Microsoft Layoffs - Cinco de Fire-O
Well, if ever you wanted to console yourself with some tequila, today might be your day. Phase Two of the big Microsoft 2009 layoff engages today.
- Microsoft continues layoff plan, eliminates thousands more jobs - TechFlash Seattle's Technology News Source
- Steve Ballmer's internal memo on Microsoft's latest round of layoffs - TechFlash Seattle's Technology News Source
- Microsoft Starts The Layoff Machine Again Steve Ballmer’s Memo To The Troops Peter Kafka MediaMemo AllThingsD
Is this it? Will there be more? From Mr. Ballmer's email:
With this announcement, we are mostly but not all done with the planned 5,000 job eliminations by June 2010.
Strangely, Ms. Brummel have asked folks to avoid emailing each other today because the last layoff's email volume was so distracting. Gee, sorry to be a bother while people are trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Let's see... how to avoid that... I know, tell people what the hell is going on and which people / groups are affected. Oy.
Please, if affected by today's events, note which group you're in and any messaging about things going forward (as appropriate and proper).
(And please, Ms. Brummel, if you talk to the troops about this, don't share how people affected by the layoff are thanking you - that just seems creepy.)
Dropping moderation for today, but as usual: be responsible. I will delete comments later that are off-topic, along with any other comments that react to the deleted comments. If in doubt, go visit the CRF parallel thread: http://minimsftcrf.blogspot.com/2009/05/comment-stream-microsoft-layoffs-cinco.html
1,545 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 1001 – 1200 of 1545 Newer› Newest»Would MS seriously do something like that to these people??
It should probably. Windows and office have a lot of deadwood and extra teams that can easily be cut without jeopardizing win8 (or whatever the next version will be called). It makes business sense.
I think to soften up the blow and bad publicity as you described, they might consider a special 'ship it bonus' too as a part of severance package.
Again, many productivity apps and "Web 2.0" widgets can be modularized and coded by monkeys. The Really Cool Shit that's exciting and pushing the boundaries of the possible cannot. .
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My original point (e.g. about building a building) is that Microsoft should not RELY ENTIRELY on superstars to make good products. Somehow you have twisted this into the strawman argument that all software should only be made by morons.With the current organization of Microsoft product groups, nobody is responsible for the design or engineering of an entire product. Leads, managers, etc. don't design anything, they exist to manage schedules and resources and attend meetings. The hope is that high-IQ ("superstar") ICs will herd their fellow cats into the right directions. These ICs are praised for having lots of "scope" and get Gold Stars. If the cats don't happen to herd themselves appropriately, the product is a mess, and there's nobody to blame.
What I'm suggesting is that there should be actual people in charge of the design and engineering of a product, and they should tell their reports what to do. That way, the ICs don't have to worry about being superstars and can instead just do their jobs. Good leaders would modularize their projects well and account for various areas of expertise and levels of skill. That way, not everybody would have to be a rock star (i.e. a genius bricklayer) in order for the product to be solid.
$40B or even $50B isn't that much to Mircosoft. Losing out on a $1 Trillion market is a much bigger deal over time.
Righto. Great vision.
"there's been talk on this thread (and others) of teams like Office and Windows being hit once they ship."
Rumors are just that, rumors.
20 Million strong! XBox Live is HOT!
Lets give the XBox Live folks a hand! Not to mention it wouldn't exist without the XBox. This is how cash cows are built!
bing. its happening folks..
What happens if you get laid off while you are on vacation?
The people I know who got the axe and were on vacation got called on their cell phones. 4 yrs ago, one of the guys on our team got his notice by email...while he was in Baghdad on Active Duty.
'Someone' might have told HR that KOMO & Drudge might be VERY interested in hearing about that and within the day, he got another email saying his 6 wk internal search would start once he returned from Active Duty. When he returned, he did his 6 wks, took severance, and returned a while later as a (more highly paid) contractor. He's now moved on to a much better situation away from MS.
Wish that were the only such story, but another guy on our team got his notice the day before he was to report for Active Duty. He's now doing quite well at Boeing.
EATING CROW!
I can't believe it!!!!
Bing is real.
"Bing" "Bing" "Bing"
I wonder how much that branding is going to cost in jobs?
My faith in Microsoft is suffering.
What I'm suggesting is that there should be actual people in charge of the design and engineering of a product, and they should tell their reports what to do. The guy who wrote this should be put in charge of product development at MSFT. I have no idea if he (or she) has any other qualifications for the job, but this one post proves he (or she) is already significantly more qualified to run product development at MSFT than any of the people currently doing it.
But you can see by the response from some that huge swaths of MSFT don't get it. They're convinced the only way to do non-trivial software development is a bunch of rockstars running around with their hair on fire. They don't deserve the title Software Development Engineer because they don't have a clue what engineering really is. They're divas, not developers.
$40B or even $50B isn't that much to Mircosoft. Losing out on a $1 Trillion market is a much bigger deal over time. Um, and I was laid off why again?
I think Microsoft's problem is that it has a 'Senior Leadership Team' in the first place and not an actual CEO.
Ballmer is a CEO that depends on a SLT to make the hard strategic decisions.The Ceo has to be the chief strategist of a company.Strategy and vision has to come from one brain.
