Microsoft's Nadella Says Tech Needs Efficiency as Job Cuts Loom (bloomberg.com) 81
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said the technology industry must learn to be efficient as demand slows. From a report: "During the pandemic there was rapid acceleration. I think we are going to go through a phase today where there is some amount of normalization in demand," Nadella said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "We will have to do more with less -- we will have to show our own productivity gains with our own technology." The company on Wednesday said it will cut 10,000 jobs through the end of FY23 Q3.
Efficiency always means the same thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't understand why so many people who grew up during a massive shortage of tech workers can't understand that things change. I get putting your head in the sand but it's been 20 years to tech workers have been getting their asses handed to them.
Re:Efficiency always means the same thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Efficiency always means the same thing (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why unions actually can help companies be more efficient, by providing accountability and feedback to management. Workers can collectively express themselves regarding the things that prevent them from being productive.
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Almost all managers struggle from impostor syndrome as a result
If they're imposters, then it's not a syndrome.
This is why unions actually can help companies be more efficient, by providing accountability and feedback to management.
I really like this idea but I've never seen it work in the United States.
There aren't really that many of those (Score:5, Insightful)
It's extremely hard to do that because it's hard to get people to understand the difference between not letting Elon Musk have near absolute power over public policy and them owning their house. People don't understand the difference between money as power and money as something you need to live.
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I think most people realize that rich people talk to Fortune 200 CEOs and senators on a daily basis and thus have power over the economy and government: Look at the civil suit against Elon Musk at the moment.
No, I think people worry "what about me?" first, which is why politics concentrates on 'creating' jobs and 'tough' on criminals. Yes, the necks of the working-class are on the proverbial chopping-block first but US voters, somehow, don't see the job of government as taking more money from people who
Efficiency means the manager needs hire to fire (Score:2)
Efficiency means the manager needs hire to fire.
As Efficiency = cut the low person on the team even when your team is good / does not have an low guy / can't take any staffing cuts / needs more staff to keep up with the work load
Alternate take - smarter projects not longer hours (Score:3)
When we face headwinds, we don't exploit workers, we lower the scope of the project. So Windows 12 getting release in 2024? I guess it's 2025. We tend to trim features from deliverables. Not e
No Paywall (Score:4)
Not sure if this is the full text, but it's the same quote.
https://www.livemint.com/techn... [livemint.com]
I like how "less people" = "more efficiency"...
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Re: Fire Natella. (Score:2)
Totally agree this guy has been the one that steered away from 7, gave us 8.1, thought everybody wanted a damn tablet.
I dont know how he has survived this long.
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thought everybody wanted a damn tablet
Have you seen phones and tablets lately. I am pretty sure he was on the mark.
Most people don't want computer because they are too stupid and/or lazy to learn how to properly use one. The mouth breathers rather have a piece of glass they can rub greasy finger juice on. Damn the consequences, not like they want to understand.
Re: Fire Natella. (Score:3)
So you are saying 8.1 was successful?
Wow
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I'm fairly sure nobody who actually wanted to do some WORK wanted to have a friggin' TABLET!
I was under the impression that MS tries to keep its stranglehold on the business market. If they don't want that, just say so. I'd be the first one to rejoice if I don't have to suffer from their overly gimmicky toy operating system anymore.
Re: Fire Natella. (Score:1)
Yes they want tablets. Just not a Surface.
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So you are saying 8.1 was successful?
It succeeded in finally making Linux my daily driver, it succeeded in making me remove Winblows from a new PC. So thanks, Natella.
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There are two possible criticisms of 8.1. One is simply whether there was any real market for Windows-powered smart devices. The second was implementation.
On the first count, trying to break into the hegemony that Apple and Google had created in the tablet and smart phone markets even at the point of Windows 8's release was monumental, and even with a kick ass portable OS, Microsoft was still going to struggle to break into that market. After all, the market isn't merely the devices themselves, or how well
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While I never used 8.1 on a phone or tablet, I don't think the interface was terrible.
It is. It is truly terrible. Frankly, it's terrible no matter how you're using it. It's illogical and undiscoverable if you're using touch, and it's cumbersome and a bunch of shit you don't want to see pops up when you accidentally mouse onto an edge or into a corner even if you have loaded a start menu replacement.
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My only experience with Windows on a tablet was a Windows 10 tablet I got for free with a pricy Dell laptop. I found the interface pretty abysmal, and ironically, the beast was more usable in Windows 10 desktop mode than in tablet mode. I looked into installing Android x86 on it, but it looked like a sufficiently complex, if not impossible task, with a locked down bootloader, then I stuck it on a shelf where it sits to this day.
