an example that is illustrative of the sort of people I encountered towards the end of my tenure. My last manager who was one big reason behind me resigning once told me in my 1-on-1 that I should count myself lucky to be employed at MSFT and that other developers would kill to join MSFT. This was someone who had started his career in TCS, Wipro etc and then worked at a bunch of networking companies who presumably didn't pay that well. Everyone at MSFT is decently paid because the stock is doing well and long may that continue . My last team/org was a 30M$+ business with only one customer, we had maybe ~300 people altogether in the US, UK and India. It felt like we were always support engineers for this one big whale of a customer and we were trying to "pivot" to get more customers but that always seemed fanciful as the product was expressly designed for one customer. MSFT acqui-hired from this customer multiple execs and developers to sell said product to the same customer. I am missing a lot of key details as I wasn't at the inception of this product but the whole org seemed dysfunctional, inefficient and certainly I had low-morale. There just wasn't as much work for that many people.
When I submitted my resignation, they actually tried to retain me! I was befuddled to say the least, I hadn't been that productive at all but I guess they just needed warm bodies to work on some other misguided initiative. Personally, I had enough. I forewent my last tranche of sign-on stocks (a non-trivial amount) but was glad to see the back of this org. It was deleterious to my career, I was so pissed that I didn't even send a farewell email. I don;t blame anyone but myself, I hold myself accountable for my career but this was what I perceived.
Apologies, this felt like a rant and it is partly one. But I never had a frank conversation about this with anyone after I left. My fiance is a Doctor so she can't understand all this but my fellow colleagues in tech will.
I call these "trophy employees". They are not subjected to the same rules as regular (anonymous) engineers, and their tenure inside the company is not given by the value of their ongoing engineering output.
What I'm seeing on my teams is everyone being more overworked than ever because the coding part happens SO quickly now that there's no friction to slow down all the nonstop "team alignment and box drawing" work that someone else in this thread alluded to.
I've been at places where I went years hardly doing work on a average week. But I'm also good [at some things] so when it mattered I showed up, then didn't do anything for months.
Also, if you build a foundation of being very good, you can coast on that even longer (years) in the right situation. There are 1000s of stories of people doing nothing for years making six figures, easy.
For example, the software industry. It's pretty much completely unregulated. Prices for software have gone to zero. Software engineers routinely become millionaires, and some billionaires.
Ad infinitum? No it doesn’t.
> Prices for software have gone to zero.
On earth?
> Software engineers routinely become millionaires, and some billionaires.
They don’t but if they did, this could mean the opposite of what you think it means.
I didn't pay a cent for any of the software on my Linux machine. Free Open Source software is everywhere.
In the 1990s, the Seattle Times wrote that there were 10,000 Microsoft millionaires in the Seattle area, excluding the value of their homes.
Charles Simonyi became a billionaire as a Microsoft employee.
At the same time I'm not sure that the computer industry is a good example for your claim due to its roots in the Bell telecommunication monopoly and the massive subsidies from the US military that lead to the wide availability of the cheap personal computers that most of the open source software that you are talking about originated from.
If anything the rise of American tech giants and the proliferation of cheap computers is directly attributable to decades of intervention by the US government and not a free market success story.
Bell invented the transistor, not the government. The rest is history.
I am not aware of any subsidies that Microsoft, Apple, etc., received from the government, let alone massive subsidies. Intel received zero subsidies for the 8088 microprocessor, which really launched the computer industry. Not for the 286, 386, x86_64, etc., either.
> is directly attributable to decades of intervention by the US government
Oh come on. I've been in this business for 50 years, with zero government intervention (other than I pay my taxes).
DEC (maker of the famous PDP-10 and PDP-11) did not get subsidies from the government, although it sold equipment to the government.
> I'm not seeing the connection between a relative lack of regulation in the software industry and the price of FOSS software being (close to) zero
Regulations are a massive cost to industry. There are no regulations on software development. I don't have to get a permit to write software, or sell it. I do not need a license. I do not need any government approvals. I do not need any certifications. Anybody with a keyboard can write software and make it available under any terms they want (usually free!).
Has the government paid for any of this FOSS software? I've never received a dime from the government for my 26 year efforts in making FOSS software.
> or your larger assertion regarding free markets and prosperity in general.
The most prosperous economies in history and the world come from free markets, not socialist ones.
The field may mint millionaires at a higher rate but it’s still not routine.
Lack of regulation in tech causes real harm, like addiction, social issues and misinformation,not to mention issues with cyber bullying and suicide in teens.
Do some people make out like bandits with billions or millions of dollars, sure but I don't think that's a good barometer for progress or prosperity.
To paraphrase Doctor Who "Human progress isn't measured by industry, it's measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege"
And by that measure we are still cavemen.
None of those had effective regulation.
Regulation against fraud does work, but the job of government is to prevent crime, enforce contracts, and stop fraud, in a free market.
> And by that measure we are still cavemen.
Government is not going to fix that.
> Do some people make out like bandits with billions or millions of dollars, sure but I don't think that's a good barometer for progress or prosperity.
In the 1800s the US lifted scores of millions of people out of poverty into the middle class.
The free market has its flaws, but many blame it for the ills caused by corruption and lobbying of politicians.
There has never been a truly free market anywhere in the world, let alone ‘pure’, so I don’t see why you use this adjective at all.
However, what we do know is that a free market requires management people today aren't accustomed to. Suddenly you are fully responsible to negotiate protection, transit, etc. That is a burden many would find off-putting and, in many cases, something beyond their capabilities.
If we were magically dropped into a free market tomorrow it is likely we would quickly attach ourselves to whomever is willing to give us those things without needing extra thought, just like the monopoly does today, and – tada – we're right back to the way things are right now.
If we were born into a free market and didn't know anything else then monopolies might be harder to pull off. That said, while the initial conditions were a bit different, we've been in a similar situation before and the monopoly won in the end.
There's a continuum between free markets and socialism. It is not a binary thing. Nothing human is perfect. You might as well claim there is no such thing as water because 100% water is not achievable (there are always contaminents).
Also, a free market requires a government. The role of government is to protect life, liberty, and property.
Uh, what? That's like saying there is a continuum between cold and far. Your comparison points are not in the same realm. Consider a free market where all actors decide to form cooperatives. That, however unlikely in practice, would result in both free markets and socialism at the same time. A free market does not care about how the people decide to divvy up capital. The people deciding to share ownership in the capital is perfectly valid within a free market. If "free market" was prescriptive about how people must trade then it would be completely contradictory.
> Also, a free market requires a government. The role of government is to protect life, liberty, and property.
Absolutely not. In a free market, one negotiates with private vendors to offer these services. A government is the antithesis of a free market, being a monopolistic vendor that you don't get to opt out of. A voluntary organization could emerge in a free market to provide those services to those who wish to join without having to individually negotiate, which would closely resemble the governments we know, but key is that it membership is optional. What makes a government more than an association is that you don't get to choose. The market cannot be free if you cannot choose who to buy from.
You could more reasonably say that there is a continuum between free markets and planned economies. It is still flawed as none of this is one-dimensional, but for the sake of simplification we can run with it. The space between is referred to as mixed economy, not free market.
A "free market" where the market isn't free doesn't make sense linguistically or within what "free market" is defined as. Of course a situation where some submarkets are unconstrained and others restricted can exist — not only can, that's how we already live — but when that occurs we call it a mixed economy. Our current world exists under a mixed economy.
I suspect your confusion stems from trying to apply the ideas of free market, which refers to a broad market economy, onto only the submarkets that are unconstrained. If you could magically ignore all the restricted markets then your logic would be reasonable, but in the real world we cannot ignore the rest of the world around us. It exists whether you like it or not. Unfortunately there is no generally accepted term for this, which is no doubt why you've wanted to use "free market" to fill the void, despite it already having a different meaning, but "unregulated market" is the one I have seen used most often in that context. You might consider using that going forward. I expect most will understand what you are trying to say without confusing them into thinking you are talking about free market in the proper sense and will allow you to converse with those who already made it clear that they were talking about free market in the proper sense.
No, it isn't.
Again, look up the definition of it rather than make up your own. Here's one from wikipedia:
"In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers."
It still requires a government to keep people from stealing, defrauding, and murdering each other.
How? If a monopoly were to emerge in what was a pure free market, it would become the government, and its rules would become regulation on the market. And thus the pure free market could no longer exist. Monopolies and free markets cannot coexist.
And once you're big enough, you can just offload your inefficiencies onto the consumer (the "enshittification" stage). As long as you're not _terribly_ bad, competitors won't be able to overcome your network effects.
What _really_ held companies from taking over the world was the inherent overheads of distributed corporate structures. Before computers, you couldn't really manage a horizontal company with offices in hundreds of different cities. Network effects were also less pronounced.
Internet-enabled companies like Google (or Yandex, Baidu, etc.) are a really great example. The early Internet was about as close to a perfect free market as possible. And in every case (Google in the US, Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China) the same thing happened: one large company ended up dominating and then gobbling up all the competitors.
Why are the biggest companies of recent origin?
They never had a chance to expand in the post-computer era. GE was really close, but they switched to the "do everything" model a bit too early. Before computers, your only option was to have a financial stake in other companies, and this doesn't provide enough control.
As for IBM, I think it just lacks the ambition to do anything drastic. You don't get _automatic_ world takeover, you need to work for it. But others are giving a good run for it, just look at the recent acquisitions by Oracle.
If you want to study the history of bureaucracy and business (an exciting topic!), it took about 20 years for companies to adapt their business processes to be typewriter-friendly. The key invention: short memos rather than long-form letters.
So yeah, my answer is that prior to the modern computer era, companies had a natural maximum limit on their complexity*size metric. This naturally limited the scope of world takeovers and made monopolies self-limiting in the long run.
These limits have now increased, and we're seeing companies taking advantage of that.
Some numbers: the largest unregulated (i.e. not AT&T) company in the pre-computer era was GM, peaking around 600k employees in the 80-s. Amazon has 1.5 million employees now. Walmart is about 2.1 million, Alphabet is at ~250k.
And these companies are not showing any signs of slowing their growth down.
So let's invert your argument and try to find counterexamples.
Google is already close to 30 years old. It's not a new company. Microsoft is more than 50 years old! Do you have examples of large pre-computer-era companies that were at least this old and yet were able to successfully enter and expand in new markets? And not just by buying a stake in some company but incorporating new products into the parent company.
My fear is that AI will make that even more scalable, enabling even larger companies.
I remember a comment in the tech news from 25 years ago - "nobody is afraid of Microsoft anymore".
And you actually are failing to see what I'm trying to say. IBM is a GREAT example of my point. They pivoted from a company that makes keyboards and PCs to a company that makes custom solutions with specialized hardware and software.
This sort of corporate flexibility used to be extremely rare, and that's why you have so many examples of companies that just withered away. And this corporate stagnation was the only real limiting factor of corporate growth.
It's now gone. Companies now have much higher upper limit of complexity. It's still a competition, so it's not like every company is going to become "The Corporation" from dystopias. But there's no inherent limiter that prevents it anymore.
I am merely 30-years old, hopefully I have a long career or at-least as long as possible but playing politics to play the short game is very short sighted to say the least.
If I want politics, I would rather just re-watch Game of Thrones.
Two of them, in contrast, went to Google, and the differences in experience were so drastic. I'm out there almost every single week directly meeting with customers. Our CEO knows me personally. CEOs of other companies know me personally. Whether or not what I'm doing actually matters, I can at least feel the impact. I can give a concrete dollar amount for deals from the past year that would not have closed without my contribution to tackling issues the buyers had.