"there's been talk on this thread (and others) of teams like Office and Windows being hit once they ship."Rumors are just that, rumors.Layoff Rumors on mini's blog are usually true. This blog has become the quasi-official communication medium of layoffs announcements. In December of 2008 the "rumors" of layoffs in January became true. Around April the "rumors" about layoffs in May also became true. Not only that, but everyone knew the exact date. Good luck to all of you on the next round.
Seen on a Microsoft whiteboard:
Q: What does "Bing" stand for?
A: "Bing is not Google".
I was part of the May 5th layoffs from the MS Automotive Business Unit. I'd say we lost 50%+. I find it very ironic that Balmer just received the one millionth hybrid from Ford. No one cared to mention the product we proudly worked on pretty much has no future.
Review time is almost around the corner... Can you not sign it and request an reassessment?
You do not have to sign your review.
You can try getting it reassessed but they can often distort what happened to justify what they did.
If they trash you on a review, do an internal transfer or leave the company.
Working for the same manager for another review period just gives them a chance to do it again.
They can justify giving you less important work because of your bad review.
Repeat that cycle often enough and you're out.
Just a few moments ago, I checked in some code on vs-2010...
It occurred to me, despite the mess - the hard times - the economy - the bad feelings from management - the mistrust in the halls...
WOW - I fucking love working on developer tools.
Microsoft is a great place to work.
I still quite puzzled by the whole Microsoft layoff criterias. Some solid performers got layoff just because HR or the company perceive them to have slow growth or does not have the potential to be the super star or reaching certain level. I had an interesting conversation with my manager and the message was quite clear. You either get up there or HR will kick you out soon. Though he didn't say it the direct way. But let's be realistic, how can you work like you have a booming career where all you have is a programming job in reality? If you work 9 - 5 and deliver solid results for whatever target level, why can't microsoft value employees like that which deliver the backbones of their product. I am very tired from the company culture and I have been here long enough that I know the way of survival. But I am seriously of thinking to quit once economy comes back. I am so tired of this apple to orange comparison in review time and sick of being criticized on things that I will never get better. Frankly, what has Steve Ballmer grow since he took over in 2000?
Wow, too bad you don't get paid by the pound for comments here, mini. You could retire!
So the blog has morphed, it is less a watercooler discussion and now more drowning sorrows in a dark and smoky bar. I no longer have any hope that it will help anything at Microsoft, in terms of bringing about positive change. The readership is now split into two camps, those wondering "what is next for Microsoft?" and those wondering "what is next for me, now that I've been booted from Microsoft?"
One interesting thing to me is that I can understand many of management's decisions, on a superficial level. For example the idea of making people partners sounds nice. You work hard and smart, move up the ladder, and eventually you are made into a partner, just like at a law firm! But the problem is that there is no real expectation of the regular worker bee being able to do that. Even if the partners were all retired (or executed) after one year in status, and replaced, with 90,000+ employees the average wait would be 89 years. So much for being made a 'distinguished engineer' or 'technical fellow', those are almost all hired in from other places now. Bottom line: great idea, lousy execution.
Taking on google in search: this makes sense, we're the big gorilla, it looks like it can make money. However after years of dumping money (Bing?) into a sinkhole, we still have...lousy execution.
Zune: I really like it, and if the iPod wasn't already here it would be a win. But opportunities were missed, so...great idea, lousy execution.
I could go on. Everyone already has. SLT needs to EXECUTE.
"Personally - i think MS is an ageing and bloated ship. It wont sink, but it wont be able to keep pace with newer, faster ships. I'd get out of this stock(espp) as soon as the market recovers somewhat, since i am convinced that SLT is not learning the lesson and will keep repeating the mistakes."
I agree with this comment. If you look for an innovative company to work for, msft is not the right place. There are a lot of examples of msft following innovations such web browser, media player, PDA, game console, web search, music player, mobile phone software, etc. etc. Msft never came up with the original ideas.
One sign that msft will never be innovative is the fact that the company started to pay dividends a few years ago. Msft paid regular and one-time dividends at least over $70 billion over the years. Billg and Steveb owns 10% and 5% company shares respectively. The dividend payout gives them billions of $ free money. Where is their motivation to work hard and innovate? My observation is that they are just fighting to remain relevant over the past decade. I always thought billg will lead us to win the fight against Google before he retires, as Google is the only company out there that can make msft irrelavant and attack Office and Windows. The fact that billg quit says a lot about his confidence in winning the battle against Google.
Any comment on bing - the new search engine launched on thursday?
I'm not sure if the word 'bing' with catch up like google did. Also why did they announce the new search engine - put it in all the news and launch it only on june 3?? I went to the bing website and all it has is a video of why bing is better. No ability to search at all. Didnt someone have the intution to announce only when it is really available for search, since people who read news will want to try it. By the time it really launches, many folks might just forget about it, since google works just fine, and it is difficult to change habits.
Also - i am a bit skeptical of tall claims they make in video. I remember the cashback launch, and the tall claims then. But the live product search to get cashback sucked. Additionally it only showed the retailes who had jacked the prices up and then would give you some discount (like up 50%, will give you 6% back).
AFAIS - another launch/marketing fiasco by search leadership team. Another reason why the i should get out of the co. stock in espp.
The Genius of Microsoft: 20 Million Xbox Live Users and Counting Need to balance all the negativity on Mini these days, so I'm delighted to pass on this Seeking Alpha article. Hats off to the Xbox team, GREAT job :-)
Nobody can deny that Microsoft's (MSFT) Xbox has done it. They have become a success in only the second generation of their console product. And against embedded competition.
