Microsoft Lays Off 2,100, Axes Silicon Valley Research 109
walterbyrd writes with news of Microsoft layoffs. Microsoft Corp will close its Silicon Valley research-and-development operation as part of 2,100 layoffs announced on Thursday, as it moves toward its new CEO's goal of cutting 18,000 staff, or about 14 percent of its workforce. News of the closure of the Microsoft Research lab at the company's campus in Mountain View, California, was first made public on Twitter by employees. The company later confirmed the move and said it would involve the loss of 50 jobs.
No more cash in the bank? (Score:5, Funny)
Back around 2000 when Microsoft had something like $100 billion in the bank I said that with that kind of money, they could afford to make no income and still pay their 40,000 or so employees at the time for the next 13 years. I wasn't serious though.
Re:No more cash in the bank? (Score:5, Insightful)
I do wish it didn't involve reducing the size of their research operations.
Why? Microsoft has a long history of hiring many top researchers, and then doing very little with the results. It is much better for those researchers to be more productively employed elsewhere. The researchers will have little trouble finding new positions in Silicon Valley, where talent is in high demand.
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Why? Microsoft has a long history of hiring many top researchers, and then doing very little with the results.
Well, as long as they publish papers, who cares if they're doing very little with the results? Someone else is going to do it for them.
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Since they are employed by Microsoft, no one will be able to do much with the results for 14 years. Microsoft unable because they are generally inept, and others unable because Microsoft will ask their soul in return for patent license.
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They patent in multiple countries. Congratulations on being exempt from patent laws.
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Do Not Protect The Incompetent - Darwin FTW (Score:3)
"The researchers will have little trouble finding new positions in Silicon Valley, where talent is in high demand."
This is a complete falsehood that people need to stop parroting. Research work is VERY difficult to come by. Microsoft was one of the few places actually employing researchers.
So what will they do now? There are absolutely no jobs left in academia, so forget that. They could in theory become programmers, but that field is overcrowded too as people on slashdot regularly point out.
The fact is, if we want to maintain our jobs and standard of living in the USA, we're going to have to band together and force politicians to stop letting immigrants into the country to take our jobs. It really doesn't help matters when certain propagandists keep lying about how "plentiful" high-tech jobs are and how desperately we need more STEM graduates.
If you replace this sentence:
letting immigrants into the country to take our jobs
with:
letting incompetent immigrants into the country to take our jobs, but letting competent immigrants take the jobs of less competent people, citizens or otherwise, and we force our programmers to become more competent (because the quality of work we do here is pretty crappy)
Then I'm on board. I'm not in favor of protectionism to protect the incompetent. And if we were more competent, we wouldn't be so worry about immigrants competing with us.
To be honest, I would like to see our government throttle immigration of engineers into our country as a function of unemployment and other economic indicators (make rate of immigration in field X inversely proportional to unemployment in said field) coupled with actual examinations (classified by years
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do you live here (bay area)? I do. been here several decades.
the valley does NOT want talent. what do they want? CHEAP LABOR. quality is not important, insight is not important, even code quality is not important. speed and price is all that matters.
I wish I was kidding... ;(
Re:No more cash in the bank? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google tells me they have $84 billion dollars and spent $37 billion in the past year.
Google also tells us that Microsoft is one of the heaviest lobbyists for increases to H1Bs. That should tell you how ethical this plan to layoffs workers really is.
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Back around 2000 when Microsoft had something like $100 billion in the bank I said that with that kind of money, they could afford to make no income and still pay their 40,000 or so employees at the time for the next 13 years.
A basic fact of business is that when a company has no income but does have assets, the time has arrived to liquidate those assets and distribute the proceeds to shareholders. A minor variation of that reaches the same conclusion in the face of low, as opposed to zero, profitability.
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Back around 2000 when Microsoft had something like $100 billion in the bank I said that with that kind of money, they could afford to make no income and still pay their 40,000 or so employees at the time for the next 13 years.
A basic fact of business is that when a company has no income but does have assets, the time has arrived to liquidate those assets and distribute the proceeds to shareholders. A minor variation of that reaches the same conclusion in the face of low, as opposed to zero, profitability.
What a quaint, antiquated idea. More likely, management will do something like use those assets as leverage to buy another company, lay off thousands, collect bonuses, then sell off the second company, rinse, repeat.
Or sell itself to some other company, collect golden parachutes and/or high-level positions at the other company (with golden parachutes), award themselves bonuses. lay off thousands, etc. etc.
Modern business can be so depressing.
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Now, I'm an open source software fan that is becoming more and more aligned with the GNU FSF fanatics as I get older. So part of me is inclined to think a move by Microsoft to sacrifice their chance to
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No no no no take it back, no! We've already paid for everything with Windows 8, they owe us a good version now.