The guys who went to Google talked of how nice it was to have stock grants appreciate, but they did basically no work at all. It seemed Google was just experimenting with expanding into remote work but had no idea what to actually do with all these people. The strategy seemed to just be hire anyone smart enough whether or not there was work for them. They'd describe periods of weeks doing nothing at all, with no contact from any team members or superiors, no direction being given to them. Then contraction comes and, sure enough, they're the first to get laid off. Not because they did anything wrong, but just because companies that big are constantly experimenting with entire divisions and product lines that existed for no real reason other than they had more money than God and may as well do something with it, but when it turns out a product line with no purpose never actually sells or even gets completed half the time, the entire division gets axed and anyone in it goes, regardless of the quality of their work or their persons or intellect.
I know these guys very well. One of them is pretty good and I'd take him in a heartbeat for anything not super challenging, but the other is a straight up honest to God superstar in the making. He was solving other team's challenges without even being asked within a week of being on the job. I'd put him on any project ever. The fact that a company would even consider losing him is an indictment on their ability to judge ability.
This isn't even really saying anything specifically bad about Google or Microsoft. I just frankly don't think it's possible for any organization that large to have any idea what 90% of their employees are even doing on any given day. Google and Microsoft should each be about 30 different companies, not one, and even those 30 would still be too big to really stand out if you're not Raymond Chen or Jeff Dean.
Maybe they were L3s? Maybe it's EU?
Something a lot of people are bad at is the gradations of "no" that might be allowed in a situation, and learning how to communicate that can ripple up and down.
If upper management tells you "I want 1 million ponies by tomorrow", but what they really mean is "I want to see how far you can get at delivering those ponies by tomorrow", that can be the difference between making a plan for coordinating that transport and going home on time or being up at 2 am calling around to find someone who won't call you expletives for waking them to ask about ponies at 2 am.
People who communicate like this are overrepresented in upper management and they are the exact people who shouldn't be allowed to be in any kind of management role. :/
It's not amazon or meta, but it's not a 'chill job' like I hear about MSFT or other places. YMMV, just my experience.
I think it is possible, but I am not sure there is any actual will for it on either side. Management doesn't want to know unless someone is breathing down their neck or they are the of micromanager variety. I certainly stopped just volunteering information. But I absolutely do think it is possible.
Post mid-2025, there were mandates to use it wherever we could.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar25/index.html
I've worked at Australia largest bank and airline companies, it's insane the amount of people who are either:
* Being paid to do nothing. Manager at the bank would spend whole day going from meeting to coffee then ask you if things are done already to be delivered as "his/her team"
* Are in position without qualification. They couldn't understand the basics of common sense.
The thing is, if you know somebody who knows somebody, that is it.
Now working at one of the telcos here, bro, it's pure circus.
Capitalism made sense with small companies where each individual had more or less direct exposure to the markets. One bad employee would drag down the company. You couldn't hide or manipulate your way to the top if you weren't good at creating value and skilled people could actually start their own companies and compete. Now with huge corporations which own the economy, the markets don't work to begin with, and also, people within the big corporations are rewarded randomly at best or worse; in a counter-productive manner.
This inefficiency is highly destructive because of how the system compounds wealth. You end up with random people with zero value-creation skills and zero vision having millions or billions of dollars and deciding everyone else's lives.
I wont say for all comm countries, but the ussr is literally the ineffectiveness at scale. You have gigantic central accounting organization that plan faked past with lag for several years for the whole country. Every industry severally lacking budget except for several efficient military serving organizations. Because most of the industries fields fail on themselves, the ones that thrive are also given patronage over the ones that fail. You have rocket industry handling milk production or KGB managing pig farms. Insane amount of people would work in fake organizations where they would just come into cold office and sit there in coats in front of empty table. Cause gov is obliged to give everyone some work and pay.
I wouldn't scold someone for thinking it, its ok to have floating thoughts. Just don't double down on them and start arguments over the internet with strangers.
https://docs.oracle.com/en/browseall.html
So when you dig in you can easily see what all those people work on.
Whereas, Uber is basically two services (ride sharing and food delivery). So there it's a bit harder to understand. Of course they're in lots of markets and have a huge human support surface area because of all the drivers and riders. Probably most of those employees aren't working on the products.
Because it's a legit question, like if a companye can lay off thousands of people and still run their service, what were they all doing?
The amount of people working on regulation, compliance and other non-revenue generating responsibilities increases substantially.
I work with regulations because I'm in charge of IT at a small but busy healthcare provider. We're like 3 people who handle ISO certification and NIST compliance, on the side.
One time I interviewed for a job at a big tech company during COVID/woke era and I had selected a dropdown option under 'Ethnicity' in the application form saying that I was from a "Caribbean ethnic group" which is technically true and I flew through all the interview stages and technical tests until the final interview where I had to meet with the CTO which they said was just a formality... They had dangled the biggest salary package of my life; it was like 2 times what I normally get... But then the CTO didn't show up; I spoke to some senior dev instead; conversation was not technical and I think I was quite pleasant so I don't think I did anything wrong there but I didn't get a job offer.
Unfortunately, the drop-down did not allow me to specify 'White Caribbean ethnic group" - Technically I'm a descendant of white settlers who settled the Caribbeans 500 years ago. My guess is they were not a big fan of the white variety of ethnic Carribbeans.
Or they wont stop talking in meetings, but produce no real work
And yet nobody has time to do anything except to tell everyone they don't have time to do anything.
I was joking, but this just became an even bigger joke.
The buyouts were taken by superstars and low performers. The superstars moved on to other things, like working in other forms of media.
Dad didn't take several rounds of buyouts and was fine.
After suffering a stroke, he was "put out to pasture", which for a journalist means he was sent to cover city hall meetings in some suburb. Eventually, he retired with some much smaller payout than what the last buyout would have given him. The sense in the family was that the collapse of the industry denied him a dignified last decade of work. (When the industry was flush with cash, older journalists were sort of like "elder statesmen" in the newsroom. Post-internet, no longer.)
Very sorry. Dignity is important and often overlooked.
I think your dad did the right thing.
No, he didn't get the big dollar signs. But he did get a decade worth of health insurance, employment, and more security for his family than he would have had going out looking for a job on his own.
There are no good choices in that situation. But I don't think he made a wrong one.
I think we should buy people out with reasonable comp and let them live the rest of their life doing something that brings them joy and happiness, even if that's volunteering in what they used to get paid for. But I'm not a policymaker.
A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own eventually.
'I've applied for 300 jobs. My 25 years' experience is worthless' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50182823 - October 2026 (111 comments)
I think theres just MUCH more depression over the much more visible reality that your upper managers don't care about you or the work you put out. Especially now with AI companies pitching them a salivating dream of doing the work of 100 with 10.
Finance. Everything is a number to be optimized that must constantly grow. The US abandoned antitrust, worker protections, social safety nets, and more in the name of greed.
For workers to care you need to treat them as humans. People care about a team and a family that care about them back.
The mythical story of the person who started in the mailroom and worked their way up is gone. The mailroom, secretary, custodian, and as many roles as possible have been replaced with contractors without benefits or any future in the building they currently work in who will facelessly cycle out in a few months for another contractor.
Employees have been abused too much to believe the lies. If I work twice as hard, my reward is a sub-inflation raise and no realistic hope of promotion. Feedback employees give is ignored, so there's no motivation to push to improve things. The management class has a desperate dream of all people being fungible so they can throw them out and get cheaper ones, and fungible is what you get - if you want a generic interchangeable cog, that's what you get, but don't complain about how the cog doesn't "care enough".
Even in bakery, coffee shop, repair, deliveries.. you feel happy about your simple skills, happy to serve people that need a little bit of what you do, even serving coffee quick and clean.. in a team of people who know how to organize themselves. It can be exhausting, limited.. but it felt better than digital gray fog we're going in (graeber would say bullshit jobs).
And previous generation had even a different culture, my mother keeps telling me how warm and fun it was to work in the 70s. No easy job, 1000~ customer restaurants, but the way people approached jobs, belonging, connection.. was different. I witnessed the cold privatization of her building around 2000s, it became more a factory than a place to drink coffee and eat, everything was stiffer and came from high above management who didn't work with employees.
The internet and free information showed them up for what they really were: biased cavemen like everyone else, and the aura vanished.
And that is going to have predictable consequences like increases in suicides, substance abuse, etc.
A job might "just be a job" but I'm growing tired of this trend online of treating work like it isn't important for most people's sense of worth, place in society, and overall mental health.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/03/31/deathbed-wish/
What I would say, and perhaps what you actually mean, or if not then at least what you might now consider, is you shouldn't give anyone else the right to declare your sense of worth, including an employer.
"Your sense of worth should not be tied up in your job" only does so much when the average person's reality is that his or her job is the means by which they survive/thrive economically, a primary factor in whether or not they attract a partner and reproduce, etc.
reality - expectations - uncertainy = happiness/saddness
It might just be a job but someone living happy in good conditions that feels like the rug might get pulled under them for something they cannot control for is a lot more unerving even if your material conditions work out just fine in the end.
Also I think your being a little atomizing in the impact here. 1 Person losing a job is their problem, I agree. 60 thousand people losing there job is a problem for the government and society. 60K people is a lot and it has a ton of consquences. This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries. Its atleast in the billions which is small in the total Federal revenue but if this is a sign of whats to come we have problems. Maybe those people go to different employment but change will effect a lot of local economies.
Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
If Microsoft is 40% based in the US the US probably would see 20K people in high salery positions get cut if its somewhat evenly leveled. They are still okay with reducing 1/4 people (they are offering a buyout so I am holding off on the F bomb).
The invest into AI is something like $6T if it hasn't produced $6T in value it better produce it in cuts. If you expect its just going to Microsoft laying off great the government is fine but if other companies in the next months cut high paid position it hits the country in non trivial ways. But You are correct its not just going to effect the US it and that dampens the magntitude but its still a massive reduction of force for a major company
Muh job creators! You can't tax your way to growth!
Well actually, they are now job destroyers. Tax the fuckers.
In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month, ~4.8M/year. 60k workers leaving Microsoft is a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking. But of course, they should still get as much support as possible via the packages they accept, and getting to retirement (Social Security and Medicare benefits) as pain free and least uncertainty as possible.
> Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I vote for and support Democratic Socialist candidates, who would implement and maintain more humane and pro worker economic systems, I'm doing my part at system levels. But systems will take decades to change. It took decades to get here from Ronald Reagan and his policies. Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
(and if you think there is a problem with corporate earnings vs what workers take home, again, that is a political and labor organizing problem to solve for)
St Louis Fed: US Wages Share of GDI at 75 Year Low - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238884 - October 2026
Pew Research: Many Americans Are Struggling to Afford Basic Necessities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50197020 - October 2026
Gallup: A majority of Americans have low-quality jobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50195502 - October 2026
(i am once again asking to think in systems)
I don't really think DSA had much that would help the economy beside the basic mainstream democrat tastes. Democrats generally speaking want less monopolies, better healthcare insurance (mostly a public option) and reasonable taxation but the DSA takes things to 11 with just politically unviable rhetoric in my opinion. But most of all, I think the ideas from the DSA that work doesn't matter as long as people are taken care is likely to cost a lot people.
The Mechanic takes pride that he can fix stuff. The engineer takes pride that they can design a system. Doctors take pride that they are the reason people don't die. If you take away pride you harm a lot of people this is arguable what got the democrats (republicans voted for this too) where they are today in that they embraced Free Trade regardless of the cost. It created a rust belt that is brain washed into blaming Democrats for 100% of the harm. Fox news helps in accomplishing that that too but I think a lot of the DSA is steeped in that MAGA like style of never engage in what harms the ideology thinking and that spooks me away from that group agressively.