Xbox is now a license to print money. And if they manage it right it will become a bigger cash cow than their PC software ever was.
Microsoft’s genius was that they saw beyond the box and they saw beyond the packaged games. They realized that the future of gaming was an online service. An online service that will ultimately work with several different boxes. And an online service that is growing to be independent of packaged games. Xbox Live is that service, the biggest game portal in the world and by far the most valuable property in the history of video gaming.
Eventually you will be able to access Live from your television, from your phone and from the seatback screen when you are flying. It will be all things to all people. What we have seen thus far is only the beginning.
$40B or even $50B isn't that much to Mircosoft. Losing out on a $1 Trillion market is a much bigger deal over time.
Wake up. Company just laid off 5000 employees to save a few hundred million per year. Few hundred millions is a lot to Microsoft these days.
The dividend payout gives them billions of $ free money. Where is their motivation to work hard and innovate? My observation is that they are just fighting to remain relevant over the past decade.
Second that. I too feel that SteveB's motivation is to save the legacy of this company, rather than true passion for creating something new and exciting. Someone else rightly commented that MS is a follower of other companies rather than creator of new innovative features. This kind of approach would never work in real world and sooner or later is doomed.
And from all indications, it seems like bing is another black/bad spot in search's already spotty history. Where will this end?
"Zune: I really like it, and if the iPod wasn't already here it would be a win."
That's a big if. Also if ipod were not there, zune would never have been born.
Ballmer is a CEO that depends on a SLT to make the hard strategic decisions.The Ceo has to be the chief strategist of a company.Strategy and vision has to come from one brain.
And what is the vision of CEO Ballmer?
if the partners were all retired (or executed) after one year in status, and replaced, with 90,000+ employees the average wait would be 89 years. So much for being made a 'distinguished engineer' or 'technical fellow', those are almost all hired in from other places now. Bottom line: great idea, lousy execution.
You forgot to mention that you will be labeled "Kim" and "managed out" long before being labeled "partner". A company full of "superstars" where 99.7% will be labeled a failure and tossed out on their butt within 15 years.
So the blog has morphed, it is less a watercooler discussion and now more drowning sorrows in a dark and smoky bar. I no longer have any hope that it will help anything at Microsoft, in terms of bringing about positive change. The readership is now split into two camps, those wondering "what is next for Microsoft?" and those wondering "what is next for me, now that I've been booted from Microsoft?"I think there's still a lot of value in that, though whether Who'da wants it to go in that direction I don't know.
There are a lot of talented, ambitious, and hardworking people at MSFT. If things get turned around there, many of them will be part of the solution. If the company continues on and craters into the ground, many of them will go on to be influential in other places.
Either way, it's pretty valuable for them (us?) to spend some time understanding what the hell went wrong at MSFT.
Just wanted to mention that I just got my severance paid out last night and have to say wow... that's a big chunk of change, esp. for an after tax amount.
Despite how I feel about being let go in May, I've heard of few if any other companies that were willing to put that kind of money into the people they are laying off. This, ironically, may not be the best business decision but makes all the difference in the world for those of us who were part of the RIF. Even more so in that they are paying for Cobra for the same duration as the severance is paid out for, which ends up being a sizeable dollar amount for a family.
In truth, this may have been the best way to leave MSFT, while working in a services organization that I feel has lost it's way and in whom I have lost confidence.
I mean come on... $295/hr for an IT/development consultant?
Whatever.
Can anyone out there please provide some insight as to why the layoffs have not been voluntary buy-outs? It seems like the criteria and targeting have no direction. Wouldn't a voluntary process have been just as cost effective and less disruptive?
Try to search "paraglide" on Bing and then click the shopping tab. Least relevant search results ever. (You can compare with Google if you like. Their shopping search results are just fine.)
One example, I know, but the point is, if Microsoft can't even work out relevance, how could they possibly deliver on a "decision-making engine"?
I've tried to defend Live Search now and then, but I give up. Time to move on to something we don't suck at.
Bing... who? The world didn't notice. It was all ready to go, press, marketing, monkey-boy pitching it. They did, and...
a) It wasn't READY! Who are these MORONS who planned this announcement? They should be FIRED. Oh wait, no... morons actually are the ones who get promoted at Microsoft.
b) Google stole the spotlight with Google Wave. They timed with precision. Now everyone is talking about Wave, but not about Bing.. Bing Who?
I left Microsoft some years ago and I'm so glad I did.
Microsoft, go bing yourself.
"I went to the bing website and all it has is a video of why bing is better. No ability to search at all. Didnt someone have the intution to announce only when it is really available for search, since people who read news will want to try it."
go back and re-read Balmers mail. It works on corpnet but not externally until the 3rd.
For any naysayers about Bing, I am an outsider and can guarantee you Bing is going to rock. MS is back to it's good old marketing gimmicks - create a buzz, lets the media rave about it, make people wait and then release it. I am sure Google will be forced to respond to this over time.
I am impressed with what you guys have done. Kudos!!!
"Um, and I was laid off why again?"
Because we don't have a part of that online business?
Review time is almost around the corner... Can you not sign it and request an reassessment?Seems like you suspect your review won't be good. Start looking internally and externally now and move on to another position as quick as you can before the review numbers are handed out to you. Once you get your review and it's not what you expect it will be very difficult to move on. So if you have a gut feeling that things won't be good for you chances are you're right.