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Thing is, almost nobody wants a Windows tablet. They have been around, if people wanted them they could have had them a long time ago. EEE Slate was a great piece of hardware from way back when. A few artists want one with wacom built in, and that's about it.
Re:so much useless shit (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually had to google Microsoft Viva... and after seeing a page of bullshit text and looking at images carefully curated for blandness and most certainly inoffensiveness but equally certainly not for information content, I still have no idea what that is supposed to be.
If you need to fire someone, start with the bozo that designs your webpages these days. The first thing your page should tell me what the fuck that product is! What I learn is that it's a "employee experience platform", which is about as non-informative as a term can be. That doesn't tell me fuck all about the product and only wastes my time.
Then again, the more I use MS products, the more I get the feeling that this is their main function... so I guess, the page works as designed?
Nothing useful (Score:1)
It sends you an e-mail every day telling you what your meeting schedule is. Which might be helpful if Outlook didn't have a fully-updated meeting list two inches away on your same computer screen. It sends you an e-mail when you spend "too much time" in meetings, as if you have any control over when your boss's boss wants to spend 2 hours pretending to be Socrates to a captive audience. It has a miniature intranet version of LinkedIn/Facebook built in, which is totally something that has always gotten a lot
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I have the increasing feeling that MS solutions are desperately looking for problems they could solve.
If they'd at least solve the problems they themselves create, that would already be a step in the right direction.
Re:so much useless shit (Score:4, Insightful)
This applies to most web sites. Trying to find out what a piece of software does, what the service is about, is becoming increasingly difficult to find out. It's almost as if the company doesn't want you to know what it is you're buying.
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Not like they care. Half of corporate web sites seem to redirect you to their Twitter accounts.
I can't understand the mentality of running your own web site where you can do anything you want, just to post NO information and redirect potential customers to a 3rd-party site, and have that 3rd-party site overwhelm your audience with ads for OTHER companies. WTF?
Re:so much useless shit (Score:4, Funny)
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That was a female?!
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I'm not in the market for black women, I am looking for software. I didn't know MS branched out into less reputable services now.
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zombo.com has come to life!
Efficient? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've worked at N different startups where there was one person who had 95% of the technical competence, and ran everything between IT and Development, with a few jr developers thrown in. The entire concept of being a "tech worker" is to be so efficient and wear so many hats that you're effectively a Haberdasher!
At the company I'm with right now, I run and manage 90% of the systems, and provide all the frontend development, because that's what's expected as a "tech worker", I can't get more efficient at my job, that would be impossible. If someone in HR had to be as "efficient" as a "tech worker", they'd also have to do the marketing, sales, accounting, and probably janitor duty, yet we never hear about other areas having to become more "efficient".
The problem with companies like Microsoft, is they have 100 people to do the work of 20, and then fire down to 50, and can't figure out why the overhead exists. With Microsoft, it's not about "tech workers" becoming more efficient, it's about teams and departments not over hiring.
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This is all true, but I don't quite know where your tone is (seriously).
Being so efficient as a tech worker at a startup is nothing to really be proud of. I've done it myself when I was younger. It's also bad for our industry. Some 'bloat' is good. Part of it is redundancy. Part of it is training the next generation of people. Part of it is dedicated skills development...
More tech companies should be as 'inefficient' as Microsoft. More people jobs. More redundancy. More training. They're still profitable. Y
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I don't quite know where your tone is (seriously).
But everything about the rest of your comment, tells us all we need to know about you.
Complacency about efficiency might not cause a company to fail in the short term...but it can have long term, and potentially terminal consequences.
That story has played out time, and time again....
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Some tech people LOVE being a 'key-man,' because it means they think they're un-fireable. But, in reality, the actual most un-fireable employee is the one th
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Pretty much. I now work at a major bank.
In as much as banks are ruthless, they do think about things like this. They don't want to have the risk of key things being owned or only known by one person.
They also play pretty hard ball with vendors making sure they're not too dependent on a particular vendor.
They also have policies of segregation of duties. On a basic level, the person verifying something (like QA) cannot be the same as the person doing the task (developer). It extends to all roles at the bank.
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You can be too ruthless about efficiency. Some of the employees who don't turn out a lot of their own work make a big positive difference in other employees' output. In theory you make these people managers, but in practice nobody does that any more, they hire MBAs rather than helping a tech get an MBA so they wind up with a manager who actually knows how the business functions. And what's sad is that it's orders of magnitude easier to become a manager than it is to become a tech. They're hiring managers ba
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Aye... "efficient" is also "brittle" .
Re:Efficient? (Score:5, Interesting)
MS does two big things wrong: 1) Rework everything to chase new fads, and 2) Be a step behind the fads such that nobody cares when they finish.