There are labor shortages throughout the developed world, due to structural demographics. This will not change in our lifetime due to global demographic trajectories. This will push wages up. This is good. Wages paid are shareholder returns not paid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713865 (citations)
Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352811 - August 2026
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe... - SUERF Policy Note, Issue No 197, October 2020
We agree to disagree on DSA policies. I want the Scandinavian model to protect people. IDGAF about profits, people first, full stop. Their support is very high amongst the under 35, and 2M 55+ voters age out every year. Progress is a function of time and electorate turnover. Old people with old ideas die out, and are replaced by young people with different ideas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781479 (citations in subthread)
Can you stop big companies from making these cuts? No, at least not without unions and laws to make it harder. So, in the short term, help these people land softly and in the long term, build better systems so that people who want to contribute have some place to from a place of economic security. That’s it’s. Feelings are irrelevant, only outcomes matter (imho).
Sure, from a raw numbers perspective it's a drop in the bucket. But not all numbers are created equal. How does the pay of these employees from Microsoft compare? You mention those of the baby boomer generation, but are all employees who may be leaving Microsoft of the same age range? What about their skillsets and the investments they and we as society of spent in their education? Those other factors matter quite a bit, so you can't just do a simple 1-1 analysis of "people".
> Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
Why? Which evidence? I think more people could have more meaning if they were self-employed, were craftsmen or artisans, and such, but this nihilistic viewpoint (which is a hallmark of anti-social/authoritarian ideologies like DSA and others) not only doesn't reflect reality but seeks to belittle those who do in fact find meaning and joy in their work. I for one like my job and have liked most of the jobs I've had. Just because an organization no longer needs you, or you no longer need it, doesn't mean that the job all of a sudden "doesn't matter".
If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
> If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death. If it is your job, and you are involuntarily retired, my condolences. I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
Society, broadly speaking, runs on everyone doing just good enough in the aggregate to keep the system running. Some systems are better than others (Japan institutionalizing perfectionism, for example).
Blueberries grow in the wild, ergo farmers don't matter.
> Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death.
So why are you prematurely defining what meaning should be for everyone? That's one of the problems with these authoritarian ideologies.
> I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
I don't understand this at all. Clearly they care a lot or else these planes would be crashing and stuff. If you think they don't care and you're saying flying on the aircraft sucks because they don't care, then maybe they should care more about their jobs and then it would be a better experience, which sort of runs counter to your thesis here.
(i donate to journalism orgs across the US [ProPublica, Associated Press, Tampa Bay Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Marion County Record, Muckrock], but far more and consistent financial support is needed than these orgs are receiving today)
We had an economic model that supported both the people and the work; the current economic model supports neither.
I would submit that this one of a great many reasons why the current economic model is problematic.
Go find a newspaper from 2000 or earlier. It will have whole sections (20 pages or so each) of advertising for jobs, real-estate and other classifieds. In some places every government job had to be advertised in the newspaper.
All that paid for the newspaper. Usually before it was even printed.
Thats the source of cost you need to replace.
Another problem is those career arcs are so long, where in something like tech or consulting, if you stick with it for 5-8 years you historically have a lot of seniority over new hires.
Our human brains unsurprisingly still default to that, and it is quite understandable imo.
Now, go code something nice.
Considering what you're responding to, it sounds like you're suggesting people over 55 don't deserve to be respected or have a good position in life.
Respect is how you feel, a good position in life is a function of your retirement benefits and financial comfort. If the market has no place for these folks anymore, and we're not offering a permanent jobs bank to keep people working who want to work (which I absolutely think we should do), "it is what it is." Sorry if they feel bad about market changes and demand for certain skills and labor.
We show respect by packaging folks out to live comfortable remainders of their life. "Thank you for your contribution and service." Lack of respect is leaving them hanging in the wind financially, not words. If you need a job to feel needed and respected after entering retirement and with sufficient financial and retiree benefits support, we'll throw a standing appointment with a therapist into the package and/or a volunteer opportunity online board/bank.
If you're looking for validation from your job or your work as a component of your identity, you're going to end up sad. That's a choice. Make better choices if you don't want to be sad.
And in what way is this distinguishable from disrespect? There is some major assumption in your post that remains to be explained.
At this point I can’t afford to apply to tech jobs anymore. They require you to be available for an hour randomly across multiple days and have shit like the ceo “needing” to meet you and then rescheduling last second because something more important than you came up.
All the jobs available to someone changing career right now give you maybe a days head up on your schedule and a 30 minute lunch if your lucky.
The interview process for tech has become a class barrier in of itself
Honestly, if work was to come at me with a buy-out offer, and I was in a position to be able to afford to not work for a few years, I'd probably accept. Maybe go find some non-tech work for a little bit to stretch the dollars and ensure I have health insurance.
We're in such a bubble at the moment, things are going to get really rough.
son let me tell you about health care coverage at non-FAANG companies... it ain't great.
and the market is brutal out there. you're gonna have to try hard to get a Home Depot job
Things are definitely weird because the current unemployment rate isn't far off 50 year lows: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
Anyway, this has been explained a lot in the literature, unemployment rates are a poor measure of the difficulty of finding a job.
Union job will get you good health insurance.
Software probably isn’t that, but if you need health insurance more than cash, be strategic.
If you’re getting screwed on the compensation and it’s important enough to you, think outside the box about the area you work in.
> you're gonna have to try hard to get a Home Depot job
Only the most desperate SWE/HN poster is looking for hourly jobs at Home Depot. I think this is bogus.
The fact people have to find a job not for money but for health insurance is about as dystopian as I can imagine. Toil just to not get sick and go broke, not because you need the money. What a sad world we built for ourselves.
Sad country, just US. Rest of the western world works much better. But this is what US population wants, more direct money at all costs and praying all the time no nasty health surprise is around the corner. Otherwise you are a commie or worse. Higher education is exactly the same.
Given overall health of US population thats not a good bet and it only gets worse with age.
There’s very little I can see truly breaking American society but I think the stark stupidity of health care here is up on the top.
Shocks do come, nothing is static. One may end up bankrupt earlier than correction happens though. Vote with your feet if you want change earlier than it coming from the top.
I haven't had any coverage in 3 years. It's not the end of the world. People who lose their shit over weird tail risks are missing out on the competitive advantage. You can compensate for the expensive doctors and prescription meds with more exercise and cleaner diets.
I always looked at employer sponsored health care as a sort of trap. I never got involved in it. Every insurance premium I would have paid has gone to a retirement, investment or savings account instead. One big open runway is a lot more useful than a bunch of smaller ones with weird constraints. The idea of a health savings account amuses me.
I'm realizing I'm a little bit too passionate about this lol but I would love to hear if you have a specific plan or goal in mind so I can copy it. For me BaristaFIRE would be ideal, but with so many friends going through the layoff/unemployment cycle and hearing their experiences I've concluded it's much more pragmatic to stay in tech.
My plan when I return is to get my EMT and moonlight as an ER tech while doing prerequisites for PA school or maybe medical physics.
Caveat: I'm not living in a typical region of the country, I'm in Wānaka, which is easier to find a job in but also more expensive than most of the country.
Ah... it's working holiday visa, I never qualify for these...
If so many of your friends are becoming unemployed, isn't this a sign of things to come? If people keep getting laid off in tech, what is the motivation to stay there if you might be next?
Like you, I'm confused by the dreams people post about working low-paid jobs if they're laid off. If the job market is flooded with tech workers, all these jobs will become even more competitive than before, and wages will fall. If you think your own career in tech is actually in danger (as in, you don't think you have any skills that couldn't be fully automated in the near future), I think the best option is getting some different education to put some barrier of certification between yourself and the rest of the desperate job market. But it should be something that's highly employable and difficult to automate, which is a scope that keeps narrowing.
/rant
The other thing to consider is if you'll want to keep working at the company after so many people have left due to the buyout and the layoff. If not, taking the buyout and looking for a new job is likely to be better for you than not taking the buyout, not getting laid off, and looking for a new job once you conclude you don't like the new environment. For one thing, you'll probably have buyout compensation and new job compensation at the same time; for another, it may be easier to find a new job if you're in the market before the layoffs increase the hiring pool.
tl:dr One round of layoffs isn't bad if you're staying, but subsequent rounds can make you miserable.
also means they can dodge any NDA / wrongful termination / bad behavior issues on the way out. sign the doc and play nice and get $$$.
keep in mind the US doesn't have great protections in that regard, so "severance" may be them allowing you to collect the last of your crap on the way out and paying you through the end of the week.
I know its very similar to the equivalent amount of cash but it feels a lot different. I feel like half my desire to work is connected to healthcare for the family.
My friend's company offered a voluntary severance package to a bunch of employees. She was talking to one of her employees and she knew that he was going to get laid off if he didn't take the package but was unable to advise him. I think the voluntary severance was 2 years medical, 2 years of vesting, many months of pay, etc. But he decided not to take the offer and was laid off for a much worse package a few months later.
ALWAYS TAKE THE VOLUNTARY SEVERANCE.
Ignoring specifics, the corp offers a package because they want you to take it. That means that you taking it is in their best interest.
It might also be in your own best interest, but it might also not be. That's something that needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis
Also if you're a manager you should be able to make it pretty clear.
But if they have half a clue they'll still be able to figure out which way the wind is blowing.
Source: a lowly line manager who has seen and survived a number of these.
I had doubts too, but it is in ALL CAPS so it must be true?
The company doesn’t necessarily want everyone to take the package, and they’re inevitably going to price the separation benefits such that some employees would end up better off taking it and others would end up better off not taking it.
The buyout offer certainly will exceed the unemployment payout for most.
And I’m not saying that in a grumpy way. Yes we do have much higher salaries, and because of that it’s reasonable that it’s on us to save up for this type of rainy day, in accordance with our own personal risk assessment.
It’s honestly something I spent 15 years rarely thinking about, because while I’ve seen many RIFs, I was never worried since getting a new job was as easy as just responding to a few of the messages that constantly came in via LinkedIn or email. No longer.
Not everyone has options and unemployment can be the difference between being on the street or eating ramen.
Generally, in the US, unemployment lasts a few months tops. Regardless of how long you worked, or how long you will be without work.
It wasn't a 'instead of layoffs' it was 'ok if you're burned out, here's your exit'.
Yes, of course it means layoffs are coming. This isn't a conspiracy. The whole point of these packages is "We want people to leave. The more people who take the package, the fewer the number that is laid off."
If the package is going to only a small percentage of the company, then yes, it's a sign they'll get rid of you. When it's offered to such a large number, then it's just a lottery to see who'll lose their jobs. Like all lotteries, the chances of you being impacted are low (e.g. 10% was the max in my case).
Most of the time, though, you're right. Take it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-26/microsoft...
Sales alone is some 25 % of Microsoft expenditures, so are these 60k about 50 % of what's left?
If you still need a job, I don't see it as being very attractive in this environment, unless you're quite senior with very marketable skills.
If you were lucky, you got laid off with a severance. If you weren't, you showed up to work one day and the doors were locked with no notice.
And we're still technically in the boom part of the cycle. I wonder how bad it will be after the actual crash.
How about the last several times all of big tech was laying off tons of people at the same time?
I'm not going to disagree with "this time it's different", but I've seen this fear several times before. This time it's AI that's going to take our jobs, and maybe that will happen, but it's not the first threat.
Back then, you might think the market was a bit cooler, but talented engineers were still in massive demand. Growth in tech was stalling but a massive reduction in demand was very unlikely
This time there's a real chance that in 10 years we have 50% or less the number of software engineers today, if the job title still even exists as we know it
I meant the layoffs due to AI, not the typical tech tech layoffs that are as old as tech itself.
So now you are claiming that AI has been causing tech layoffs for 40 years now?
Considering that the offer seems to be familiar and not more lucrative than ordinary separation, I would estimate the target is a 20000 headcount rapid reduction by December. If that's not accomplished this time then I would expect further action until that short-term target is met as early in 2027 as possible. Probably by offering to many who were not included this time.