Bing, eh? No dumber than Googol^H^H^H^H^H^HGoogle, I suppose.
Still, it's going to take more than just marketing to drag Bing out of last place.
What would you make of a manager's sudden shift in attitude toward you -- like you're a rockstar (and your reviews for years with various managers including this one state this) to you're not really that good suddenly although you hadn't changed the way you were doing things?
I think Microsoft's problem is that it has a 'Senior Leadership Team' in the first place and not an actual CEO.
Ballmer is a CEO that depends on a SLT to make the hard strategic decisions.
This is the same way management is done at all levels in MSFT. Nobody in a leadership position is a decision maker. Everyone is supposed to be a "consensus builder" or "coach" or some other new-age dipster.
Which is why execution is so effed up at the company. I lost count of how many times a bunch of folks walked into a room, nominally came to a consensus on something, and walked up with completely different ideas about what everyone had agreed to. It was really just a bunch of people doing what they wanted to do and avoiding responsibility for hard choices.
Ballmer's just First Among Equals in the AWOL Leadership Brigade at MSFT.
The Genius of Microsoft: 20 Million Xbox Live Users and Counting
20 million Xbox Live is not one billion revenue. It is free with the box. Then there are expenses to renew the subscription and acquire new customers. You should be lucky to get 3% profit margin overall.
What would you make of a manager's sudden shift in attitude toward you -- like you're a rockstar (and your reviews for years with various managers including this one state this) to you're not really that good suddenly although you hadn't changed the way you were doing things?this means your on the watch list. I got some "feedback" on interpersonal last week and i was now "just above" in the achieving bucket .. which is BS.
I was also asked to provide a "reply" of my notes taken so a) my manager has it and b) he asked for a "what is your plan" to improve ...
wtf is that about .. i have not seen that tactic before.
I am clearly on the "goodbye" list.
"The Genius of Microsoft: 20 Million Xbox Live Users and Counting
20 million Xbox Live is not one billion revenue. It is free with the box. Then there are expenses to renew the subscription and acquire new customers. You should be lucky to get 3% profit margin overall."
Sorry, let's review the business model -- shall we?
XBox Live is free for those who sign-up at the Silver level -- Silver will not give you access to most Live services, including the ability to play online with your friends. It's a gateway drug to the real experience.
How successful of a gateway has Silver been? Well, 10 *million* of those 20 million people pay 50 bucks a year to be Gold subscribers -- that's a 50% attach rate and half a billion in revenue right there... then tack another half billion dollars on to the online purchases made over live (downloadable content) and you have a billion dollars of revenue.
Note that the Live Gold subscription business is growin like crazy, that paid downloadable content is exploding and that new services like Netflix streaming are debuting all the time, and you have one giant fucking juggernaut of a business.
It kills me to see the people hating on Microsoft's hands-down best business -- if Apple was doing what we're doing on Live y'all would be pissing yourselves.
Live is a fantastic business that's hugely profitable and has unlimited future potential, and for once we're making smart decisions and not fucking it up. It should be a model for the whole company.
I was also asked to provide a "reply" of my notes taken so a) my manager has it and b) he asked for a "what is your plan" to improveI as a mgr at MSFT once and was on the other end of this - "managing out" someone.
This is MSFT standard HR procedure. Get it in writing that you are crap, and that you have been told you are crap. And get a documented plan which you can be "proven" to have failed.
Pack your office now. They'll be doing it for you very soon.
Oh, the humanity. Time to get back to work on making managers at Microsoft better.
PREPARE FOR YOUR NEXT REVIEW AS NEVER BEFORE. ACT NOW. What I heard from my manager is that the January and May layoffs eliminated positions, and not exactly people. It didn’t really matter how good your performance was if you were sitting in a position that was eliminated. A few years back you could have gotten rich as an admin, being at the right place at the right time. Now, you could have been the best developer of the world, but you were at the wrong place at the wrong time. The only difference was that, being Microsoft still a little developer-centric, it was logical to have some good performers in the technical disciplines getting the chance to stay around and interview for 60 days.
Having the chance for the internal search was offered to a higher percentage of those laid off last January but the results weren’t that good. Several good performers, at least as per their recent reviews, didn’t do as well as expected during the internal job search. Those were most likely employees just sitting around and being successful in their comfort zone. They were not prepared to stand up and jump to any other boat. Fewer people got the chance for internal interviews during the Cinco de Maio layoffs. And if you think things were bad for you as a technical employee consider that a few lawyers were escorted out of the building, and had to sign documents agreeing not to even send a message to their colleagues to inform that they were leaving. Internal and external processes – and we are talking about legal processes – were left hanging on a cliff without nobody knowing about their status.
The next layoffs will happen silently. Right now, even before you start to write your review, the calibration is already going on in several teams. ACT NOW. Start to “manage up” and show your manager how your results relate to your commitments. Start to get into his or her mind your expectation regarding your next review. Better yet, start to get into your own mind a realistic expectation regarding your next review, or your disappointment may be bigger than just getting informed that you won’t get any raise, unless you are getting a promotion.
For any naysayers about Bing, I am an outsider and can guarantee you Bing is going to rock.I'm an outsider, and I can guarantee that you aren't one.
Who in their right mind pre-announces an internet search service before it's ready? Particularly when you ALREADY HAVE A SEARCH ENGINE? Where's the value in letting people know it's there, but it's not ready yet?