Their mobile push is an example: most biz is still done with mice, but they ignored mousers in the chase for finger-oriented UI's. It's very difficult to optimize for both mice and fingers; you generally have to disfavor one. Mouse-centric UI's are more compact and efficient because the pointer is more precise and you have roll-over (hover) descriptions and right-click to "hide" info until needed without paging/scrolling back and forth.
They should have improved their mouse-ware instead of waste billions on mobile; too few buy MS for mobile.
You can't pull our mice from our warm productive fingers!
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Okay, boomer. The 50's are calling and they want their pocket protector back.
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Okay, sexist.
Let's hope you get to give up your job to someone who can't do it, in the name of diversitaay.
As twitter auctions expresso machines, kegerators (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/1... [cnbc.com]
I've lived in the bay area my entire 50 years, seen companies come and go. I've seen transplants revolve their whole life around a company that just implodes or leaves them by the wayside after they burn up and can't commit 60+ hours a week.
The reason so many of these companies have this kind of fat is for the very reason I mention above. Everyone is put on salary, and everyone is expected to devote 14+ hours a day to the company (That's including an hour of commute each way). No overtime. The idea was if you're going to suck that much out of a persons life, you should at least give certain perks, make it a golden cage.
If Nadella's idea of efficiency is anything like Musks, he had better prepare for the backlash. The only reason Twitter is still running is the H1B's who can't leave. Most of the American citizens bailed the moment they realized musk still wanted 12+ hours a day with none of the perks.
Meetings (Score:2)
> and you spend half your week in meetings [at MS].
With better collaboration-ware they wouldn't need so many damned meetings. Fix Teams, for one. [reddit.com]
Too many managers like to hear themselves talk. Save meetings for the tricky stuff, like disagreements over architecture or pivotal features, not mere item-list reviews.
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The moderators are being jerks and removed the link, so here's a mirror: MS-Teams comments [reddit.com]
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The Reddit post you link here has been removed by the mods.
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Yes, the moderators are jerks. Here's a mirror:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dilbe... [reddit.com]
How about cutting him? (Score:4)
Let's be serious about doing more with less. More sensible work, less hot air and bullshit talk.
Windows 11 is a Failure - Let's Gaslight Everyone (Score:3)
Current web standards are dragging us down (Score:4, Interesting)
Then help form an open stateful GUI markup standard. (YAML is static.) Then we wouldn't need bloated buggy JS ui frameworks with long learning curves like React, Angular, Electron etc. to get decent GUI's over the web for rank and file business CRUD.
The same app takes roughly 3x the labor and code than it did in the 90's*. We de-evolved; doing web CRUD is the Bloat Industrial Complex. Those who specialize in the arcane bloat justify it with "in-case" fear: "You need bloated stacks in case you later need internationalization, mobile, web-scale, etc." All these in-case's add up. YAGNI still matters; paying the in-case tax is wasteful for small and medium ordinary biz CRUD. The only reason businesses accept the bloat is fear of using allegedly "out of style" tools or techniques.
And the existing standards won't go away so it's not an either/or choice; just give YAGNI & KISS believers an option. Bloat-lovers can continue using the existing bloated webshit.
The GUI browser or pluggin could be based off the Tk or Qt ui kits to avoid having to start from scratch. (Maybe even Mono's Winforms ui library which allegedly also runs on Linux, although is buggy by some accounts, but perhaps fixable.)
List of missing or defective DOM features:
https://www.reddit.com/r/progr... [reddit.com]
* Such tools and IDE's had bugs and shortcomings, but got more reliable on each release (until they fell out of favor and got ignored for web chase).
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Indeed. This is a really tragic and misguided development. It is like the instigators of this stuff have never even heard of KISS. I am sure most technological disciplines have had similar phases though before they became proper engineering disciplines. For example, steam engines kept exploding and setting factories on fire for quite a while after general adoption driven by them being far more power sources of mechanical power. That very much reminds me of the current general mess with IT security and unrel
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> It is like the instigators of this stuff have never even heard of KISS
Their excuses are usually:
1. Rocket science UI's make we UI rocket scientists rich, so don't byte the hand that feeds us.
2. The convenience of desktop IDE's are not possible over the web. (This is not an inherent problem of being networked, it's mostly caused by poor web ui standards.)
3. It's good to have in case you need (the features already listed). First, I'm not sure it's entirely mutually exclusive, needs more research, and sec
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There's no GUI here, move along. Web apps are just billboards with hardly-discernable buttons. It's all funded by advertising, sales, marketing, PR types and their creative minions. It's about selling things, not accomplishing tasks. Web developers have an exploitative symbiotic relationship with them, playing professional with whatever new toys that will do the bold and impactful job.
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I work on small and medium business and administrative CRUD. It's a common need that has to be served even if it's not as sexy as social networks and eCommerce.