This is actually pretty drastic, enough to be considered overkill adequate enough to weather economic downturns extending for quite some time, it would be much more foolish to err on the side of inadequate.
After 20000 is hit, I would expect no further cutbacks for well more than a year unless things turn miserably worse faster and steeper than their top people could imagine based on what they know now.
They make the offer to 60,000 (typically, an entire department gets this offer, including people they want to keep). Some X,000 will take the offer. If Y,000 > X,000, they they lay off the difference.
> The Redmond, Washington-based company is expecting a lower proportion to accept the voluntary exit offer because the employees included in the offer are younger and no additional incentive is given beyond standard severance for their length of service, the person familiar said. Typical take-up levels for buyouts in tech are between 3 per cent and 5 per cent, they added.
https://www.ft.com/content/2ef29406-f2f8-413f-81f6-5ae098c97...
That's not an outcome they'd like, but it's an outcome they have to accept, in order to not piss off everyone else.
1. For anyone they want to keep who takes them up on the offer, they always have a chance to try to convince those people to not take the buyout offer.
2. If you make the buyout offer conditional to particular individuals, it will sow resentment and division.
It's generally better for the employees and the employer to do this kind of blanket buyout. If they voluntarily hit the reduction targets, nobody needs to be laid off. If they don't, the layoffs will be there, but smaller. If the 'wrong' people want the buyout, there's still a chance to convince them to stay. If they don't want to stay after the convincing, it's probably best for them to go on their way.
I'm still not sure what the advantage to the company of an offer like this is versus layoffs where management gets to choose who leaves, unless they feel the "loyalty test" of deciding to stay is worth more than their own evaluation of employee performance.
1. Some C-suite asshole wants headcount in your division reduced by, say, 5% next year. He has zero visibility into anyone's performance, or any of the projects anyone is actually working on.
2. His subordinate directors could do random, or targeted layoffs to hit that 5%, but this ruins morale for everyone who survives, and is rather awful for those that don't.
3. ...Or, they could make this offer, let people leave on their own, try to convince any stars who want to take it to stay, don't do any backfill. Then, hopefully, between the voluntary layoffs and no backfill, you might hit that 5% reduction, and not have to do involuntary layoffs. (Or if you do, they would be much smaller.)
4. This is less disruptive for teams and managers, because with voluntary layoffs, they have time to plan for these people leaving, instead of showing up to work on Thursday, and being told that 5 people on their team were given the pink slip this morning.
5. This is also, obviously, less disruptive for employees who take the offer (as they can control their exit, and get a payout), and less disruptive for anyone who doesn't take the offer (lower odds of showing up to work on Thursday, and getting a pink slip).
I was actually thrilled with my cola that year along with the required vacation time.
Honestly it was a very weird time. Less than a year prior I had worked in a real estate office, and there was a lot of scary stuff already starting to happen.
Reasons to accept. Reasons to decline, but that isn't one of them.
I don't know if it has to do with my particular tech background, the fact that I live in Austin and everyone and all the remote jobs are gone, but it used to be pretty good out there, and in the last year it seems like there's almost nothing at all.
That's generally not legal in the U.S. or most of the EU. The company would have to establish a very significant paper trail to establish that these individual "performance-based" layoffs were not part of a layoff subject to WARN regulations (or their European equivalents which are even stricter). The hurdle is so large that no company has successfully pulled off such a feat, and many of the companies that tried ended up paying significantly more in penalties to their local Depts of Labor than they would have saved with this stunt.
(Not to mention that companies have spent decades perfecting the "layoffs are coming in a quarter or two, send out performance reviews now and encourage managers to be extra 'honest' and nitpick everything so that we have a written record just in case we need to fire people for performance to make the layoff seem smaller" dance, including Stack Ranking being built to be that smoke 100% of the year, every year. Still technically illegal, but if the quiet parts aren't said out loud who are you going to believe, the months ahead of time paperwork in performance reviews or that executives decided they needed harsh performance reviews months in advance on a golf course somewhere? It's not a conspiracy when it's so easy to pull off.)
Mass terminations without timely notice, or pay in lieu of notice, are not. Disguising a mass termination as a collection of "performance" based individual terminations is a method that many companies have tried and failed, because...get this...WARN regulations in the US and EU don't care about the reasons for termination unless it's a "for cause" termination and you absolutely need to document the cause for those.
It's fine for them to get rid of excess weight. My guess is they could probably cut a lot more if they wanted.
Now, even if the company is crushing it, they'll still see employees more as a cost center instead of a revenue generator.
Their net income is up more than 2x in just the last 5 years. 10 years ago, Microsoft only had $85B in revenue, now they are up to $134B in net income, and they need to let 25% of the company leave?
The total net income doesn't matter: The move is management saying they are overstaffed for the work they think they need.
Assume Microsoft is expecting just a third of people to take the offer. It's just too many people to want to move to a different division that needs more labor: It's basically entire divisions that they'd have to create from whole cloth.
yes, because, (a) you would be an amoral company otherwise and (b) the productivity and work quality of those remaining 15 will plummet if you don't and AI won't save you in the end: you'll build faster and cheaper, but the quality of your products will enter a downward spiral it will be hard or impossible to exit from.
It's deleterious to the economy. As the recent Microsoft game studio apocalypse shows, mergers are also extremely deleterious. It would be better to have a dozen game studios employing people and competing rather than one shit company cutting expenses and reducing products going to market.
I like this. I was trying to think of some way to allow layoffs for struggling companies but not reward layoffs for companies that are making a profit, who just want to make more. My idea was more around the executive team being unable to take a salary or having to fire the CEO or something, nothing which as I worked through in my head seemed workable.
Enforceability is a problem; it's always been trivial to re-write a job description.
What should actually happen is everyone should be paid the same amount while doing 75% of the work they were doing before, but unfortunately there are no serious power structures like unions which could ensure that technological gains actually improve people's lives in that way.
Well no, you should keep the other five to increase your output even more and make even more money.
Tomorrow they’ll announce that they’re going to spend $134b on new data centers.
while other divisions are sinking ship
there always a case for a yard cleanup and decluttering
Yes, it's cold, but in the grand scheme of things, it's good for the society if companies are efficient and the economy is efficient. An efficient economy means that we can produce and consume more per hour worked.
Such behavior by companies may not be in my self-interest but that's another matter.
The amount of capex flying around requires raising funds, there have been dozens of stories recently about investors demanding higher rates for AI bonds. MSFT et al need to get their balance sheets in order to get good rates. Also, everyone is waiting for the bubble to burst, getting the house in order ahead of it is very prudent.
If they need your skills after restructuring, you will be offered your old job back and get to pocket the buyout money.
If they don't need your skills, you're going to get fired anyway.
At least that's how any rational company would handle it. Employees are supposedly hired because they contribute to the company, not to fill seats.
It's very common in these situations to target every org in the company with a goal of X% reduction. If a small fraction of these teams now need extra headcount, easy enough to allow those teams to hire. Usually you don't keep the severance if you return in under X days.
I've personally been laid off, only for the post-re-org team to hire several people, including asking to rehire me. It's rare, and those affected should probably plan to find new jobs, but it happens.
I've never worked at a rational company. I'm not sure that's a thing.
Exactly as you place it, the way they found out to push for buyouts was to terminate existing positions.
Everyone was forced to decide between taking the buyout, or apply to internal positions instead, naturally the later was much more complicated than just taking the money.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7518428...
So there is some truth in the claims of the MS President.
I'm not privy to a standard Microsoft contract so I can't say for 100% certain, but I'd be quite shocked if they don't provide a clause that workers can only be terminated for cause. So they're legally required to buy out contracts if they want to get rid of a substantial number of workers in a short period of time.
Sounds like you might be European. The US doesn't have contracts for salaried employees most of the time. In the event of a layoff, no notice is required, no mutual termination agreement needed, no consultation takes place. You are terminated (sometimes effective immediately) and if you're lucky you may get a severance package, which is not required by law.
Sure they offer severance, industry norm is usually 1-2 weeks of severence per year of employment, but in no way are they contractually limited to only lay people off for cause.
Firing an individual is different, on that front they are careful how its handled to avoid being sued and having to settle. Employment laws also vary by country, I'm mostly familiar with US laws.
What I was responding to is somebody above thinking that Microsoft was being "generous" with this deal - what I was saying is that they were almost certainly just sticking to greediest possible behavior that stays within the bounds of the contract. You can describe billion dollar multinational corps in quite a lot of ways, but generous isn't one of them.
In comparison with what I've seen in big tech layoffs over the years, this offer is pretty "generous" in comparison. I'd assume any layoff following this would be as well, at least beating the 1-2 week per employed year norm.
Is this really true? I believe all of my software engineering jobs have been at will, and there was nothing in the documents I signed that would give me any benefits or rights if my employer wanted to fire me.
US "at will" laws really are that bad. The US has a strange history with labor laws.
https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/no-breach...
Most American employees are at-will, and the contract in the MSFT lawsuit above was an at-will contract which is why they could be terminated, as you said.
Unless you can provide some other evidence that MSFT employees at not at will, it seems reasonable to believe they are, in which case providing the generous severance they did was not legally required.
I'm bewildered that you think this is the case. Have the widespread layoffs in tech over the last few years not aptly demonstrated to you how false this is?
For the vast majority of white collar jobs in America, there isn't a contract that the employer has to "buy out", and the employer can lay them off with sufficient notice (WARN requires 60 calendar days if the company is above a certain size, etc).
I was in a startup during Covid. The CEO said: "unlike many startups, we just got a round of investment so we are in a really good situation and we won't have to let go anyone, you can be reassured". A week later, they fired a whole team and a few other employees.
Executives are not your friends, and they are not paid to tell you the truth.
So yes. They are not only not your friends, they're outright hostile and you should trust nothing they say and approach every interaction with them as a game and try your best to at least break even.
They likely view you with deep contempt and derision, if they acknowledge that you have any measure of self worth at all. You should act accordingly.
I’m glad you’ve had a better experience. Sometimes the best among us do percolate to the top. I’ve seen it too, I’ve just seen the opposite too many times to trust anyone in an executive leadership role.
Find life satisfaction from other sources is my advice, but not corporate world and career in such. Thats a sure sign of life wasted on many levels.
Have you been in companies of more than a few people? Being "CEO, CTO, CPO and founder" of a startup of 5 does not count as "being an executive", right?
I did not get the choice to just leave with a buyout today and really wish I did. I'd be happy to go. I am not really sure I even want to work in this industry anymore which is unfortunate because I've been in it for pretty much my entire adult life. I have other interests though so I'm sure I'd find something to occupy my time.
This company follows trends and rarely sets them these days and the meme of Microsoft's corporate structure with each org pointing guns at each other isn't too far off from the truth. It doesn't always translate to good long-term strategy or even decent products in recent years.
“Like a family” “Sacrifices” “New platform” “Come together” “Critical delivery” “Recap”
I learned this from another senior when I was at Unity in 2022 that dipped immediately when they started talking like that.
I mean, two out of three isn’t bad, right?
Most of the time, anyway.
As far as business is concerned, the thing often runs better with mid people with less leverage. They just do their job, don't have any ideas and you can squeeze them.
Because it's not all the best that are leaving. Just the ones not stuck with a mortgage or similar stuff. This cuts the wings of very capable people and completely strips them off their bargaining power. Which is very useful to management.
Not all employees need to be the "best". But if you are a top tier company in a given field like Microsoft, you need the best minds to stay top tier, otherwise you will descend. But on the other hand you don't need the lower tier performers to stay top tier except for scaling reasons because the supply for top tier performers is a very small pool...