That's not "generating buzz", that's making Microsoft look like its usual self – unable to launch anything in a timely manner.
B.I.N.G. - Bing Is No Google
"But the problem is that there is no real expectation of the regular worker bee being able to do that. Even if the partners were all retired (or executed) after one year in status, and replaced, with 90,000+ employees the average wait would be 89 years."
I understand your point, although your math is wrong. A new hire would have to wait 89 years. The average wait for current employees would be about 45 years.
Which brings me to another issue. The quality of spelling, math, logic, etc, on some of the posts from self-proclaimed Microsoft super-stars is shockingly bad. If you're that careless with your coding, this company is doomed.
One last thing. To the anonymous poster who works some comment about Response Point into every post. We get it. You were on the Response Point team and you got laid off. You're bitter. Now, shut up about the decision to shut down Response Point. It was a mediocre VoIP product that didn't bring in enough money to justify it's existence. Also, MSR decided to create it without coordinating with UCG or anybody else. What did you expect to happen when you started monkeying with the company's overall VoIP strategy? That the SLT was going to say "Sure, go ahead. We want the product teams to be coordinated on unified communications but you MSR pointy-heads are so smart you can do whatever you want without coordinating with anybody." I do have to commend you for actually shipping something, though. That's a pretty rare skill in MSR.
"20 million Xbox Live is not one billion revenue. It is free with the box. Then there are expenses to renew the subscription and acquire new customers. You should be lucky to get 3% profit margin overall."
About 2/3 are gold subscriptions, which are $50/year. To make the math easy, let's call it 70%. So, 14M x $50 = $700M/year.
Xbox Live also makes money by selling downloads. IIRC, the most recent publicly disclosed figure was about $200M.
So, they're pretty close to $1B. There is some overhead but the profit is FAR higher than 3%. You should think harder before you post.
Someone else rightly commented that MS is a follower of other companies rather than creator of new innovative features. This kind of approach would never work in real world and sooner or later is doomed.Microsoft has always been a "fast follower", starting with MS-DOS (followed CP/M and AppleDOS). Windows followed Mac. Excel followed Visicalc. Word followed Wordstar or WordPerfect. Outlook followed FreeAgent's newsreader. IE followed Spyglass (commercial version of the original NCSA Mosaic code, I think). MSN even followed every large BBS (like AOL) and timesharing service (like Compuserve - anyone else still remember their compuserve id number?) on the planet, and then followed every large web site on the planet as of the late 1990's. Sometimes they've bought (when they needed a head start because they were late to the party - see Frontpage, Zune, etc.) and sometimes they've built. Selling better and/or cheaper mousetraps is how they've won many market battles.
I'd have to say that MS has been rather successful with this strategy in the real world (until recently at least, where they missed on media players and search). For both of those, they were too late. I think MS felt that they could put all their weight behind their offerings and win that way (as they did when incorporating TCP/IP into Windows and launching MSN back in the mid 1990's), but it hasn't been a successful strategy lately. In the case of Zune, they lost on "cool". In the case of google, they're losing based on being far too late to the party, such that their competitor's brand was already a verb before they had something even possibly competitive.
Back to "cool", Flight Sim (and the rumored Train Sim successor) was cool. They're products that would have been nice to keep around because, to certain consumer markets, these products actually ARE cool. No, they're likely not multi-billion-dollar businesses, but is it really good business sense to insist that all businesses must be? Some businesses perhaps should exist to protect the overall corporate brand, and these small bastions of cool help do that in the consumer space. Remember that one of the reasons for XBox's existence was to protect the living room from Sony, from what I heard....
But who am I to take issues with MS' business decisions? I'm viewed as such a non-contributor there that I was laid off just days before they ran with a money-saving idea I'd been advocating for a year (aha! with me out of the picture, some manager could claim it as theirs and look like a saint in this economy).
"Bing" "Bing" "Bing"
I wonder how much that branding is going to cost in jobs?
Should be good for Southwest at least. I can't see or hear "Bing" without thinking "Ding!".
Better than Kumo, which could be pronounced Q-mo or Koo-mo or even Come-o, and begs comparison with awkward sumo wrestlers. (Can't you just picture the google home page with a drawing of some sumo wrestlers and the legend "Welcome to the party - again - Microsoft"? Now instead, we wait for the likely drawing of cherries next to the google logo with a similar caption.) But really, coulda been better.
I still like the internal joke of "bing is not google", and that might be reason enough for me to learn to like the name.
I received an invitation from a teammate to fill in a Microsoft 360 survey for her. The survery says it is for "developmental purpose". Anyone knows what does this mean? Usually when would one ask other peers to fill in such survey? For promotion/award? or something negative?
About 2/3 are gold subscriptions, which are $50/year. To make the math easy, let's call it 70%. So, 14M x $50 = $700M/year.
Xbox Live also makes money by selling downloads. IIRC, the most recent publicly disclosed figure was about $200M.
--
Yeah right. Xbox loses $100/box already. When does 66.6% become 70%. Using funny math results in funny numbers. Hardware group and Office Mac are the cash cows. We should be lucky to get J and RB salary back.
"I received an invitation from a teammate to fill in a Microsoft 360 survey for her. The survery says it is for "developmental purpose". Anyone knows what does this mean? Usually when would one ask other peers to fill in such survey? For promotion/award? or something negative?"