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Uh, how is that a change?
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I think MS (and their products) will get worse before this gets better.
Doesn't matter, people will still buy MS products no matter what. Businesses aren't going to wean themselves from MS's enterprise software anytime soon. This was a good decision: the research efforts were costing money which wasn't being made up in new sales.
MS's best course of action is to cut out as much R&D as possible and other bottom-line costs, and then try to extract as much money from existing customers as possible by jacki
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When you say "intellect-nots" and talk of shortages of "smart employees", you mean there are too many people who don't want to code intrusive ads to sell sell sell, right? Maybe you're the one who's not so smart, looking for robotic employees you're too stupid to code.
Year of Linux on the desktop? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe Nadella got tired of hearing about the year of Linux on the desktop, and decided to finally make it happen? Anyhow, good luck without your researchers. I hope it was the ones responsible for Windows 8.
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Anyhow, good luck without your researchers.
What, all 50 of them in Silicon Valley? FFS, I didn't even RTFA but I got enough from the summary to understand that this is less than a rounding error compared to Microsoft's overall R&D and engineering staffs.
Also, can we make it Schnell's Law that anyone who mentions the Year of the Linux Desktop without irony has triggered Godwin's Law [wikipedia.org] about the Occam's Razor [ucr.edu] of Linux zealots' Panglossian [shmoop.com] combination of The Seven UI Laws [99designs.com], the Joel Test [slashdot.org] and Newton's First Law of Motion [physicsclassroom.com]? Unless of course they have do
How many layoffs overseas? (Score:1)
Any layoffs in Hyderabad? ... just asking.
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Yes. They're laying them all off in Hyderabad and Bangalore so they can import them over here as H1-B's. What do you think the H and B stand for??
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Let's spend 2.5 billion on Minecraft (Score:5, Insightful)
The employees we could have paid with that 2.5 billion are a useless drag on our bottom line.
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they have to make room on the payroll for the java developers that they need to rehire (that were let go some 15 years ago as sun v microsoft ended)
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Microsoft buying Mojang (Minecraft) makes zero financial sense. Notch and 2 other founders left, so I'm not sure how they expect to make their money back ...
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How much work do you think Notch and the other two founders DO on Minecraft on a daily basis?
How many pieces of merch do they make for Minecraft?
How many servers via Minecraft Realms do they sell a month?
I'm not sure you have any idea how Minecraft operates.
Wait for it in 3...2...1... (Score:5, Insightful)
"We desperately need more H1B's to manage the staff reduction! We cannot afford to retrain our existing employees in staff reduction management technologies." -MS
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We desperately need more H1B's to manage the staff reduction!
I was working as a lead tester for a video game company that decided every video game must appear on ALL platforms. We were hiring more testers to implement this strategy that ultimately failed, as each game looked like an obvious Sony Playstation 2 port on Microsoft xBox and Nintendo GameCube. Lead testers were filling out paperwork to justify hiring more testers to fill out more paperwork. to justify hiring more testers. I bailed out a year before the company went bankrupt.
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Go into the bankruptcy paper-work business. If you ever have to file bankruptcy, you'll be ready.
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How many H1-Bs are they trying to get? (Score:1)
Has Microsoft gotten off the "we need more H1-Bs" bandwagon?
I guess the shortage of highly skilled workers is over.
Or, maybe only unskilled workers are being laid off.
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This year alone they have hired 2985 H1B's
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Those other nations are more than welcome to turn the tables or create their own rules.
If you are going to drag someone in (Score:2)
It's far too common to blame
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This worker was "dragged" halfway around the world to fill a position where there was (supposedly) no qualified U.S worker available. Is it OK to import an H1-B worker and a few weeks later lay off a U.S worker from the same or similar position at another location within the same company?
I vote no on that one. If there are lay offs to be done due to one division being downsized, then lay off the H1-B workers and relocate the U.S worker. This should be part of the H1-B regulations, but it never will be.
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Of course not, but there's little or nothing to prevent it while it is less convenient to fire a guest worker in the US - plus guest workers are normally cheaper. If management have no reliable performance metrics they'll always go with cheaper. If management have the guest workers as contractors paid out of a different pool to the local workers it can
Hmmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
When the announcement that cuts were coming I made a comment on /. about how everyone at Microsoft would be looking over their shoulder wondering whether their job would be cut.
Howling responses insisted that no, the only jobs being cut were going to be in Finland and tied to Nokia.
Now we find out that jobs are being cut in Washington, Silicon Valley, and Fargo. Hmmm, thats a long way from Finland.
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From the article.
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Isn't it MS that has the toxic culture of making sure that somebody in every team gets a poor review? That's already a reason to wonder about being cut.