I might be wrong, but I doubt that these mass buyouts were also offered to those that are strategically relevant. Though I guess that can happen if that specific branch of the management tree is bad at their jobs
This also works as price discovery mechanism for both parties. Best employee can take a break and apply later for different job, profile, growth industry etc. Companies also find better to hire what they think best at market price instead of honorary best which are there for long time.
Even now with agentic work there are areas I am able to do well and some areas im not. It's definitely always changing.
Getting rid of your best means you'll also make sure that the rest of them slowly, but surely leave and never come back. Good people will not work with average people which results in long term failure to compete for the company.
There's a reason why all tech industry leaders have focused on getting a *consistent* and *even* pool of good workers to establish themselves there (against wisdom of the MBA crowd you're repeating here).
Or rather because they share observations about the world you might not like.
This is what a discussion is - and besides me not liking it, it's also flawed and dismissive of people.
Having checked your CV, I can see why you're probably doing it, but that's still.. not great. Maybe you should've also checked mine before running with these strong opinions.
The execs want to run the most profit to cost they can squeeze out, usually short term. The employees see the value in the senior and knowledge rich staff with higher costs long term.
Which hurts me to say. But engineers tend to make for terrible businessmen. (There are exceptions of course, and the opposite is _even worse_)
I think the efforts on cutting edge works has been reduced and redirected to more market-dominating trends like LLM optimizations. This is a bet. Cut off the finger for a stronger arm. And I think this bet will fail. But I thought the same about this new Gemini after Bard, and boy I was wrong.
That is true for monopolies. Once you get a monopoly, you do not need to compete anymore. Lower the salaries. Make products worse. Increase prices. Monopolies do not need to care. We used to break them because that. Nowadays, bots just will tell you that they are monopolies because they are "so good". So, here we are.
It is not true if you are determining the correct feature to add to microsoft's money making products. That requires deep knowledge of users and the industry and the existing product. It requires understanding the industry and users far in advance, the turnaround time for a feature in Windows or Azure is likely 6 months or longer, sometimes years. It requires acumen and an ability to think about customers and the market and sales. Microsoft doesn't have 5000 people who can do this. They probably don't have 1000. These people can go start their own business or consulting firm today. There are lots of people they worked with in the past who know how good they are so they can get another job.
The same is true for engineering. Out of 500 engineers, there are 10-20 that are doing the really important work that you can't just find someone else to do. They know everything about the system and everyone comes to them for advice or to get explanations about how things are put together and why. You can't just find some average engineer and put them in the same desk as these 10-20 and magically things are fine, the mid tier person doesn't have the years of experience nor the potential to fill this role even if they did have the experience.
I.. uh. I hate to break it to you, but that's not as deep of a moat as this reads like you would believe it is.
Engineers (like me, fwiw) would love to believe all these things about themselves, but they're not really true.
Of course, there is a difference, but the difference just doesn't matter all that much in the real world. Markets do not care.
Which isn't to say that people shouldn't know their worth. But it is to say that one can better defend their worth when armed with an accurate assessment of reality.
Or rather, it is an incredibly cheap way to shut down a whole range of dumb counters, so of course one throws it in.
But I do not love to break it to people. I am ambivalent about that. I just like true things.
So you're right on the "something isn't authentic here" but wrong on the assessment of the motivation.
I said that their strategy is self defeating. You are arguing they will do it anyway.
You are arguing that people are delusional about their worth. My point agrees with that, most people are, but there are some people that are actually valuable and companies are very bad at telling the difference.
It's effectively that the more desirable elements leave, the less desirable parts stay behind and get more concentrated... So the bad employees are the salt in the dead sea
It was coined by this chap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Webster#Career
Ultimately, you can only take equity away from people like that for so long. We're taking the people who actually create the value and firing them so that we can satisfy the hangers-on, meaning shareholders who often 1) don't know they even own MS and 2) are often diversified as to make a real problem with Microsoft not a dealbreaker for their financial goals.
I mean, suppose you're a star performer at Microsoft. Consider the following:
1. The FAANGs pay better than just about any corporation on Earth.
2. Most of those FAANGs have also had plenty of layoffs of their own.
3. If you are the caliber of person who works at Microsoft who could get a job at a super hot AI company (say NVidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) my guess is most of these people already left.
I suspect that most of the people who end up taking this offer have already checked out in some way, i.e. people wanting to quit and now this gives them a reason to do so.
having to get "promoted" to even get a perm job is not 'exceptional job market'
The more senior you are, the more you will need to rely on network referrals. Most HR processes are designed around filling average positions and filter for it especially when the number of applicants are high. I switched jobs around 2024 and all the interviews I got was through referrals or directly reaching out to the founders. I got zero callbacks from applications to HR.
Also five years ago, we had a once in a generation pandemic that forced all retailers to go online at global level, pushed remote work to be the norm and the tech workers suddenly had access to a growing global job market. That was the exception not the norm.
Yes, people with specific, real AI skills (and by "real" I'm specifically excluding the "let me show you the secrets to a good prompt!!" LinkedInfluencers) are making obscene amounts of money. But there are other folks who were experts in their fields and truly the best are now having a mighty difficult time getting hired. There was a front page HN post recently by a guy who headhunters used to trip over themselves to contact, who wrote a number of programming books, who was considering leaving tech because he couldn't get hired. Now, granted, a big reason he couldn't get hired is because he was looking for a fully remote job and that world is largely gone, but I think another big reason is that he was a technology expert in specific programming languages, and that is exactly the type of expertise that AI is making less valuable.
You, probably, talk about something else.
To say that it's because Microsoft overhired is a gross mis-remembering of the last 20 years.
For starters, I remember way back in the late 2000s meeting an engineer from the office team. Their entire job was focused on making buttons. Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software, though I've heard that has changed.
Anyway, this is a company with decades long cultural roots for enormously large teams where each person is hyper focused on tiny little pieces of a much larger product.
Also, let's not forget that they bought up 1/3 of the gaming industry.
I don't mind that Microsoft is hurting, because it makes mid products, that always seem to fail-up. However, I do mind that the people are okay that the answer is to lay people off instead of, maybe, breaking the company back up into smaller companies that preserve the stability of the workforce.
Is this weird in any way? I live in EU land, but this does not seem too uncommon. As a developer Ive had assignments where I only wrote unit test, another where I was reponsible for daily CI running well (though both moved towards development eventually). I heard just the other day about a competitor where you did not write your own test code.
But yes, before that it would be not at all unusual to have “test engineers” or other technical staff whose entire responsibility laid with setting up test environments and running QA of products. These people did not do product dev, though they may have been involved in writing supporting test platform libraries or even maintaining test infrastructure (like IBM Jazz).
Even today in the U.S. companies that haven’t fully jumped onto newer development practices probably still have QA and/or test departments.
The world at large makes all sorts of trends, and that by itself doesn't make them smart. As a developer, you are likely to have blind spots when it comes to quality and reliability as a result of having written the code. Even a team of developers cross-testing each other's code will not have the same ability to find flaws (before they embarrass you in front of the customer/client/user) as a dedicated tester whose job it is solely to find new (and old) ways to break things (and document them.)
DevOps is a completely different thing (though they work together with testers.)
It is only weird to have dedicated QA on your team if you don't give a fuck about releasing shit with bugs in it for the user to bump into.
I never said it was smart. Or dumb, for that matter. Just that many product teams have been made to merge testing responsibilities as an internal responsibility, in line with having end-to-end ownership of the product from development to its operational deployment. And usually without any dedicated test engineer member of that team to do this.
> It is only weird to have dedicated QA on your team if you don't give a fuck about releasing shit with bugs in it for the user to bump into.
Well, has the behavior of software companies led you to believe they care strongly about this? I always got the impression they cared more about either maximizing feature velocity given a certain team size, or minimizing labor cost for a given feature velocity.
I just checked LinkedIn and they have quite a few job listings in this vein. Which makes sense: in the "AI and YOLO" development lifecycle, automated testing is more important than ever.
That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.
This isn't the end.
Blasphemy! Bring the torches!
Maybe it was the org we were in, Office could have been different, but our challenge was usually wanting more people on the team to help spread the load rather than less.
And for what its worth, I didn't intend to go into test at the time but it was a great place for me to start. I picked up a habit of writing production code in more testable ways, considering edge cases, implementing observability, etc. Those skills are often picked up along the way but it definitely helped me out starting with a much stronger basis of those skills.
You mean 3.96T dollars, right?
I would love if we'd put efforts towards better economic/political systems.
I saw it happening in a funny way not long time ago - company offered buyouts, but got insanely surprised when high percentage of people actually accepted it. Management thought acceptance rate would be much, much lower, but when numbers started to pour in on a 2nd day, oh man... Panic spread very quickly because people were accepting packages in fear of layoffs without such package, so management said if any layoffs will happen in 3 years period after this, same package will be offered no question asked. Cooled things a bit, but what a mess...
And people believed them?!
Probably because they could sue them for not keeping their word.
Unless those funds were placed in an escrow account, I would have assumed that claim held no water.
There's a reason corporations almost always settle lawsuits (if they aren't dismissed).
And?
Litigation is a rich man's game. Companies almost always have more resources to dedicate to litigation than individual employees, especially if those individual employees have been laid off and are now without an income.
The company knows this, the employees know this, the company knows the employees know this, and vice-versa.
Okay, so how many nights until the blue-eyed employees all leave the company? :p
You can't say, "Well, we hired a new CEO, so all those old agreements are null and void."
Given that they are now saying they have 25% too many employees, perhaps they should be banned from hiring H1B's altogether until they're rehired however many they end up letting go ...
No they weren't. If this administration had strong reasons to believe Microsoft cheated and engaged in fraudulent practices, the DoJ would have opened an investigation leading to punitive measures. It's a dog whistle and red meat for "the base."
> Given that they are now saying they have 25% too many employees, perhaps they should be banned from hiring H1B's altogether until they're rehired however many they end up letting go ...
That's not going to happen. It's easier for them to send the jobs offshore. You could support banning American companies from hiring in other companies in addition to immigration. I'm sure that will work out great for the US.
Microsoft and other tech firms on the DoJ's list have already been suspended from permanent labor certification programs following their work visa fraud investigations so this just isn't true.
> That's not going to happen. It's easier for them to send the jobs offshore.
Microsoft's Government/Enterprise business depends hugely on their US presence and history. Offshoring more than they have already wouldn't just further tank the quality of their already-declining product catalogue further but it would disqualify them from federal procurement and compromising the privileged market access.
Microsoft and Adobe are both already under investigation. Based on the preliminary findings, they've been suspended from participating in the Green Card program along with a host of other companies. [1]
> That's not going to happen. It's easier for them to send the jobs offshore.
It sounds like that's what the administration is demanding (i.e., hire more US workers before they can participate in the H1B program). [2]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/08/microsoft-adobe-green-card-l...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/08/jd-vance-...
Spoiler; they just staff up directly overseas now.
Also, good grief, flooding the market with thousands more people.
2027 is going to be wild. Stock up on beans and rice, folks.
Software engineers make a lot of money, at least historically because of supply/demand mechanics. By suddenly and continuously flooding the market with lots and lots of software engineers, you effectively can bring down wages, since if people are unemployed long enough they're likely to take a lower salary.
For sardonic reasons, I prefer "MANNA".
It seems heavenly until the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin.
Of course, this is just when they got caught doing it. Who knows how often it happens where they don't.
Buahahahaaha
I don't know what the overall answer is, but I would say that if you have high demand skills, you can still earn a living.
This Microsoft deal for the large part is not being offered to software engineering orgs.
Really, it feels like we're in a quiet depression.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mehoinusa672n
Most people do better economically over their lifetimes because most people's earnings grow as they progress in their careers.
Besides "sounds cool with shock value online"
A real GDP decline of over 10% year over year for more than 1 year is the biggest signal. Ofc, I noticed the US Federal Government has been cooking the books since at least H. W. Bush (maybe longer) by including tech stock potential gains as part of GDP. Take out tech stocks, the US economy looks like it will to historians.