STEP AWAY FROM THE CONSPIRACY THEORY!
Christ, we've all lost our minds. 360 reviews have been standard business practice for the last decade and we do them frequently at Microsoft... some managers use them, some don't, it's just a preference.
I was the outsider who commented about MS generating buzz for Bing. Look guys, it doesn't matter what you have already (live.com). In the world of search, MS is third and takes home about 8-10% of market share. Everyone has to be honest here -you can read cnet and other reviews - there are other sites better than google. (cuil.com, etc). But Google has become a brand name for quality search and the only way to break that mold is to get out there boldly with a marketing campaign and follow up with something new.
I think what MS has done so far is working. All reviews comment on the fact that google offers better quality, but they also say that MS is trying to create a niche by calling it as decision engine and their demo video clearly reflects that.
You just need to give it some time.
MS has a strong reputation for copying/imitating and doing it better. (IE Vs Netscape). Over the years, MS has lost its vision and lost sight of web based business.
I think it will catch up. If not, it would be a shame that capital and intellectual power could not be used to execute and come out with a winning strategy.
Remember, every company goes through this phase (including Apple). I see many of the guys who comment here, have started their career at MS and build up their trenches. It is really hard to come out with a winning product and sustain the leadership in the market place. I am not surprised that too many people who comment here don't get it.
"shut up about the decision to shut down Response Point. It was a mediocre VoIP product that didn't bring in enough money to justify it's existence. Also, MSR decided to create it without coordinating with UCG or anybody else. What did you expect to happen when you started monkeying with the company's overall VoIP strategy?"
If Response Point is mediocre, OCS is worse. The bloated UCG team is a strong candidate in the 3rd round of layoff.
Back to "cool", Flight Sim (and the rumored Train Sim successor) was cool. They're products that would have been nice to keep around because, to certain consumer markets, these products actually ARE cool. No, they're likely not multi-billion-dollar businesses, but is it really good business sense to insist that all businesses must be? .
.
I have pilot friends who love MS Flight Sim and say it's the best software available to train on that doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars. I think this is awesome even though I'm not a pilot and I've told other non-pilots that Microsoft does really produce some great software like Flight Sim that experts in the field love. Now MS has gone and F'ed that up. Great.
I remember back in the 80s and early 90s when you could walk into a software store and see a bunch of Microsoft software that did a bunch of stuff, esp. for regular Joes--something you'd expect from the supposed biggest and best software company in the world. For god's sake, I pretty sure at one point there was a Microsoft program that produced greeting cards. It is a shame that Microsoft is so corporate and "strategic" now that it is no longer interested in producing software for people just because it's cool or useful and people would buy it for money. Now it's all about killing Apple and Google.
Again, many productivity apps and "Web 2.0" widgets can be modularized and coded by monkeys. The Really Cool Shit that's exciting and pushing the boundaries of the possible cannot.
The "Overview and Summary" page in Event Viewer on Vista contains list boxes that do not get taller to fit the vertical space in the window when you resize it.
They'll get wider but not taller.
This is Vista SP2 (and Windows Server 2008).
Would it be pushing the boundaries of the possible to get this fixed?
Putting list boxes in resizable panels and scaling them to fit when the window is resized is not difficult.
A lot of "Web 2.0" widgets coded by monkeys have this feature.
"I left Microsoft some years ago and I'm so glad I did.
Microsoft, go bing yourself."
Yeah, sounds like you've really moved on. LOL.
I received an invitation from a teammate to fill in a Microsoft 360 survey for her. The survery says it is for "developmental purpose". Anyone knows what does this mean? Usually when would one ask other peers to fill in such survey? For promotion/award? or something negative?Anyone can initiate a 360-review. Some people who part of bench programs will have 360 reviews initiated for them. It's just a way to get feedback.
"So, they're pretty close to $1B. There is some overhead but the profit is FAR higher than 3%. You should think harder before you post."
Some overhead? Try again. Lots of overhead. Servers, memory, disk, high-speed bandwith, marketing, customer service, management, administration, etc. An efficient company might net 20%. Since we're dealing with MS, and E&D in particular, it's probably no more than 10% and losing money can't be ruled out.
But let's be charitable and say it's making the 10% on your estimated $900m. That's $90m and the only profit being contributed to the greater black hole known as Xbox profitability. That probably doesn't even cover the annual bonus pool for E&D leadership.
Look, if Xbox was producing Nintendo margins, or even half that, it would be a good business. As it is though, it's an incredibly lousy one with no obviously change likely. MS should spin it off, or at least get rid of the hardware element and retain the Live segment. Without the console conflict, MS could perhaps make a play for the broader Wii and PS3 installed base. That could potentially yield an okay business, and might as well have something running in all those expensive and largely empty server farms the company has been building.
Jack Welch: How To Kick Ass In These Tough Times
WELCH: We have 11 companies in our private equity company. We meet with them every 30 days. Our objectives with them and our challenge to them were three things. One, cash is king. Get every drop of cash you can get and hold onto it. That is number one.
Number two is communicate like you’ve never communicated before to your people. They’re scared. They don’t know what’s happening. Every action you take must be understood by every employee in the place. If used to think you communicated a lot, communicate tenfold more now in every morning at businesses.
Get in the skin of every employee so they know everything that’s happening and they aren’t kept sitting out, wondering. They understand what the situation is.
