If even Microsoft is trimming employees, whether it's less than X % or not is somewhat immaterial. The chilling fear of job loss articles like it produces is still a feeling I experience.
At least for me, I have multiple former coworkers saying 'apply over here' and I'm nervous to jump ship. Last in First Out says it's risky to move jobs if there's gonna be a big downturn.
Mediocre butts-in-seats middle management are probably rubbing their hands together in glee that soon they can crush that uppity employee class underfoot once more. My own manager is amazing and I don't wanna give him up easily, lest I end up with one of the Lumbergs.
Yeah… middle management is oh-so-powerful! They’re definitely not worried about their own roles because they control everything!
Seriously, what the hell is this mindset? What’s the deal with HN and framing middle management as some us-vs-them bad guy? Stop dehumanizing this layer. Middle management doesn’t exist by their own accord. It’s formed by leadership to support leadership.
I get the impression that the people who bash middle management have never experienced the role themselves.
Bingo. Middle managers can make your day-to-day a little easier or a lot worse, depending on their particular management style/ability.
But overall trends in the workforce, at your company, and policies/practice that create these trends? That's upper level executive level leadership. Why do middle managers get all the blame for company decisions? I have never understood that.
In my experience, in small/medium/big companies, I am sorry to say, but most middle “managers” are what Steve Jobs referred to as “bozos”.
They are either professional managers who have only managed but never did anything else, or they are mediocre software engineers who have decided to become managers … because in most cases they couldn’t build and deliver anything.
Unfortunately leaderships let bozos rules, that’s the truth.
“ We went out and hired a bunch of professional management; it didn’t work at all. Most of them were Bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to DO anything.
If you are a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you cannot learn anything from? And you know what’s interesting - you know what the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never ever wanted to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is able to do as good job as them.”
> most middle “managers” are what Steve Jobs referred to as “bozos”.
I'll humbly submit that we should offer more grace to middle managers: these typically end up as the first few steps into management for ICs. The role is new, and they face difficulties managing up to upper management and clients, and down to their subordinates. In some orgs, I suspect they are not set up to succeed, but more to diffuse responsibility and hopefully compartmentalize some of the chaos.
That said, I've had a handful of [middle] managers who weren't fun to work under, and it was their personalities/vices combining with various organizational pathologies.
> We went out and hired a bunch of professional management; it didn’t work at all...they knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to DO anything.
Leadership is instantiated within a business/cultural context. Without knowledge of that context, leaders will not be as effective as they could be. This makes the concept of a professional managerial class that purports to be able to swoop into any industry and "manage" rather ridiculous.
This is almost a certainty in large organizations, because these people spend their time on advancing their career, office politics and place in the organization as opposed to producing things / "doing their job". And unfortunately but unsurprisingly in most organizations it's a much more successful strategy when measured in power and compensation.
>If you are a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you cannot learn anything from?
What's the alternative? The truly great contributors don't want to be managers; they want to do real work. You can't be a manager and also do real work; there's not enough time. I've seen good managers actively quit their role because they wanted to do interesting work, not manage.
>And you know what’s interesting - you know what the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never ever wanted to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is able to do as good job as them.”
And then they can't do any interesting work, because their days are full of meetings. They eventually get tired of this and switch roles (or companies if they have to) and return to IC roles.
Someone has to be the manager; you can't have a company with thousands of engineers and a handful of executives managing them. Asking great ICs to do as you suggest isn't scalable or sustainable.
> you know what the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never ever wanted to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is able to do as good job as them
That's mostly not true, with occasional exceptions. The skillset to be a great manager is completely different from a great engineer, so having someone excel at both is very rare.
A great manager needs (1) very good people skills to truly understand what makes each individual optimally happy and productive, and (2) the political skills to manouver within the organization in ways that allows them to make (1) happen.
Yeah, I've seen middle management get cut faster than ICs at several companies. They're definitely not safe.
Executives and upper management? Yeah, they're likely the ones rubbing their hands in glee. You can hear it in interviews with several of them. "These people not wanting to come back to the office or 'quiet quitting' or jumping ship to get paid what they're worth are going to regret doing so when this recession hits." Inside their heads they're probably adding a 'Muahahaha' at the end of that.
But I think most middle managers are about as worried about their jobs as ICs are.
You might even guess that’s the goal of this “economy is going to get worse” narrative that these “company announces layoffs” stories are part of.
The economy has been doing well despite supply issues caused by the pandemic and war. This has made hiring difficult which has given employees power. While businesses have been making money hand over fist they’ve also been begrudgingly forced to give a small amount to employees.