Even in the modern day, an economic depression is associated with massive unemployment, deflation, reductions in the trifecta of industrial output + consumer spending + international trade, with the final kicker being reduced credit availability. Currently, interest rates are relatively high (historically middling) which has effectively restricted consumer credit, while the national credit rating has fallen.
Modeling that the GDP goes up because people are buying bitcoin would be the equivalent of the AI investment effect. A key difference being that the AI companies are currently included in the calculation and bitcoin is not. I don't mean to imply that the AI companies are transparently ponzi schemes, but they are all massively overvalued. The net GDP effect should be very very small if not negative, while the valuations are being used to justify a growing GDP that would otherwise have obviously fallen.
But at that point, they almost should be laying off engineers, even without playing any such game.
Can’t claim MS is firing citizens and replacing them with H1Bs, if they are leaving voluntarily.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/10/26/introducing-a-vo...
Headline is making me laugh cause it sounds like a press announcement for a new product
"The new Microsoft Voluntary Exit Offer, thinner, and lighter, with 20% slimmer bezels than before"
_wait_
The interesting question is what it means for the ineligible part of the company. Are they simply going to get another iteration of VEP later, or are they going to be hit by brutal layoffs at some point in the near future?
> 1–2 weeks’ pay per semester of tenure, based on level; six months of fully covered COBRA (remaining 12 months paid by you) and two vesting events in February and May.
> L65-L67 get 4w of pay per year of service, while L64 and below get 2w per year. I’ve been with MS for 10 years, so I qualify for the max payout of 39w.
> Eligibility this time is up to L70, not sure what the package is for L68-70.
“Eligible employees will receive an email with a link to their Voluntary Exit Offer details within the next few hours.”
It's something like - 3 months base salary - plus either 2 weeks or 1 month of pay per year of service (the former if you are at principal level or above) - 12 months health insurance
anyone know what level 70 means?
IMO a lot of these layoffs are companies going from an experimental fiscal mindset to a conservative fiscal mindset - ie, rather than acquiring companies and hiring to grow into new markets, a lot of organizations are falling back on what they know works, independent of any productivity impact of LLMs.
There is a big HOWEVER. At least 2 in fact.
1. The company had been growing in the previous years, 2019, 2018, 2017 (they shrank somewhat in 2015 or 2016). In 2014 they had 29% workforce increase. So the significant growth in 2021/22 is not an aberration but rather continuation of the growth in previous years.
2. What IS an aberration is the workforce count after 2022. No growth in 2023 or 2025 (as in ZERO YoY change), and measly +7,000/3% growth in 2024. And some YoY loss in 2026 (-5,000, or 2.2%). With 2027 YoY likely showing at least some (and possibly a lot) of these 60,000.
So no, "it's just overhiring due to pandemic" was supposed to die years ago.
> like many of these recent layoffs, this is essentially reversing 2020-2022 net headcount growth.
which I took as "this is just reversing Covid overhiring". Which I'm tired of hearing. MSFT might have grown faster in 2021/22, but have stopped hiring for pretty much 4 consecutive years since.
What’s your theory?
That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.
I’ve heard this claim many times and is not backed by any more evidence than “it works on my machine”.
If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.
It has been losing users, safety standards have dropped and overall the platform is worse off than before. There’s a reason why no other company has done something similar with their employee counts.
Also, it is now full of bots and grifters, plus Musk’s own promoted tweets with whatever political thing he’s obsessed with at the moment showing up in everyone’s timelines.
The matter of the fact is that most governments and newspapers publish on twitter (now X) still. It also serves the purpose of amplifying Musk to a large audience.
If you wanted to transform a public forum into a right -wing echo chamber, then the transformation is a massive success and the platform continues to achieve all relevant objectives.
While you’re right in that the platform has its uses, other companies cannot do the same. Which is why it’s important to talk about objective success metrics. Sure if you want to fire 80% staff at Microsoft and have a transformation where they only cater to half the user base then they can do it. But they will also not be taking in the same profits as before.
I don't think it's right, but I can see how a billionaire just completely overrides the company mission and business model after they buy enough shares or something.
Maybe there are other non-obvious use-cases for other companies, where you're effectively buying the user base to then pull the rug.
A lot of the original customers will just accept such a change. See Twitter or GitHub.
Musk paid an absurd premium for the company. Far more than it was worth. It was intended to force the board to sell. So an 80% estimated drop (it’s private so it’s a very rough estimate and I won’t go into the various reasons you should not accept it at face value), sounds scary but it’s by design.
Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition. It lost more than $1.3B in the two preceding years. A big downgrade from its previous $1B+ annual reported profits.
As for the 81% headcount reduction, Musk confirmed that, but if you think he’s lying about that for some reason, CNBC investigated it. Journalists examined internal Twitter records and reported approximately 1,300 actively working employees, with another 1,400 still receiving pay but no longer working. CNBC also interviewed two recent employees who corroborated the scale of the reductions. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
Prior to acquisition, Twitter's SEC filings confirmed more than 7,500 full-time employees.
I don’t see why this claim is so unbelievable. Twitter was famous for its army of social media staff whose entire day comprised two meeting between matcha tea and meditation. https://youtube.com/watch?v=buF4hB5_rFs
Musk just fired everyone who wasn’t an engineer and it turns out the engineers keep the lights on.
As for this:
> Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition
This is objectively false. 2020 revenue for Twitter was $3.71B while 2021 came in at $5.07B. The company was on a growth trajectory and path to profitability.
In fact, after the acquisition, the ad revenue dropped by a lot. https://www.businessinsider.com/x-revenues-plunged-months-af...
All of this is public information.
That’s because I didn’t make any claims about X’s financial performance. I was explaining to you why you were wrong on some important facts.
> This is objectively false. 2020 revenue for Twitter was $3.71B while 2021 came in at $5.07B.
First, you’re conflating revenue and profit, which is kind of unforgivable in this context. Second, I explained that in those years they made large profits. In my comment. Which you clearly didn’t read.
If this is just where you like to emotionally vent may I instead recommend Reddit? I like the interesting discussions here.
Again, you added nothing and are suggesting I was wrong on some facts? Can you point to my comment that you responded to provide the fact that I was wrong about?
> First, you’re conflating revenue and profit, which is kind of unforgivable in this context
Err I am not? Seems like you’re intentionally misrepresenting what I’ve said.
> this is just where you like to emotionally vent may I instead recommend Reddit
Seems like you’re the one intentionally or unintentionally engaging in a Reddit like discourse. In sister comment you say Elon Musk was the only investor in Twitter which quick Google search will tell you is incorrect. I feel you need to hold yourself to the standard that you accuse me of not having.
The valuation crashing back to reality after going private, and therefore being measured by its intrinsic worth rather than whatever the latest trader paid for a share of it, was an inevitable but meaningless consequence.
Twitter has become text book bad purchase, bad management, and worst "rebranding" in history.
It was meaningless to Musk for all of about a week, when he came off his ketamine binge and realized what a stupid offer he’d made. But it was a done deal by that point.
According to Reddit[0], it might not have been meaningless to employees with unvested RSUs. They lacked an acceleration clause, so instead of immediately becoming 100% vested at $54.20, the schedule remained intact with a cash payout instead of stock. If the cash payout was relative to current company value, then it was a massive hit.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/yykn1e/if_you_work...
I'm talking about the investors and banks that ponied up over half the purchase funds, and the employees that didn't have life changing payouts who were laid off.
I suppose he has the money to pay back the investors and banks now though. Not sure what kinda return they were expecting vs what they got.
The Financial Times report is behind a paywall so I'm not sure how that evaluation was reached. Also there are a bunch of bizarre financial shenanigans Musk has freely pulled with zero scrutiny. Hard to gauge the full impact of the layoffs when the person at the helm is profoundly amoral and has no scruples about lying.
and `X’s revenues have dropped since Musk’s takeover, but it posted about $1.2bn in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation in 2024, according to two people familiar with the matter — roughly flat with the period before Musk’s takeover.`
https://x.com/firefox
https://x.com/marcoarment
https://x.com/viticci
https://x.com/CaseyNewton
https://x.com/gruber
Musk, in traditional private equity ways, killed anything that wasnt immediately making money. Then he made it pay to play and monetized the hell out of it. All of that BEFORE he opened the far-right floodgates.
Now its a shell of its former self and coasting on the momentum it once enjoyed.
The Twitter exodus does relate to this, kind of; it's an example of the "fall back on existing revenue streams" strategy (you could call it a private equity playbook, but it's more universal than that) exaggerated by the guy acquiring it not needing more revenue and clobbering the revenue part too.
Twitter pre-Musk had an _enormous_ amount of experiments going on. They were building streaming services, clones of every social network you can think of (Spaces etc.), an entire sports brand around MLB, and so on and so on.
They also had an army of sales people who sold ads and an army of engineers building and optimizing an ad platform, which is (or was?) their actual business.
The "platform going down" narrative from both sides was 100% irrelevant to what was actually going on. "We laid off PMs, salespeople, and engineers and the system didn't crash" is a complete non-sequitor that should be obvious to anyone who's involved in software engineering or maintenance. If anything, I'd expect laying off most of any company to make it much more stable; when you don't change things you introduce fewer bugs.
If you aren't growing and building, then obviously you don't need the same amount of people only to maintain what you have. It doesn't take that many people to fix bugs, renew SSL certificates and plug security holes.
Game studios knew this since forever. Once you finish building, if you aren't building something new, then you're laying off. It's not a new thing Twitter/Musk has just discovered. Odd that whenever this is discussed, it's framed as if Twitter-then is the same thing as Twitter-now, minus most of its employees and doing just fine.
Laying off all those people didn't tank the site, it tanked the business!
50% of the output is produced by the square root of the team size.
In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.
A tautology, and therefore devoid of information.
If you had claimed "In very large organizations...", you might have been saying something.
The problem is that the bigger and more bloated a company is, the harder it becomes to tell what is fat and what isn’t.
In fact, this condition might be the cleanest definition of "bloat".
Also look at their recent account merging efforts and all the problems people have encountered and posted about on the platform itself.
I suspect this is what got Meta and other companies at least considering whether they would benefit from doing this at a much smaller scale, because there were some mass firings the next year at other companies, but this could have just been in the pipes anyway due to overhiring before.
After the acquisition, advertising revenue dramatically dropped (to a low of about 1/3 in 2025 though it has apparently recovered up to only down about 50%!), because all of those functions were gutted. This is why Twitter tried to switch to "buying a blue-check" and other premium features (e.g. access to Grok), because they had fired all of the people necessary to run a real advertising business and they needed revenue.
And I know that you don't need that many employees to support Twitter's customer facing business because Bluesky does basically the same thing (message storage/search backend+web app+two mobile apps) and they worked for over a year on just 20 million in total raises (and no advertising or any other revenue)- they did a Series B in 2025 that raised over 100 million, but they were operational for over a year on just 20 million in raise. So yeah, it doesn't take that many people to just present the messages of users to other users, but what Twitter did was to cut back on what they did for their customers and accept the big drop in revenue that came with it, and that's not really proof of anything.
User numbers are down 20% since the acquisition, ad revenue is halved and the value of the company has collapsed. Where is the politics? The only political thing was the acquisition itself. It ceased to function as a growth and market based company and effectively became a propaganda outlet, EM is highly relevant in that this was the actual point.
As a product the entire platform has stagnated, which is what you'd expect if you let most people go and just use it as an arm for election influence.
Wut?
I guess this is why we can't have nice things.
Edit: Enron Musk apologists will always crack me up.
For example, Google had been growing somewhat quickly for decades prior to 2020, but in 2021 and 2022 it grew by over sixty-thousand people, and the crazy growth actually started in 2020, so even more than that. Sixty thousand!