And finally, the third one is if you’ve got the cash, you’ve communicated with everybody, you’ve taken care of your best, you’ve differentiated with your people, go out and buy or bury your competition.
And the idea is buy them because they might not have done what you - you did. Bury because they’re sitting around scared. Steal their employees. Steal their R&D people. Steal their salespeople. Bury them. Now is the time.Ballmer, are you listening?
Regarding the 360 feedback, see Wikipedia, which has good material on this. The 360 degree surveys are typically requested by people that want to get honest feedback from their peers, reports and manager. They have no relationship to promotions, performance evaluation or anything else. Give your teammate the most honest feedback you can. And commend the person for wanting to develop himself/herself. The irony of such surveys is that most of the people that I’ve seen asking for 360 degree feedback are those that least need such anonymous feedback. Meanwhile, people that really need feedback will rarely volunteer to receive it, or get it when receiving it anyhow.
One of my own 360 surveys was particularly useful. I suspected that my manager at that time either had something against me, or had little attention to whatever he was doing. Then the manager answers in a very specific question that he considered that I didn’t seek continuous feedback to develop myself. This in a 360 degree survey! Case proven. I was gone in less than 3 months…
This is MSFT standard HR procedure. Get it in writing that you are crap, and that you have been told you are crap. And get a documented plan which you can be "proven" to have failed.
Pack your office now. They'll be doing it for you very soon.
part of performance managenemt and action plan development this is true .. why does that represent a real "your going to be axed" message.
Just wanted to mention that I just got my severance paid out last night and have to say wow... that's a big chunk of change, esp. for an after tax amount.
Amen. I got a little less than a year worth of salary (including vacation, 80% target bonus and cobra for family). Hope I can land a job in few weeks and thus maximize my returns. Thank you Microsoft/Ballmer. May God bless you.
"Can anyone out there please provide some insight as to why the layoffs have not been voluntary buy-outs? It seems like the criteria and targeting have no direction. Wouldn't a voluntary process have been just as cost effective and less disruptive?"
Voluntary layoffs are counter productive. Despite all the noise here, I can confirm that in my team the people who got fired were either kims or had reached a saturation point or were working from home too much. MS may say that 'position not specific employee was targetted' , but in reality it seems that fired folks were handpicked by my pum.
If you allow voluntary layoffs, best developers will leave and kims will be left behind. It is a lose-lose for the company.
go back and re-read Balmers mail. It works on corpnet but not externally until the 3rd.
OK - So why did Ballmer announce it publically at some show where news media was around? Why didnt he wait till 3rd to announce the inauguration of bing?
On a side note - has bing fixed the relevance issues of the live search? Has anyone tried it?
Why does everyone assume that the best and brightest (a.k.a. superstars) would leave Microsoft in a New York minute if they were offered a voluntary layoff? That would assume that all those superstars are just chomping at the bit and waiting for an excuse to leave.
That just doesn't grok.
First, the so-called superstars can work anywhere they wanted (so the theory goes). In spite of those options, they chose Microsoft. Are they all so unhappy now? Some, yes. Most, no (IMO).
Good, bad, or otherwise, MSFT is a VERY big company with lots of different types of cool technology. As superstars, if you believe anything you read here, they can have their pick of the litter when it comes to projects. Why would they give that up?
Then there are the golden handcuffs. A superstar (someone who has risen up through a few levels) is now sitting on some pretty sizable deferred compensation. A few months severance isn't likely to cover what they'll be leaving behind in deferred compensation. Otherwise they'd just negotiate a signing bonus equal to (or greater than) their likely severance and leave whenever it suits them. (i.e. they'll leave when it suits them, layoff or not).
Sure, some will leave, but they were probably going to leave soon anyway (remember, they can come and go as they please--they're superstars). So, from MSFT's perspective it's probably better they leave now rather then when it's more convenient for them and less convenient for MSFT. The rest will stay until they don't want to stay any more, regardless. Whaddya gonna do?
I'm not saying a voluntary layoff is necessarily a good idea, just that I don't think it would cause all the superstars to form a line to get out.
On a side note - has bing fixed the relevance issues of the live search? Has anyone tried it?.
It's released now (as a preview). bing.com and try it out. Live.com is also available, so try a few queries in both and see how they compare.
Now we're getting to the interesting part: the paranoia phase. Judging by the questions along the lines of "my manager did/said that, what does it mean?" it is well under way.
This will cause MSFT to rot from the inside out.
From where I'm sitting it's pretty entertaining though. A mix between Sartre's Huis-Clos and John Carpenter's The Thing
"On a side note - has bing fixed the relevance issues of the live search? Has anyone tried it?"
Have been a long time google user. But I got to say that I am impressed with Bing's results so far. seems like it is helping with the decision process that follows search. Health based search was awesome; so do travel related. If we can keep this up and improve on each categories, it's a good product that I don't have a problem evangelizing with non-ms friends and customers. Especially information on the left helps us narrow down.
All the bing haters - just give it a shot and see; you will see the difference.
[i]Just wanted to mention that I just got my severance paid out last night and have to say wow... that's a big chunk of change, esp. for an after tax amount.
Amen. I got a little less than a year worth of salary (including vacation, 80% target bonus and cobra for family). Hope I can land a job in few weeks and thus maximize my returns. Thank you Microsoft/Ballmer. May God bless you.[/i]
Wait.. this was the May layoffs?
I thought severence didnt kick in until <=30 days of July 4.