By pushing this narrative that a recession is imminent they can lower employee expectations so that even more of their record revenues can be channeled to profits/executive compensation.
Initially, I thought this was overly antagonistic.
Then, I remembered the swath of anti-remote work articles when we were more optimistic on the state of the economy: worries about "quiet quitters," WFH employees secretly living in another country/state, etc. If those are truly big problems, why has discussion slowed so much?
(I'll believe they are problems, but that they have been exaggerated.)
Snapchat has nothing to do with a general 'growth slowdown'. People have left Snapchat for TikTok[1]. Social media users, especially youth, are fickle and the industry relies heavily on network effects. Once you're no longer perceived as cool and/or lose enough users that the network effect isn't as powerful, it tends to snowball, and is hard to get that back.
"But there could be a bigger reason the company[Snapchat] has seen revenue deflate. Its reputation as the social media platform for young people has faded—particularly in the eyes of advertisers."
Not denying that growth slowdown is happening to some extent. But Snapchat has problems beyond that, and isn't a great example for it.
As for Roku, I'm not as well-versed there, but I do see that in October 2021 they announced that they're losing 85 channels, including the behemoth YouTube, so that may have contributed significantly to its decline this past year.
Not to mention lots of TVs now tend to have the same type of channels as Roku built-in, rendering it a bit unnecessary. Mine has everything I care about for streaming, for example. Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+, etc.
> People have left Snapchat for TikTok[1]. Social media users, especially youth, are fickle and the industry relies heavily on network effects.
The article you mentioned didn’t describe an exodus of users leaving Snapchat to use TikTok. It describes how TikTok is now advertisers’ preferred platform to reach younger audience, where Snapchat used to dominate.
Snapchat added 15 million daily active users last quarter. [1]
The elite is lying to you and always have been. I know this first hand as my company is heavily invested in the travel industry and we have been bleeding money during the pandemic like crazy AND YET we have also been hiring like crazy.
All of this is just to tell the pesky employees to know their place.
At ~1% is this more “psy-ops” than an economic measure? In other words, no one is safe, stay on your toes. Don’t be complacent. Presumably these are/were productive people and could be reassigned and retained for when the economy recovers.
>At ~1% is this more “psy-ops” than an economic measure? In other words, no one is safe, stay on your toes
Probably. 1000 layoffs amount to 0.45% of the total workforce.
>Presumably these are/were productive people and could be reassigned
Maybe not. I reckon at least 1% of the workforce gets PIP’d each year. This year, it’s being loudly announced (and skipping the PIP formality) to scare people, as you noted above.
One of the people laid off yesterday (along with his whole team) had been a candidate to lead development of the Xbox 720. This was definitely not a very public PIP ejection. It looks more like a spreadsheet driven culling of the product lines.
Whats the rationale of cutting a guy like that? He was probably on the phone with Sony or Nintendo before his desk was cleaned out. He's probably value to Sony (maybe not so much Nintendo) just for the intel alone.
I'm guessing the project got cut, so the team went, so the guy went. You're right, he can have almost any job he wants with a phone call. Given his history, he'd survived quite happily in much more difficult, demanding environments, so I can't imagine he was targetted. It wasn't personal, it was a spreadsheet decision.
To play Devil’s advocate, perhaps that team never delivered anything, despite consisting of (presumably) talented engineers. I’ve seen several “brilliant but unaccomplished” teams that never actually ship anything but nonetheless manage to hang around due to the raw intelligence of their team members. It can be hard to let someone go who talks like an accomplished CS professor at every meeting, but does little besides that.
>It looks more like a spreadsheet driven culling of the product lines.
You’d think a company as successful as Microsoft would be above such ineffective, morale-crushing moves (also profit-crushing, assuming the people being fired were actually productive), but then again, if this article [0] (and associated HN comments) are to be believed, Microsoft isn’t exactly optimizing [fh]iring decisions based on performance.
A layoff and PIP (performance improvement plan) are very different things. Nobody thinks that lots of people were being PIPped and suddenly MSFT decided to cut and run.
At most companies, for all intents and purposes, getting PIP’d is equivalent to getting laid off. It’s basically a formality HR makes you jump through before firing an underperforming employee to avoid lawsuits for wrongful dismissal.
Every team wants to pick their people. They might have some ability to apply for other roles in the company but if hiring is slowed already there might not be a lot of other places to go. They definitely aren't going to randomly assign employees to different departments.