Undoing that takes a very long time--they should have been much smarter about it. You need four rounds of twelve-thousand person RIFs (whether layoffs or buyouts) to get back to the earlier growth trajectory. Each round generates several stories that hit HN.
Is this MS still dropping back to pre-Covid? I would bet at least some of it is.
This is an incorrect way of looking at it. Microsoft was growing at approximately 10-15% headcount year over year prior to COVID. If they reverted to the approximate 2020 headcount that would mean an overall decline in growth in comparison to a situation where COVID did not exist.
And the answer is, "Calculate what would have happened without Covid, assuming previous growth patterns, and compare that to current headcount."
So they would revert to the 2020 headcount plus a guess as to non-covid influenced headcount. A reasonable guess there is "about the same amount on average as pre-Covid growth."
A company growing 10% per year would be around 7x larger 20 years later. There's a limit on how big companies can get.
Yes, there is. Read Coase's seminal paper, The Nature of the Firm. Companies function by replacing market mechanisms with bureaucratic administration. That finds its end when internal coordination or misallocation of resources incurs more cost than it saves in transaction costs.
Conglomerates therefore have a ceiling in size, and it's the reason why unwinding them generally increases market value for the sum of its individual companies (in finance parlance: "conglomerate discount"). It's also why the Soviet Union didn't run very well, and very large conglomerates are usually the consequence of political/economic arrangements.
I always think of that line from Doctorow: "If you want to know how Amazon will treat its coders once they can be readily replaced, just look at Amazon warehouse workers and drivers".
But across Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, it's an absolute bunfight to get a new role in software at the moment. Thousands, even tens of thousands of applicants for every role on LinkedIn, in relatively short order. Invariably, if the role exists, it's too many for them to sanely process. Not just desperate applicants but qualified ones that meet the spec comfortably.
If that's coming to the US eventually, there will be lots more layoffs to come and nowhere else to jump to.
Fun thing though, we recently let a consultant go due to relying too much on LLMs.
I'm now a couple of years and about 1000 applications deep for which I've interviewed only with two companies (Xero and Canonical). No offers. This isn't like it was. And I'm not alone.
Not necessarily the reasoning. It might also be that they think their slice of the pie is about to become much smaller, for example.
Would love to have some insider knowledge on this decision.
Maybe it’s the small sample size, but from what I’ve seen, the thing hurting velocity more than anything is the fact that teams have too many “cooks”.
The way work is delegated is a bit broken when in reality the engineer who knows the code base or problem best should scope the work and just delegate it to their agents.
I can’t image how things look on the BI side.
Imagine it's more like a net 10% will leave, which is in line with many layoffs (acknowledging Microsoft's size makes this a large number)
People are playing stock valuation games these days, as they don't want the laggard label. =3
We could, but we would need access to Larry Ellison and a scale.
This feels like the centuries-ago transition of peasants from subsistence farmers to economically valuable consumers: thousands of Microserfs, spat out by a geriatric company that lost its ability to leverage their strengths. Their intelligence, their cognitive work product, will be their own again.
Awful for some affected folks; great for others, but SUPER great for everyone who stands to benefit from these talented folks' ejection into the great unknown of "holy shit I need to make money, lemme skate where the puck's going"
Some may even disrupt Microsoft. After all Microsoft can't force their knowledge out of their minds.
In a way this could be a downgrade, we'll be less incentivived to optimized or automate, and will be able to just throw bodies at problems.
personally, I was somewhat poorly utilized in my last team, I've just switched to a dream team where I am again tremendously effective, and I'm concerned that the axe will fall on me at random or before I have an opportunity to get 140% in my next Connect.
Layoffs like this are a huge reason for that. Talent pools are overlapping like never before. A person with 5 years of solid experience applying for tons of jobs and getting nowhere, only to realize they are competing with people with 10-15 years of experience freshly laid off from big companies. At that point, early career people are getting pushed almost completely out of the industry.
they've the most deployed software in the world - the software is inadequate most of the times (i.e full of bugs). 2nd the software is prone to misuse cz M$ doesn't have enough people listening to customers and making software meet the needs of its users.
if there was a company that should've done the Forward deployed thingy is Microsoft.
To assume MS will continue coasting is a fool's errand.
The consumer market both does and doesn't matter to Microsoft. There are certainly more options besides Windows for the average person looking to buy their next device (assuming they'll even get a full desktop/laptop computer) and that will continue to be the case moving forward. If you look at what drives most of MS's decisions on Windows, business-wise, it's not a desire to capture more of the consumer desktop market. It's a desire to maintain the enterprise and to use that as a jumping-off point for more revenue-earning opportunities like 365 or Azure. They know they are far, far safer there and have the connections with clients that matter. Your CTO will not be throwing together a slide deck to justify spending a large slice of the budget on switching away from Windows, at least not anytime soon, because it means throwing out a lot of other stuff like Active Directory, SharePoint, and the like that no one wants to think about.
[0]https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
Windows ecosystem is not Microsoft focus. It's in supported phase where Microsoft will make some updates to it, but they are not spending a ton of money or attention on it.
looking at azure - the traditional .net shops will insist on mssql instead of cosmosdb - when cosmosdb might fit their needs.
so many things wrong in the m$ ecosystem that could be fixed with m$ showing a little bit of care and deploying knowledgable engineers or resources to empower their customers.
However, I know many which have switched MSSQL to Postgres/MySQL happily. Azure supports those well.
Azure using SRE here.
> 1–2 weeks’ pay per semester of tenure, based on level; six months of fully covered COBRA (remaining 12 months paid by you) and two vesting events in February and May.
> L65-L67 get 4w of pay per year of service, while L64 and below get 2w per year. I’ve been with MS for 10 years, so I qualify for the max payout of 39w.
> Eligibility this time is up to L70, not sure what the package is for L68-70.
If your comp package has a non-disclosure clause it's illegal. You cannot be asked not to discuss salary in the US.
> People don't want to tip off
That's why it's illegal to be prevented from discussing salary. Discuss your coworkers - you might be the one being underpaid.
Fun times =3
You can sign broken contract freely - it's unenforceable, so you can sign whatever paper HR hands to you, and only when you're retaliated against do you need to care. Which coincidentally is when you stop needing to be cooperative anyways.
Don't "YMMV" your way out of laws that protect you.
We have this thing called freedom of speech that the courts take pretty seriously (usually).
The whole don't discuss how much you get paid, because its poor etiquette is an anti-worker old wives tale created by HR people last century. Its a complete myth, but most jobs Ive worked at there's always someone who is extermely afraid to discuss the topic out of fear of breaking a non-existent rule. The psyops worked.
ymmv, as living in an ivory tower means I may be unaware of current US rules.
>We have this thing called freedom of speech
That may be an old wives tale, as corporate money is defined as speech now. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
I was making over market rate on H1B. The petition process forces the employer to pay market rate or above.
Also the transfer petition is very easy and it usually takes 2-4 weeks. You can argue that changing jobs is higher friction for H1B workers, but if you are offered more salary elsewhere but decide to stay, well, that’s kind of on you, not the H1B process.
Perhaps the people I knew were just unlucky =3
That statement is fake news. And not sure why they have to lie if all this data already backs up their claim. Oh wait, if it wasn’t for this BS claim we would question the market forces and not buy their BS…
I changed my job 3 times in 2 years on an H1B. Standard paperwork. In fact, the last one was during the company I worked for was being acquired so I had 2 petitions at the same time. Didn’t lift a finger for it. Well, other than signing the papers sent over to me.
I can get behind the claim that H1B workers negotiate worse because they are new to the country and possibly unaware of the market forces etc. And they don’t have the unemployment benefits to fall back to - even though they pay for it the same as everyone.
Oh, they also pay Social Security. And then leave. Just so we can enjoy it.
What is smart is to use those money and build (or at least head towards) future that will allow you to chill a bit more and focus on more important matters in our short lives. I am doing my best, it may be enough or not, we shall see soon.
You don't need to work at Microsoft to pay your bills. That is the point.
"Your work is done. Why wait?" - (to paraphrase George Eastman's suicide note.)
Well, AI research outside of frontier labs had a good run. Gonna suck when competing with the other 30% unemployment white collar workers. When you say what work you used to do, some of them may end up trying to be violent towards one who is seen as having worked on the tech that killed the golden goose.
The "internal" memo: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-is-offering-buyout...
In this job market, that may not be enough time to feel comfortable and safe taking the offer (if you're a super-employable hotshot with offers awaiting in your LinkedIn, you're probably not the likely target for the offer)
but if I was that employable, and offered that severance, I'd not give it one second's thought
and that's the problem, these severance packages are more often taken by the best people in the company
Could still be much better than a sudden layoff though.
But if people are more productive then you can find new things for them to do, unless demand is falling.
They'll probably say "wow look AI is working", "must be ago!" not, "wow looks like all that irrational spending is catching up". I don't think they'll be able to justify the ridiculous valuations and spending that's taking place, even if AGI walked in and clocked in at the office tomorrow.
I say that as someone who fully believes AI and LLMs are already revolutionary, akin to the spinning jenny. The world will fundamentally look different treating cognitive work the same way we treat mechanical work. BUT the financing and ways we've strapped the economy and people's retirements to it is simply irrational.
There's no sane material evidence to show this is gonna work out. Basically all signs point to this becoming an economic time bomb just like dotcom. Dotcom is a great example because we can see all the fiber etc stuck around, got cheap, and changed the world - but all the irrational economic activity around it blew up and there is thousands of miles of insanely financed fiber on the ocean floor doing diddly squat because of it. They're just buying time on a runaway train.
That’s a lot of workers looking for work.
Even basic things like fixing the pothole doesn't get done because, well, permits.
Edit: this was in the windows vista days and I hope/expect they have overhauled that entire process in a major way, because things were at a near standstill.
Azure is an epic shitshow (to be fair, GCP is even worse, but eh). Github is seriously struggling staying up and alive. Windows updates are posing more of a danger for business continuity than the security issues they fix, which is a challenge in itself. Windows itself is being made irrelevant as more and more software moves for SaaS web models and the gaming flank is being eaten left and right by SteamOS/Proton/WINE, what's left of Windows Embedded after CE got terminated looong ago (that was the foundation for a lot of HMI stuff) is being replaced by Android or straight Linux on Raspberry Pi style devices. Office 365 is buggy as hell (and in the case of Outlook, a horribly bloated Electron mess). Wide masses resent Windows itself for the bloatware, espionage and advertising that's forced down your throat.
And to make the already bad situation even worse, the Trump government made American Big Tech their bitch and everyone but the US is now looking to divest from them as fast as possible.
This! EU is now in full "decoupling" mode, many future contracts are now under reviews and plans how to preserve sovereignty.
Btw seeing what ArtCraft does it is now really realistic. Will it be SuSe + Mistral, or a kind of ArtCraft like vibe coded solutions?
There's still people left there? Lol
Google? It's a meme by now that you have to raise a media or HN stink and even that sometimes does not help.
You have the guy who wrote code in the 90's, became a dev manager, maybe is a PUM now, or still a dev manager, and basically "does emails and attends meetings", goes to the "daily triage" (which has a whole bunch of people in the room), is a member of the "war team" (they probably don't use that term any more). All these people are not "doing" anything useful and there are a lot of them at MS.
This used to work out fine, because the way the August reviews always worked (stacked rank etc.) it's very much a favorites game, "who you know". So you get a pass.
But suddenly there's a reorg and new management comes in (or a flattening; no more dev leads with 2 reports!). And they have their own set of dev leads, dev managers, etc. they want to install. So the existing management gets kicked out, those who still have buddies in other orgs will transfer there (but this gets much rarer now, as most friends from 'old Microsoft' have retired). But the "does emails & attends meetings" guy is out of a job (and is going to cry "age discrimination" because he's 50+, but the reality is he hasn't done a whole lot for a decade, and has zero useful skills now).
PMs; there are WAY too many of these, with their entire parallel org of management. There used to be almost as many PMs as devs back in the day. Other companies don't have anywhere near so many. Most of them can go; back in the day a lot of them would go to the dev's office, ask about a topic someone asked about in email, the dev says "Oh I can just reply to the thread", PM says "Nooo... let me do that" (PM wants to be the one replying to be 'visible' even though they are just a glorified status collector/forwarder).
There ARE a lot of incredible people there, and the best people I worked with at MS are just as good as the best I worked with at the FANGs. But unlike other companies (FANGs, startups) there are a LOT of a really bad/useless people there too. A lot. Although I have no faith that MS is going to lose THOSE people in this buyout.
Engineering discipline is absolutely non-existent at MS. Everything is date driven. The source tree (Source Depot) gets locked as of X date and only "test fixes" can be checked in after that. But the next ship vehicle is months away. So people keep checking in regular code as "test fixes" after the branch lock. One time it got so bad that the build was actually broken for the entire day of the branch lock, and people were force submitting in the evening (everyone expected whoever broke the build to fix it, but... they didn't, so force submit!) to make sure their changes got in before the lock.
Random unrelated funny MS story: The wiki that everyone in Bing used, got wiped out, because it was running on a machine in someone's office that got wiped when they left. We had to have everyone run a script to salvage what they could off everyone in the org's browser cache.
What a limited understanding of how tangled systems operate.
In 30 years we’ll be reading these stories about Anthropic.
It’s the nature of the industry.
A thought-terminating cliche, if you will.
Personnel firms have decent experience predicting the takeup of an offer, so they make predictions about how good the offer needs to be, and they try to get close, within expenses and other considerations.
If Z people take the buyout, then, after the dust settles, you layoff the remaining X-Z people.
So it is unlikely that their target reduction is 25%.
A few months later, I was laid off anyway, with severance nowhere near what either of the two buyout offers had included. I regret passing up the offer because I trusted the company and believed things would get better. I spent several months out of work, burned through my savings, and am still feeling the financial effects today.
That doesn’t tell us what this company’s target is, but a voluntary buyout certainly doesn’t rule out layoffs later. If I were facing that choice again, I’d take the buyout in a heartbeat
The opportunity cost is higher now (companies are actually spending money on capex), and changes in productivity due to AI mean that simply hoarding talented developers isn't as useful any more. Before, you could keep people "busy" doing things that didn't really produce anything useful, and still find ways to justify it. VPs and directors are now being rewarded for "doing more with less" - not just shipping the largest organization.
I think overall SWE numbers will continue to slowly climb, but I think we're going to see more big tech unwind bloated staff numbers.
2 trillion dollars has left that market and transferred into data center development and AI related business. Most business growth is negative due to industries shrinking, acquisitions, going internal and developing purpose built tooling with AI, and sadly, going out of business entirely.
It all feels obvious, but what people warned about with AI, is finally having it's day. My fear is after this outcome, it fails.
Anthropic is already doing this - some software engineers have redeployed into research roles, for example. “Redeploying” is going to be the latest HR trend I think.
I probably wouldn't take this and instead devote more of my time to practicing for and collecting interviews during the equivalent time period with the hopes of keeping my job at the end.
But these are the most lucratively paid employees. These are also the same folks that are used to working at the same company and who might find it trying to interview elsewhere.
Most of time, it's after all IC, they look at what's left, decide what moves to make and lay off the managers.
However, I have seen more and more where managers are told what's happening and they find new jobs before layoffs.
I'm a recently retired developer, started with mainframes and punch cards all the way to AI.
Why a force reduction?
Ignore AI for a second. If you had a magic wand, that would help everyone at your company produce more, sell more, and all of your customers are producing and selling more, would that be a growth phase?
A quarter of their workforce! While a major conference was going on!
You can't and won't tell me with a straight face that AI will replace them.
Are we sure this isn't click bait
(not rhetorical, genuine question)
I wonder where are all those AI apologists who have been touting here for years that jobs will not go away?
Rapid technological advancement is always painful. Extrapolating that to "death of the industry" is awfully reductive and I haven't seen any signs of that. As others have pointed out, Big Tech layoffs have only reverted the shotgun-blast hiring of ~2020-2022.
This is just an optics-friendly way to soften the blow of 25% layoffs.
Layoffs absolutely suck, and there is likely more pain on the way, but if the alternatives are voluntary buyouts + layoffs vs plain layoffs, the first is much better.
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-makes-new-voluntary-...
It's probably taking advantage of economic arbitrage, plus healthy beliefs in what AI can maintain.
The interesting thing will be to see what new things companies who do this can achieve.
The question above whether to take it now or try to delay taking a package is an interesting thought.
25% offers != 25% layoffs
After offers, they could enforce any percentage of layoffs up to 25%, no?
Offers often come before layoffs, no?
The issue with most enterprise size workplaces is that the core teams that are actually working on revenue producing stuff is very small. The rest are support staff. I worked for a large bank and we had over 100 mobile software developers. Think about that for a second. A mobile application with over 100 people. That does not even include other teams that these 100 people depend on.
But you have to truly ask the difficult question: are all 100 people actually working on revenue producing work? The answer is that easily 60-80% are not. In fact, we had teams in the east coast that was the bulk of the 100 folks who did nothing but write documentation, guard their networking and data frameworks vehemently, and the rest of the time was spent fighting mundane software tasks.
That team could have been effective with at most 5 folks. In the world of AI coding, 5 folks would be an absolute force.
A lot of large workplaces are seeing these changes, because they simply got fat. Even Apple, which historically has been praised for weathering the layoffs has recently laid off many middle managers and employees working on useless things. It's part of Ternus' shake up. And it's not because of some evil corporate strategy to treat people like crap, it's really not. Strategically you have to ask yourself if you are truly being productive and truly a core member of a core team. If you are not, and simply wrangling JIRA and stuck in back to back meetings all day thinking you're a decision maker. Sorry but you're on the layoff list.
The bank wasn't the only example, I've worked in mid-large workplaces and with just a bit of introspection you knew immediately if you were a core member on a core team. And if you weren't, it was always in your best interest to constantly keep yourself ready for the next thing.
Voluntary packages tend to be accepted by the strongest employees
It’s a shitty deal for companies but shareholders love cost cutting
They gained 40,000 people in 2022. It's not a totally crazy argument.
1) "AGI" has been achieved internally which means...
2) ...we need to lower "operating expenditure" which includes i.e (human employees) so that the AI agents can take over.
Lastly, they will use the remaining capital to build homes (data centers) for these AI agents.
The layoffs could have nothing to do with the employees.
I run an org with 200k employees. We're on our 4th significant outage with M365 services in a month. We're talking major stuff -- including user data like email getting deleted by various processes. Their approach is pretty much "meh".
MS is an entrenched monopoly which is hard to move off of, especially in times of low budgets and tough debt markets. On the other hand, LLMs are reshaping the competitive landscape and MS might be reacting to that threat, in their usual MS way.
Given all insane bets made by previously (somewhat) reasonable and successful business owners, I wonder how much of a joke it really is...
In order to be “patient 0”, he’d have to be human in the first place…
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/microsoft/salaries/software...
Or perhaps, as Zack noted, Musk showed them the way?
Why do recruiters keep contacting me even though I’m retired?
Maybe your retired flag hasn't propagated the system yet?
Maybe they're just casting a really large net?
a) be ashamed of himself b) be fired
c) end of story.
"more ways for employees to shape their next chapter".
Tech is nothing like that now. Guessing a lot of people will find earlier retirement tempting with so many skills to keep up with now and AI rooting out personalities and ages subtley in the HR pool.
It's good trade off.
It's a normal part of life, but the corporate-speak is just not my cup of tea.
Sit on your butt doing nothing for what I would not pay minimum wage for alone, all year, then essentially do a week of work or come up with a solution the company knows is worth millions, so they're largely left alone and paid well. I have, as have others I have known, had those sorts of jobs a few times (things aren't quite like that nowadays, people either get over or underpaid now, and mos of those people have retired by now, or the newer "those types" get stock in the "new model"). Often it is not a hard tech skill but a good gut in an emergency, in tech or business.
Then there is this newfangled "communist" or "socialist" model of "companies" and "work" we are seeing that have nothing to do with either of those "isms" or capitalism, where people protest layoffs and expect everyone can get a paycheck while still refusing to check their egos and selfishness at the door. Of course, the truth is "communistic" things are generally pooled and meted out among people in s "commune" where people share similar very specific values requiring trust, and a great majority of those places do not even have the concept of a paycheck.
Either way, income has to come from somewhere. I mean, I guess feudalism could make a comeback if we had a large population die off and people split their time up between farming with high tech harvesting machines and hanging out playing PS4 games off the solar panels after dark, but in general I think most of the people I have seen getting upset make little or no sense.
I mean, is the goal for firstworld and secondworld countries a handful of neuralinked (no thanks) tech overlords we beg for equal monthly monetary alotments from and a world like in "The Machine Stops"? What would you need to do for that ("Black Mirror" and credits?!).
We can't sure all be "YouTube stars" or "self-affirmation LinkedIn gurus", obviously.
Is is corporate slop speak entirely or are many of them just as flummoxed as many of us?
(disclosure: I usually do 1099 work, but I sure know what it is like to suddenly be blindsided.)
Damn, I’m glad I’m not a developer.
It does seem a bit of a fortuitous timing, with Anthropic IPO S-1 just dropping..
1793029639 | Microsoft is offering buyouts to around 60k employees | https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-is-offering-buyout... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245741
1793034695 | Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees in AI efficiency push | https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/26/microsoft-msft-voluntary-buy... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50247270
1793035384 | Microsoft offers buyouts to 60k employees | https://www.theverge.com/tech/1018666/microsoft-expands-buyo... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50247451
1793035702 | Microsoft offers buyouts to around 60k employees to contain costs | https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-is-offering-buy... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50247555
1793037937 | Microsoft is offering buyouts to 60k workers | https://twitter.com/kobeissiletter/status/211474589631535930... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50248197
1793040227 | Microsoft offers 60k employees a voluntary exit | https://twitter.com/Amanda_Goodall/status/211474837095498590... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50248876
1793042659 | Microsoft offers voluntary exit packages to 60k staff | https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/microsoft-offers-volunt... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50249546
1793043316 | Microsoft offers voluntary buyout to 60k employees | https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/microsoft-offer... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50249703
1793048715 | Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to a quarter of its workforce | https://www.kuow.org/technology/2026-10-26/microsoft-offers-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50250937
1793052827 | Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60k Employees (25%) as It Spends on A.I | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/26/technology/microsoft-buyo... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50251858
1793074541 | Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60k employees | https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/26/microsoft-msft-voluntary-buy... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50254648
1793074635 | Microsoft offers buyouts to around 60k employees to contain costs | https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-is-offering-buy... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50254655
1793100027 | Microsoft offers to buy out a quarter of its workforce | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/microsoft-offers-vol... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50257448
They could have done 10% a year for the next 2-3 years, but the immediate financial gratification wouldn’t be satisfied
Copilot going to pick up the slack of 25% of the workforce?
Spreading it out means employees spend some of their time with an ear to the ground rather than working, and teams have to deal with multiple restructurings, neither of which are good for well-being nor productivity.
Even with these buyouts, there will be layoffs next summer. And the summer after that. And the summer after that.
And the internal memo currently circulating actually does not mention that number so I'd be curious where it came from.
Can't read the article because of the paywall.
But some people here have a short memory and already support the new thieves on the block Anthropic and OpenAI.
And they did fire some of them in 2025/2026.