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Not according to iMaps
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Now we find out that jobs are being cut in [...] Fargo.
Aw, geez.
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Ego is anonymous coward lecturing others about how "zero people know you you are"
The more things change, the more they stay the sam (Score:4, Informative)
Layoffs in the USA, and hiring increases elsewhere.
I remember a few years back reading how MS was proclaiming that they weren't increasing their H1B hirings. However, they were achieving the same results by doing it in Canada instead.
More recent layoffs
http://www.murthy.com/2014/05/... [murthy.com]
Re:Solution: Financial Independence (Score:5, Interesting)
Nada. We're in the middle of some of the worst right now. There's a piece up somewhere...can't remember if the link was on fark, gawker, or vice...but they gave a decent explanation of things are being run today (look for the Olive Garden piece) -> there is zero interest is keeping these companies alive, now it's about stripping them of their assets, and getting them to pay a hefty dividend. Feel me? Microsoft today is not the Microsoft of yesterday; Microsoft of yesterday made software; Microsoft of today is a corporate giant that could cut all of its employees, sell off then lease the buildings it currently occupies, sell off its name in certain areas (Microsoft ice cream, etc.), and so on. It's going to die only after it's been pimped out to every piece of gutter trash that the Street can find. And it's brain? Completely controlled by people with the worst intentions for it. It's like one of those zombified snails.
Multiple cuts (Score:2)
I worked at a company that made multiple layoff cuts over several months. It was really demoralizing. I hope for Microsoft and its employees' sake that this is the last layoff, else morale will plummet and people will start leaving of their own free will. They should have done just one larger cut and moved on.
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Machiavelli: If you have to do bad things, don't do them by dribs and drabs. Do them upfront in one fell swoop.
2.5 billion for Mojang and Minecraft (Score:1)
Somebody is doing it wrong.
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They are trying to block the layoffs from their mind
They are not axing the Silicon Valley campus (Score:3)
In fact, they are expanding it -- they are putting in a brand new data center on the site that was the former Counterpane Security, on LaAvenida across from their SV HQ, and they also have leased a huge building a couple of blocks away on Pear Street. There's also rumors that they're behind the demolishing of an entire block of tilt-ups between LaAvenida and Pear to be replaced by six-story office buildings. In any event Microsoft isn't leaving the Silicon Valley, just Microsoft Research is leaving -- all f
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What about the Turing Award winners? (Score:5, Interesting)
(I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Lamport when he won: See http://vimeo.com/95177539 . Nice guy!)
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It's actually a good strategy for MS, I think, and I believe Ballmer screwed up by not following this strategy.
For other companies, it only works in the short term because their competitors win in the long term because without good employees, the company can't develop new products. However, for MS, this just isn't a concern. They're a monopoly in many markets, especially in business software; companies aren't going to suddenly stop buying Windows, Exchange, Office/Outlook, etc. MS can milk their existing
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A lot of people think the tiles are cool. They just didn't have to make everything else stupid.
great advertising, Microsoft (Score:1)
This really makes me want to give up my stable software development job and go work for you. No wonder why they say there are no qualified applicants....
This was one of the most interesting parts of MSFT (Score:2)
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Bill Gates didn't do that great a job He produced MSBasic, convinced IBM to hand him a monopoly for software that he bought. They managed to write a few pieces of software for the Mac with support from Apple which they then ported to Windows. From there on it was mainly anticompetitive practices, until the internet came along at which point Gates totally ignored it. Until; it became too popular to be dismissed, then to make up for the huge blunder, they had to engage in anticompetitive practices so onerous
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I'm not the biggest MSFT fan, but that's really giving MSFT the short stick, by saying they were done after MS-Basic and MS-Dos...
For example, Bill managed to recruit David Cutler for WinNT which really allowed them to take over the server market and kept their desktop windows franchise alive for another 15 years (do you think it could have had WinXP legs by limping along with WinME as a code base?)... Of course you can't be at the top of the hill forever and I suspect the Nokia acquisition won't be as tran
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Everybody got an individual office and the usual perks and yet when you asked people about what they were working on, they could rarely produce an answer that was related to a meaningful product or a service.
Acadmics, what did you expect?
Was this even a surprise? (Score:1)
Satya is an Indian. He'll probably cut costs by hiring more of his cheap kind from India.
I can understand it (Score:2)
Look at Apple, they have no research department where actual scientists work (who publish).
If you're unfamiliar with it, check out research.microsoft.com, and you'll see what I mean.
A terrible CEO (Score:1)
CEOs with no imagination do layoffs. Nayda is a terrible CEO, nothing he has done so far impresses me.
To those of you who were involved with Win8 (Score:1)