The flip side of that "it's only ~1%" argument is "in any large company, several percent of employees aren't pulling much weight [either personally or because they're assigned to work on something of low value to the company]".
I don't get it, are you trying to imply that's not the case? Tacking inflation involves raising interest rates, which causes a pullback on the economy.
The only confirmation that the economy is slowing will come months from now when a bureaucratic council finally declares that it feels like there is indeed a recession - probably after the midterms. Until then, we can't say anything with confidence. /s
I think market expectations and presenting like company is doing something is even more important. The laid off people are just pieces in this, like they were when they were hired.
That's what I was thinking. I worked for one of the Fortune 500 insurance companies a few years back. They had a semi-annual cuts that saw a bunch of people laid off, including one person who had been working there for almost 15 years.
It stressed the hell out of me despite being new, though my boss assured there was little reason to fret. That was one of the reasons I decided to switch jobs.
Imagine being laid off not to save a failing company but because earnings haven't grown as much as expected at your wildly profitable company. Microsoft had $198bn in revenue this year.
The kneejerk reaction to the downturn puts a bad taste in my mouth.
They, like all companies, were hiring speculatively based on growth projections. No growth equals no work for those new people to do. This seems to be the 100% logical reaction so I’m not sure where you see the disconnect.
Aren't companies like these supposed to have longer term horizons on projects etc? Wouldn't a glut of talent mean more opportunities to build without distractions?
Imagine thinking that a company shouldn't do layoffs until they're on the brink of failure. No layoffs for strategic shifts. Don't hit the breaks unless you're absolutely sure you're about to crash!
Imagine moving across the country for a great job, selling your house, etc and a company lays you off because their growth wasn't "as much as expected."
When asked, I tell people the only Microsoft products I recommend are Excel and SQL Server. And I am not so sure about SQL Server because of its price. Now that Steam is available on Linux, if Steam packages a download that self installs Linux plus Steam on bare metal, I can say goodbye to all things Microsoft.
My experience with the Steam Deck seems to indicate that almost everything I've wanted to play runs fine on Linux. It's not quite perfect, but I've been surprised how few titles fail to run reasonably well.
For that reason I've been super tempted to jump ship to Linux on my gaming PC (my non-gaming work is on macOS). The one thing keeping me back is the status of bluetooth peripherals, namely controllers; I've heard this can be a problem even today. My PC is hooked up to my big living room OLED so wires would be fairly inconvenient.
Linux on desktop still sucks massively with even basic things. No per-display scaling in GNOME in 2022 is ridiculous. Power management on laptops is significantly worse.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadSorry to hear about those employees who were laid off, but this is not interesting news.
At least for me, I have multiple former coworkers saying 'apply over here' and I'm nervous to jump ship. Last in First Out says it's risky to move jobs if there's gonna be a big downturn.
Mediocre butts-in-seats middle management are probably rubbing their hands together in glee that soon they can crush that uppity employee class underfoot once more. My own manager is amazing and I don't wanna give him up easily, lest I end up with one of the Lumbergs.
Seriously, what the hell is this mindset? What’s the deal with HN and framing middle management as some us-vs-them bad guy? Stop dehumanizing this layer. Middle management doesn’t exist by their own accord. It’s formed by leadership to support leadership.
I get the impression that the people who bash middle management have never experienced the role themselves.
But overall trends in the workforce, at your company, and policies/practice that create these trends? That's upper level executive level leadership. Why do middle managers get all the blame for company decisions? I have never understood that.
They are either professional managers who have only managed but never did anything else, or they are mediocre software engineers who have decided to become managers … because in most cases they couldn’t build and deliver anything.
Unfortunately leaderships let bozos rules, that’s the truth.
“ We went out and hired a bunch of professional management; it didn’t work at all. Most of them were Bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to DO anything.
If you are a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you cannot learn anything from? And you know what’s interesting - you know what the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never ever wanted to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is able to do as good job as them.”
I'll humbly submit that we should offer more grace to middle managers: these typically end up as the first few steps into management for ICs. The role is new, and they face difficulties managing up to upper management and clients, and down to their subordinates. In some orgs, I suspect they are not set up to succeed, but more to diffuse responsibility and hopefully compartmentalize some of the chaos.
That said, I've had a handful of [middle] managers who weren't fun to work under, and it was their personalities/vices combining with various organizational pathologies.
> We went out and hired a bunch of professional management; it didn’t work at all...they knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to DO anything.