If HTML/DOM/JS cannot be fixed to solve that big niche, then we should find/make a GUI-network standard that does, as an industry.
CEO failure (Score:2)
Companies need to get better at figuring out how to utilize the resources they have to maximum potential. You're telling me they can't find problems for everyone to work on?
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> You're telling me they can't find problems for everyone to work on?
They should fix bugs. [slashdot.org]
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I agree (Score:2)
Hence let us throw out all badly performing, insecure and hard to administrate crap in the OS and application world! Yay! No more Windows and Office!
Microsoft's position isn't necessary relevant! (Score:5, Informative)
My current workplace is "all in" on Microsoft product usage. We use just about every piece offered in the O365 subscription (even considered ditching our existing VoIP desk phones and provider, in favor of MS Teams acting as our PBX/phone system) and heavily rely on Power BI generated reports and MS Flow, etc. etc.
My experience with it is, it's "good when it works properly" -- but the number of issues/outages/failures is unacceptable. Honestly, if I was a sysadmin of an in-house environment providing these tools the company relied on daily, I'd probably have been fired already.
We just struggled through their latest fiasco where they injected a broken security rule into Windows Defender, causing all the workstations on our WAN to prevent people from opening any applications from desktop shortcuts or from the toolbar. And coincidentally, this was timed right after we rolled out a major Fortinet VPN upgrade. (People who didn't get the upgrade successfully were having problems launching the VPN client since the previous version would no longer connect.) This Microsoft snafu just complicated the issue, since end-users were putting in tickets about needing help with the VPN upgrade when they were successfully upgraded but were simply getting the security errors due to trying to launch it from the task-bar or desktop shortcut!
I've got a series of angry tickets and emails from the head of legal here over repeated issues using Teams. Everything from being unable to join meetings in progress to a black screen where the video was supposed to be. So far, ALL of these have been Microsoft issues they resolved in about 2 days to 1 week's time.
And while thankfully not common? I've had users who had Exchange mailbox problems nobody could seem to resolve. (Generally, this all stemmed from someone putting in a broad rule, a long time ago, for auditing all mailboxes and putting a hold on content that matched. Eventually, this cause some mailboxes to run out of space, because items they tried to delete were never really deleted; just hidden from their mailbox.) Even after releasing them from the hold on the content in the original rule, we had a couple of mailboxes that never recovered. Even with tickets put in to MS for assistance, they'd tell us they did X or Y and "it should start purging the old content over the next 24-48 hours". It would purge for a bit and stop, and continue having the storage quota issues.) Long-time employees are NOT happy when you tell them the only solution is giving them a whole new empty mailbox.
So my point here is -- MS must be suffering from a lot of bloat and mismanagement. They constantly roll out new features or changes or even deprecate things without even updating the web UIs for the products to support or reflect the changes. (SO often, they just tell you to use some PowerShell command to manipulate the new stuff.) They're such a huge business, employing so many people, they can't say a lack of staff is causing any of it!
I don't know that their struggle is relevant to the majority of smaller companies, who have gone though the rally for "more efficiency" and "more automation to cut head-count" repeatedly since probably the 1990's....
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I feel your pain, kind of, but more in a dodged-bullet kind of way.
I start a new job on monday. Two days after I told my current CTO that I'll be moving on, they announced to the engineering org that they are moving to C# / .net, hosted on Azure, using basically Microsoft everything except Windows Server.
Can't tell you how glad I am that I'm not going to have to deal with that.
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Uhhh, moving to C# from WHAT? It might be a Microsoft product, but C# is the most comfortable and capable language I've ever worked with. Sounds like a good move on the part of your former company.
Davos? (Score:2)
Could you find a more tone-deaf audience to be in front of to announce pending layoffs?
"Hey, fellow billionaires! I'm about to fire 10,000 people in order to support our stock price and profit margins. Want to get in on the act?"
Fuck that guy, and fuck Microsoft in general.
Obligatory (Score:2)
efficiency? try Linux? (Score:1)
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Unfortunately, there are only *maybe* a half-dozen little-known distros that actually run well on older hardware. SliTaz, Tiny Core, and Puppy come to mind. Most distros follow a much more monolithic "do it all" model, which makes them feel fairly bloaty on older hardware - especially hardware that doesn't meet the minimum RAM requirements.
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Yes but, no (Score:1)
However, anyone who has ever worked at a large tech company like MS also knows that the folks these companies value and promote into middle management are absolutely incapable of creating a culture of value/efficiency. They turn the old 90s promise on its head and create an environment where working harder is valued over working smarter.
Good luck Satya, but
Reform Executive Compensation (Score:1)
Wage slaves (Score:2)
Nadella is seeking more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]