Microsoft Lays Off a Portion of Its Workforce as Part of a 'Realignment'

Microsoft today became the latest Big Tech company to cut jobs during a period of mounting economic uncertainty. Bloomberg reports that the Redmond firm is "realigning business groups and roles" after the close of its fiscal year (on June 30), even as the company intends to grow its headcount in the coming months. From a report: The layoffs reportedly affect less than 1% of Microsoft's 180,000-person workforce and follow no clear pattern with respect to geography or product division, touching on teams including customer and partner solutions and consulting. They come after Microsoft slowed hiring in the Windows, Teams, and Office groups while assuring that recruitment hadn't been affected by industry headwinds. "Today we had a small number of role eliminations. Like all companies, we evaluate our business priorities on a regular basis, and make structural adjustments accordingly," Microsoft told Bloomberg in an emailed statement. "We will continue to invest in our business and grow headcount overall in the year ahead." Microsoft reported strong earnings in Q3, with a 26% year-over-year increase in cloud revenue and overall revenue of $49.4 billion. But in early June, the company revised its Q4 revenue and earnings guidance downward, citing the impact of foreign exchange fluctuations.

Poettering laid off...

[Anonymous Coward]

And he's going back to Red Hat, to work on systemd 2.0

(all of the above is just a joke, no need to reach for your heart medication)

Re:

[usedtobestine]

I hope you're wrong (going to back to IBM/RedHat) and right (laid off.)

Overheard

[systemd-anonymousd]

"Recession isn't happening. Recession is a conspiracy theory. Recession is transitory. Recession is good for us," the workers said, as they carried their boxes into the parking lot.

Re:Overheard

[irreverant]

I've lived thru this more than once now; in fact this will be round number ... lots. I worked and lived thru the AOL Time Warner merger, and the Microsoft NBC merger, the ... segments of the market determine work-cost flow. It is a simple as that, to as what drives layoffs and hiring of employees. There is a considerable shift and change even within non-traditional markets: Discord vs Telegram vs Teams vs .... just like ICQ, AIM, ... Trillian. In fact I would argue that the adoption of GovTech formerly #Web3 is what is driving market competition and it is what has reinjected some life & capital to once ailing sectors. Discord was made for gamers but found some adoption from users that left Slack, Skype, and Teams that were looking for a product that could support them during their transition to Crypto & NFT.

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

Pffft. And how many people do companies like MS lay off when there was no recession. I remember MS laying off 10% (18,000 people) [zdnet.com] in 2014. 1% due to a recession sounds small.

Re:

[Tablizer]

It's not hard to find incorrect economic predictions since if it were easy, pundits would be golfing with Warren Buffet instead of being a talking head on the news or trolling around Slashdot.

> Recession is transitory

Well, they usually are. The 1930's is about the only one I'd call "non-transitory".

And hiring 4,0000

[sixminuteabs]

Donâ(TM)t forget that part. Cuts in a few teams, more hiring elsewhere. Net impact of all this is thousands of new jobs.

Herd culling

[backslashdot]

Culling the herd is great for morale. That's what they teach you in MBA school anyway. I am serious, they justify it saying that "top performers want to see the slackers thrown out" .. that notion, while it may appear true, is in practice false because it assumes management is good at determining who is good (productive) and bad (non-productive).

Re:Herd culling

[Cloudsangoma]

Working in a company which doesn't throw out the slackers, can be very demoralizing. Especially, when you have to carry the weight or otherwise hold their hands.

not related to layoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Managing a team includes culling the deadweight, on a year after year basis. But that assumes the management are actually competent enough to do this, and they don't just show favoritism etc. Randomly laying off people (even if they are "deadweight") is not good for morale.

Re:Herd culling

[tlhIngan]

Working in a company which doesn't throw out the slackers, can be very demoralizing. Especially, when you have to carry the weight or otherwise hold their hands.

And yet, going the other way is bad too, otherwise Amazon would be at the peak of its game - it fires the lowest 20% of performers yearly. So much so managers have to game the system by hiring people whose sole purpose is to be fired.

And this is also unsustainable, because it forces everyone to work harder until they burn out.

hire to fire & tell you staff puff up your met

[Joe_Dragon]

hire to fire & tell you staff to puff up your metrics is what some management needs to do to keep an good team around.

Re:Herd culling

[war4peace]

I have been laid off twice in my 25+ year career (so far). Both times, it was due to a decision from above (first time) and way, WAY above (second time) which had nothing to do with performance. In the first case, it had everything to do with who kissed whose arse better, and in the second case it was a war between leaders: "we need to fire X people, either from A's organization or B's organization". I was in the losing organization.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[backslashdot]

Full disclosure: I didn't go to an MBA school, I heard it anecdotally. I do know people who hold MBAs who do hold that attitude. There are a lot of non-MBA people in positions of executive management who think like that too.

"Realignment"

[Tablizer]

is PHB-talk for "business is stagnant, so we layoff staff." I'm surprised they didn't call it a "strategic realignment" or "efficiency-based staff tuning".

MS, I got an idea

[Tablizer]

...keep the staff and have them finally fix all those annoying bugs you typically ignore (because you have insufficient competition to care).

PLEASE

[andrewbaldwin]

can they close down the "This is Microsoft here, there's a problem with your PC" call centre. :-)

Although it can be entertaining to wind them up, I wish they'd tire of this scam.

Not to worry

[sjames]

In spite of the lay offs the wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments over the difficulty of hiring will continue.

layoff.sh

[backslashdot]

cat http_proxy.log | grep slashdot.org | fire_script_no_severance.sh

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion