Microsoft Skips Salary Increases for Full-Time Employees this Year (cnbc.com) 71
Microsoft will hold off on offering salary increases to full-time employees, CEO Satya Nadella told staffers by email Wednesday. From a report: The move aligns with Microsoft's efforts to reduce costs as revenue growth slows and clients reel in spending. In January, the software maker said it would cut 10,000 jobs, or just under 5% of its workforce. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and other tech companies have downsized as well in recent months. Last year, as inflation rippled through the economy, Microsoft nearly doubled the budget for merit increases and boosted stock allocations for certain employees. This year, compensation will look more normal.
"We will maintain our bonus and stock award budget again this year, however, we will not overfund to the extent we did last year, bringing it closer to our historical averages," Nadella wrote in the email. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Insider reported on the message earlier. Nadella said performance bonuses for Microsoft's top executives will be down considerably from last year.
"We will maintain our bonus and stock award budget again this year, however, we will not overfund to the extent we did last year, bringing it closer to our historical averages," Nadella wrote in the email. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Insider reported on the message earlier. Nadella said performance bonuses for Microsoft's top executives will be down considerably from last year.
With the tech layoffs from Twitter & FB (Score:5, Interesting)
Your pay is not connected to the success of your company or the economy. And the people at the very top are more than happy to use layoffs to control and modulate your pay.
Wages climb a bit, CEOs & big shareholders don't like it. You do massive layoffs and force the survivors to work unpaid overtime. Eventually this risks burning them out (or making them form Unions). So you hire up a bit, take a bit of the pressure off, then as soon as they've recovered do another round of mass layoffs.
This is the cycle of layoffs. It's something MBAs figured out in the 90s. Dig into their literature and you can catch them talking about it in jargony words because if they said it plainly you'd be mad that they play with your livelihood like this.
CEOs, major shareholders and MBAs are not your friends. You are an input on their spreadsheets, not a person.
Re:With the tech layoffs from Twitter & FB (Score:4, Insightful)
In January, the software maker said it would cut 10,000 jobs
Any time a company has to eliminate 10,000 people the the CEO should immediately be fired for being incompetent. Except for **EXTREMELY** rare circumstances, no properly run business should ever need to eliminate that many employees.
99.9% of the people being eliminated were never needed in the first place. They were purely vanity hires. The CEO made the company bigger to give the illusion of growth and success: ".... as inflation rippled through the economy, Microsoft nearly doubled the budget for merit increases and boosted stock allocations"
Satya Nadella has even admitted his incompetence:
".... we will not overfund to the extent we did last year,"
no (Score:1)
It just means the execs want their bonuses by any means necessary. They get their bonuses by hitting budget, and whether products are fucked, or accounting/legal doesn't get their stuff done in time to support the business, etc. makes no difference. The 10,000 people aren't getting whacked because they aren't needed, they are getting whacked because whacking them hits the budget numbers.
Yeah some of them will likely be terrible deadweight but they should have been pushed out anyway. Most likely these are pe
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Re: no (Score:2)
Um google, facebook, Amazon, Microsoft. Those are all big chip companies. That may not be that primary business of each but they all make a lot of semiconductors
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Chip companies refers more to Analog Devices*, Texas Instruments, ON, Skyworks, Broadcom, Micron, AMD, etc.
Can confirm - have not seen layoffs yet here at *
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Any time a company has to eliminate 10,000 people the the CEO should immediately be fired for being incompetent. Except for **EXTREMELY** rare circumstances, no properly run business should ever need to eliminate that many employees.
You need to take into account the size of a company. 10,000 people is about 4% of Microsoft's staff. It would be like a SMB with 230 employees laying off 10 people. Do you feel every time an SMB needs to lay off 10 people it means the CEO should be fired immediately for incompetence?
Those aren't equivalent (Score:4, Insightful)
I was told that there would be job creators and that if a company was successful that success would inevitably be shared with the employees and society at Large. That was obviously a lie but there are some people who for whatever reason either can't or won't see past that lie. I like to take things like this and throw them in their faces in the hopes that they'll stop worshiping corporations and CEOs.
And for anyone who says people don't worship CEOs I've got two words for you: Elon Musk.
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Re:With the tech layoffs from Twitter & FB (Score:5, Insightful)
Weird how that pathology never applies to the executive class. WTF does a CEO do for 7, 8, 9 figure salaries that someone wouldn't do for $200,000 a year? Why are workers expected to kill themselves for the least shitty job available so these people can make the next ten generations of their families members of the liesure class?
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Weird how that pathology never applies to the executive class. WTF does a CEO do for 7, 8, 9 figure salaries that someone wouldn't do for $200,000 a year? Why are workers expected to kill themselves for the least shitty job available so these people can make the next ten generations of their families members of the liesure class?
Depends on how many people you think can successfully be CEO of a company the size of Microsoft. There was effectively no growth in Microsoft stock over Ballmer's 14 year reign as CEO. Under Satya their stock has rose about 750% in 9 years. Did Microsoft's technology and employees just get magically better in the last 10 years? Microsoft went from a stagnant legacy company like Oracle to one of the top growth IT giants like Apple and Google.
A CEO does not do all the work, but a good CEO is the primary diff
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But that said my point is is that the CEO's job is to figure out how to pay you less and give you a worse product while getting you to pay the same amount of money or work the same amount of hours
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A sample size of 2 is meaningless. The question is if they could find someone else who could adequately do that job with a $200k/year salary.
Presumably someone who was capable would go somewhere else that paid more. That's the core issue. The only way to fix it is a maximum salary cap, say 50x the lowest salary in the company. If Microsoft have minimum wage janitors that would be $750k. Another way would be 10x the average mean or median salary.
Anyway, as long as it applies to all companies then CEOs will b
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And what has Satya done for (whatever his compensation is) that he wouldn't do for $200k a year? Also, the CEO's of some of the richest companies in history worked for a lot less than $200 million a year when building them. Tesla and Amazon did little but lose money for the first ten years of their existence. Apple was built by a bunch of drug using hippies in a garage. Though of course well compensated later, Steve Jobs worked for a $1 salary when he came back from Apple.
So again, what do these
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Members of the "executive class" get fired for performance reasons every day. It's just as likely that MS's execs are doing this so they don't get fired themselves as it is to preserve their own bonuses.
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Members of the "executive class" get fired for performance reasons every day. It's just as likely that MS's execs are doing this so they don't get fired themselves as it is to preserve their own bonuses.
The difference is when an executive gets fired they get their multi-million dollar golden parachute, plus other severance goodies.
When you or I get fired we get shown the door with a foot in our ass.
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Depends on the reason for the termination. Speak for yourself though, I'm capable of negotiating my own employment contract with appropriate severance. Why aren't you?
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Is that before or after you went to Haaarrrvvvaaard elitist school?
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WTF does a CEO do for 7, 8, 9 figure salaries that someone wouldn't do for $200,000 a year?
Most CEOs do not have 8 or 9 figure salaries. Most CEOs are paid in packages that are tied intrinsically to shareholder returns, and when those vest, they cash in on 8 and 9 figure benefits.
But to the fundamental question, most plebs working for $200,000 a year have a responsibility of fuck-all, maybe in control of a small department or some innovative part of a business. The decisions they make do not affect 220,000 employees, and the pension schemes of a significant portion of population of countries. CEO
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But to the fundamental question, most plebs working for $200,000 a year have a responsibility of fuck-all, maybe in control of a small department or some innovative part of a business. The decisions they make do not affect 220,000 employees, and the pension schemes of a significant portion of population of countries. CEO compensation plans are out of control, but $200k would be equally ludicrous given the responsibilities of the position.
And what exactly does that "responsibility" translates to?
If they hey fuck massively, they just lay off tens of thousands to save money for the shareholders and move on. Worst case, they get fired by the board with a massive golden parachute, and move on to fail as CEO in another company.
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Shareholder returns that are boosted by screwing over the workers who produced the profits? Where is you point?
Warren Buffett said it best (Score:2)
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Snort. Draw on a small pool of candidates from your local heads of a soup kitchen, public radio station, library foundation or alumni association and you'll find far more "social skills" than your average CEO.
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WTF does a CEO do for 7, 8, 9 figure salaries that someone wouldn't do for $200,000 a year?
Salary negotiation skills. They're good at it. See also: stabbing their coworkers in the back on the way up.
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Sure, sure. You ever met a prole who was able to negotiate starting pay above HR wage scales? Even if you did, they were hobbits riding a unicorn. Suppressing wages for the workforce is far more important to companies than placating a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, even if his abilities match his Lex Luthor sized ego.
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Sure, sure. You ever met a prole who was able to negotiate starting pay above HR wage scales?
That's why the ones who can negotiate are high-paid CEOs.
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Which still doesn't explain the fact there's nothing a CEO does for 9 figures a year that someone wouldn't do for $200,000.
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By 'same job' I mean same results as well. What do Satya, Bezos, Musk et all do for giant compensation that they wouldn't do for $200,000 a year. Also what kinda proves this point is may of these same billionaires worked for much less when their companies were struggling. Amazon like Tesla did little but lose money for their first decade. Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple famously worked for $1 a year. He was well compensated after the fact of course, but that wouldn't have happened if Apple went bankrup
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What do Satya, Bezos, Musk et all do for giant compensation that they wouldn't do for $200,000 a year.
I don't know if they would do it for $200k, but they certainly would have done it for much, much less.
Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple famously worked for $1 a year.
Yeah, he was good at negotiating. The unfortunate reality is, if you want to hire someone good at negotiating, then you're either going to pay them a lot, or be better at negotiation than they are. One of those two.
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CEOs, major shareholders and MBAs are not your friends.
Who thought they were? They don't need to be.
If you are going to work for friendship, you're looking in the wrong place.
Lots of people (Score:2, Insightful)
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"Prosperity gospel" is garbage and in no way related to historical, biblical Christianity.
It's also in no way related to your summary thereof. It does not say that evil cannot prosper. It says you will prosper if you send your "prosperity preacher" enough money. Garbage, but of an entirely different sort than you said.
However, in a society based on rule of law, the process of adding value does correlate largely, though not perfectly, with financial success. All else being close to equal, the harder work
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Yes, this is how the world operates.
You can either accept that and play to win, or whine about it and lose.
I choose to win. What does that look like? It means I build my skill set to be multi-discipline. Need a DBA? I'm here. Need a PHB to be the bad guy and manage to the numbers? That's me too. Need a consultant to come in and figure out and fix some code? Me again. Need someone to go talk to a council/committee about a pet project? What time?
So sure; lay me off. There are other opportunities out th
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What really sucks about this is that other tech companies will use this as an excuse not to give meaningful cost of living increases at their organizations as well.
What remains to be seen is if tech employees will be willing to put up with what will basically be a small pay cut thanks to inflation, or if they'll go elsewhere.
Self-fulfilling prophecy. (Score:2)
We have had people calling for economic decline for some time now, but it seems like Microsoft and other organizations looking to cut costs are going to do what they can to ensure that the economy tanks.
Granted, there are probably some overpaid individuals in the organization, but who thinks they are going to be impacted?
Any bets on if the corporate execs get record bonuses for meeting their efforts to reduce costs?
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We have had people calling for economic decline for some time now, but it seems like Microsoft and other organizations looking to cut costs are going to do what they can to ensure that the economy tanks.
Granted, there are probably some overpaid individuals in the organization, but who thinks they are going to be impacted?
Any bets on if the corporate execs get record bonuses for meeting their efforts to reduce costs?
Since they're publicly saying the executive bonuses won't be as high as last year? They'll have to sneak this into a special "operating excellence" award or some shit so it doesn't look like the execs are dipping their hands in the cookie jar, after filling it with low-rank blood.
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We have had people calling for economic decline for some time now, but it seems like Microsoft and other organizations looking to cut costs are going to do what they can to ensure that the economy tanks.
Oh, this conspiracy theory again. Everything would be fine except for Big Biz talking the economy down.
Why in God's name would businesses intentionally damage the economy, knowing that they'll lose profits, market cap, and shareholder value?
Re:Self-fulfilling prophecy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever seen the movie The Fifth Element? This is not a new concept at all.
Big businesses do this to control wage growth, when you hear a buzz word about the economy heating up that's generally what they mean. When wages grow, so to does demand, so you'd think the rich would be logical and realize that our economy grew the fastest when there was a strong middle class. Decades of tearing it apart and they are bumping into ceilings trying to continue growth with a smaller and smaller portion able to afford services.
Trickle down economics is such a bad joke at this point, everything grows from the bottom up, not top down.
Far too much of a stock's value is pinned to emotion. When everyone talks about a looming recession it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy all things being equal.
The biggest problem I see is that people at the top don't understand Covids impact on supply chain and thus the supply side of supply/demand. My need for food is unchanged but the supply has been disrupted multiple times. I may be able to put off some laptops purchases but new datacenter equipment causes business growth disruption. So far the solution has been to raise interest rates which just makes getting the things you can't already get even harder. It's silly and super shortsighted.
As the saying goes, we'll try the right thing after trying all the wrong things first. That's how we've always done it. Much like simple privacy laws would solve the Tik-Tok dilemma. Instead they'll craft dumb law after dumb law that won't even accomplish the goal they set out to accomplish. Regulating CEO compensation and proper taxation would solve a lot of problems but even 150 years into Laissez-faire people still haven't learned that unbridled capitalism has all the same pitfalls as every other economic principle. It would be far more productive to argue about the amount of regulation for specific industries but congress isn't interested in legislating anything of real consequence.
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In the hopes of driving competition out of business. Even if everyone hurts, the biggest tend to hurt less and be poised to exploit a bigger fraction of the market in recovery by virtue of being the last ones standing.
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Assuming facts not in evidence. About a quarter of inflation is due to Covid relief funds. [nationwidefinancial.com]
Most of inflation is due to good ole fashioned corporate greed and supply chain issues.
Good for thee, not for me (Score:2)
Isn't this normal? (Score:2)
For the past three years, the companies where I've worked have given a measly 1% raise to anyone not laid off. I thought this was normal as companies are restructuring or otherwise finding ways to become profitable again.
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That's the excuse.
There are definitely companies which are struggling and losing ground, but there are plenty of companies making a profit still and using this tactic preemptively.
The reality we need to face is that we are in the beginning stages of a long tail recession. It started a year ago and will continue for some time - it just depends on how things evolve around the forthcoming currency collapse.
And, given the international behavior around BRICS country consolidations and collaborations, and loss of
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Microsoft reported a 2022 profit of $135.62B.
Profitable again indeed
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For the past three years, the companies where I've worked have given a measly 1% raise to anyone not laid off. I thought this was normal as companies are restructuring or otherwise finding ways to become profitable again.
Nope, not normal. Wages in March 2023 rose 7.04% compared to March 2022. While that is mostly driven by people finding new jobs instead of yearly raises, my company for instance gave a blanket 3% raise last summer on top of the merit increases we got this spring. Your company may be struggling, but most are not struggling to increase their wages to compete for talent.
Sounds like you should brush off that resume.
But maintaining bonuses & stock awards, of cou (Score:2)
Because it would be the higher-ups who would be adversely impacted by THAT. We can't have Nadella putting off his new yacht purchase!
Nadella is full of it (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems to be just another example of the mega rich pulling the ladder up some more.
Microsoft revenue is $198.3B annually. After extensive research and analysis, Zippia's data science team found the following key financial metrics. Microsoft's revenue growth from 2001 to 2022 is 683.8%. Microsoft has 182,268 employees, and the revenue per employee ratio is $1,087,793.Apr 6, 2023
https://www.zippia.com/microso... [zippia.com]
How long can you afford to work there? (Score:2, Interesting)
At some point, not working is more profitable than working.
So I guess with a skyrocketing inflation, if you can't pay more, instead people will just work less. And use the time to do more sensible things like brushing up their resume and using more of their time to shop around for greener pastures.
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You're little MAGA thing isn't funny. If you think Biden caused GLOBAL inflation ... which is exactly what it is/was then you're off your rocker. But be that arrogant American who thinks they are the center of the universe.
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Amusing that he picked "Grievance Studies major" to use as his caricature. Projection is a tic they're prone to, for whatever reason.
It's fascinating really. Psychologically, might it have something to do with living in a constant undercurrent of buried cognitive dissonance?
See also this [slashdot.org] and work your way back up to the grandparent post. These guys project so much they should be rated in Lumens.
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If that minimum wage keeps pace with inflation, you might be right. Alas, we can't raise minimum wage because we believe the lie about wages driving inflation, so we have to keep you poor to protect the wealth of those that already have it.
Some folks have some math to do. (Score:3)
Microsoft total compensation at un-raised levels minus that on offer from other hiring industry players. If the result is positive, consider staying put. If it's negative, consider leaving. I had the poor luck of being in middle management for a large company during two years of salary freezes. No fun at all, even though the company was still paying above industry averages. People actually still think that a "cost of living adjustment" is still a thing. It's really not.
big words.. (Score:3)
https://www.salary.com/tools/e... [salary.com]
Microsoft is a mess (Score:2)
On March 6th, I got a bunch of messages from almost everyone I used to work with there - Federal, specifically - who had been laid off en masse, with the exception of a few stragglers, mostly ass kissers. Even the salespeople were let go, including the sales managers. Those who weren't let go were more or less forcibly transferred out of the area into something unfamiliar.
I had quit back in late December and gotten another job.
The company seriously lost its way during COVID. While they are doing the req
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I think you're right. I feel like Microsoft is one of those "too big to fail" type companies at this point. They don't really have a concrete sense of direction, but that doesn't really concern them because putting *anything* out there that's new will keep the money rolling in, as long as it's linked to the existing software people are committed to using.
Working for a business that's using their whole suite of cloud-based offerings as the backbone of our software solution, I've seen time after time where th
Officespace (Score:2)
If you work for a large tech company... (Score:2)
...don't work too hard. Hard work will NOT pay off. Instead, view large corporations as springboards to entrepreneurship. Stack savings doing the bare minimum while keeping an eye out for opportunities and inefficiencies where you can start your own small business to step in and compete.
Should suspend executive bonuses too... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's only fair - if you're going to suspend increases on your workforce in order to cut costs, you should suspend executive bonuses for the same reason.
But no, I'm certain he and the other execs will be collecting their multi-million dollar bonuses and, well, fuck the employees!