Leadership is instantiated within a business/cultural context. Without knowledge of that context, leaders will not be as effective as they could be. This makes the concept of a professional managerial class that purports to be able to swoop into any industry and "manage" rather ridiculous.
What's the alternative? The truly great contributors don't want to be managers; they want to do real work. You can't be a manager and also do real work; there's not enough time. I've seen good managers actively quit their role because they wanted to do interesting work, not manage.
>And you know what’s interesting - you know what the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never ever wanted to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is able to do as good job as them.”
And then they can't do any interesting work, because their days are full of meetings. They eventually get tired of this and switch roles (or companies if they have to) and return to IC roles.
Someone has to be the manager; you can't have a company with thousands of engineers and a handful of executives managing them. Asking great ICs to do as you suggest isn't scalable or sustainable.
That's mostly not true, with occasional exceptions. The skillset to be a great manager is completely different from a great engineer, so having someone excel at both is very rare.
A great manager needs (1) very good people skills to truly understand what makes each individual optimally happy and productive, and (2) the political skills to manouver within the organization in ways that allows them to make (1) happen.
Executives and upper management? Yeah, they're likely the ones rubbing their hands in glee. You can hear it in interviews with several of them. "These people not wanting to come back to the office or 'quiet quitting' or jumping ship to get paid what they're worth are going to regret doing so when this recession hits." Inside their heads they're probably adding a 'Muahahaha' at the end of that.
But I think most middle managers are about as worried about their jobs as ICs are.
The economy has been doing well despite supply issues caused by the pandemic and war. This has made hiring difficult which has given employees power. While businesses have been making money hand over fist they’ve also been begrudgingly forced to give a small amount to employees.
By pushing this narrative that a recession is imminent they can lower employee expectations so that even more of their record revenues can be channeled to profits/executive compensation.
Then, I remembered the swath of anti-remote work articles when we were more optimistic on the state of the economy: worries about "quiet quitters," WFH employees secretly living in another country/state, etc. If those are truly big problems, why has discussion slowed so much?
(I'll believe they are problems, but that they have been exaggerated.)
"But there could be a bigger reason the company[Snapchat] has seen revenue deflate. Its reputation as the social media platform for young people has faded—particularly in the eyes of advertisers."
Not denying that growth slowdown is happening to some extent. But Snapchat has problems beyond that, and isn't a great example for it.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-01/snap-i...
As for Roku, I'm not as well-versed there, but I do see that in October 2021 they announced that they're losing 85 channels, including the behemoth YouTube, so that may have contributed significantly to its decline this past year.
Not to mention lots of TVs now tend to have the same type of channels as Roku built-in, rendering it a bit unnecessary. Mine has everything I care about for streaming, for example. Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+, etc.
[2] https://bestlifeonline.com/news-roku-losing-channels-youtube...
The article you mentioned didn’t describe an exodus of users leaving Snapchat to use TikTok. It describes how TikTok is now advertisers’ preferred platform to reach younger audience, where Snapchat used to dominate.
Snapchat added 15 million daily active users last quarter. [1]
[1] https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...
All of this is just to tell the pesky employees to know their place.
A good manager is valuable but you'll have some chance to evaluate any future ones. If it ends up being terrible, sometimes you can boomerang back.
Probably. 1000 layoffs amount to 0.45% of the total workforce.
>Presumably these are/were productive people and could be reassigned
Maybe not. I reckon at least 1% of the workforce gets PIP’d each year. This year, it’s being loudly announced (and skipping the PIP formality) to scare people, as you noted above.
>It looks more like a spreadsheet driven culling of the product lines.
You’d think a company as successful as Microsoft would be above such ineffective, morale-crushing moves (also profit-crushing, assuming the people being fired were actually productive), but then again, if this article [0] (and associated HN comments) are to be believed, Microsoft isn’t exactly optimizing [fh]iring decisions based on performance.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33165844
A layoff and PIP (performance improvement plan) are very different things. Nobody thinks that lots of people were being PIPped and suddenly MSFT decided to cut and run.
https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/pip-meaning
They will be under a microscope where every single thing is scrutinized.
The kneejerk reaction to the downturn puts a bad taste in my mouth.
The best companies try to offer people shots to apply internally. If they behave too boorishly they will struggle to recruit on the other side.
Pun intended?
(not the people working on it, but the software product)
For that reason I've been super tempted to jump ship to Linux on my gaming PC (my non-gaming work is on macOS). The one thing keeping me back is the status of bluetooth peripherals, namely controllers; I've heard this can be a problem even today. My PC is hooked up to my big living room OLED so wires would be fairly inconvenient.