I can confirm that in my team the people who got fired were either kims or had reached a saturation point or were working from home too much. MS may say that 'position not specific employee was targetted' , but in reality it seems that fired folks were handpicked by my pum.
If you allow voluntary layoffs, best developers will leave and kims will be left behind. It is a lose-lose for the company.
The forced ranking curve labels most employees at Microsoft average or below average no matter how good they are in absolute terms.
From what I remember of previous discussions of "Kim", they are people who competently do their job but have limited chance of promotion.
I suppose the rationale of getting rid of people who can do their job is the company will land more super stars.
Even if you fill the company with super stars (that miraculously like fixing bugs to support multiple releases of a product), you are going to label most of them average or below average.
List of races and species in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyThe Golgafrinchans are a race from the planet Golgafrincham that appears in fit the sixth of the radio series, episode 6 of the TV series and the the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. In their ancient history, they tricked the most useless third (the middlemen) of their population to get on a spaceship and leave the planet, by spreading rumours of the horrific fates their planet was doomed to soon undergo, such as being eaten by a mutant star goat, or collapsing into the sun. The plan was to get them to crash on a "harmless" planet, thus losing any capacity for space travel; they would then be out of everyone's hair.
Soon after they managed to get rid of these people - including all the telephone sanitizers - the entire remaining population was wiped out by a plague contracted from a dirty telephone.
The results returned from Bing seem the same as Live for the queries I've run. What's more, it still hasn't indexed my Live Space, which I've been pointing out to the search guys literally for YEARS.
Fail. Again.
I agree with the commenter about UC and ResponsePoint. The OCS group has been painfully slow in getting anything done besides pretty powerpoints. ResponsePoint moved quickly and garnered good reviews.
Then again in services, we are responsible for many "solutions" which were mostly just pretty powerpoints.
to Saturday, May 30, 2009 4:25:00 PM...
Calibrations happen in many orgs every quarter, they are largely unrelated to the layoffs but the output of this years calibration should be assumed to have greater value in future org discussions. As far as anything one can do now to affect their spot in the stack, there isnt much you can do... they are mostly trend based and a sudden shift would be perceived almost as much a potential negative as a positive.
to Saturday, May 30, 2009 10:56:00 PM...
Totally agree with your comments... for everyone else, someone who is using MS 360 is almost certainly NOT a layoff candidate but probably either a bench participant or high potential doing their standard annual review prep. It is far from typical for MS to use MS 360 for low performers... give the person your deepest, honest feedback since they are almost certainly using this for legitimate career and personal development.
Is the high number of laid off Microsoft workers 40+ more than a coincidence?
Please recommend resources/links to help laid off Microsoft workers 40+ to explore options and seek mutual support.
If you allow voluntary layoffs, best developers will leave and kims will be left behind.
I get that "kims" refers to 3rd rate performers... But where/how did this term originate? Is it MS specific?
I agree. I went through Boeing's layoffs in 1995 where they allowed voluntary layoffs... And basically most of the senior talent took the option, much to the dismay of upper management. In 1999, there was another round of layoffs at Boeing, and again they allowed voluntary layoffs... the hitch though is you didn't get much of the severance package that a involuntary layoff garnered (just the standard unemployment).
I was tired of Boeing's BS and I asked my manager about taking a voluntary layoff... He told me that I shouldn't do it, but if I wanted to leave, he would put me on the involuntary list (he needed to lose 3 from our group). Best career wise move since I changed from manufacturing careers to IT, all paid for by the severance package.
Few comments about BING.
Most of the people who uses search engine are expert computer user and do not need any fancy UI. But the Bing UI is too complicated and gaudy. I am browsing from my netbook (1024X600 screen resoloution) and some of the links in left side are hidden. I understand this is inane but why should we have this type issue when we have more than thousands of people in search.
Some blog already claim that the preview in the search result page may result some liabilities. People can see the information on restricted pages(including porn) without clicking the link. This may result into restriction of Bing in certain countries.
Final comment about Bing it seems that the tray is flashier than the food. Bing need to improve its relevance. Not these fancy pictures and animations.
Review time is almost around the corner... Can you not sign it and request an reassessmentI've done that once. I had a senior leveled tech person who was a new manager and his comments weren't based on facts.
I escalated to my skip level manager (who'd been my direct line manager the month before and had written glowing comments in the *same* review)
Needless to say, after having a fact based conversation with both of them, it was clear that the wording should be changed, and was done so promptly.
In my case, I had the facts that backed up my case, but as much as it sucks, not every negative comment is wrong. If you have a legitimate gripe about the comments on your review, you should stand up for yourself and do so armed with the facts.
>>I get that "kims" refers to 3rd rate performers... But where/how did this term originate? Is it MS specific?<<
Kims are not 3rd-rate performers. They are steady, consistent good performers who don't aspire to huge upward momentum year after year or have plateaued interms of how far they will get promoted in thje company. They are valuable worker bees but not "rockstars."
Unfortunately, given the MSFT need for up up up, these folks often get pushed out out out.
The term Kim comes from a Mini-post awhile (a year? more?) back. if I remember correctly - and no doubt someone here will correct me if I do not - "Kim" was the hypothetical name given to this persona. It stuck and being a Kim or getting kimmed became the nomenclature for referring to this category of employee or the action around eliminating them.
Back to "cool", Flight Sim (and the rumored Train Sim successor) was cool. They're products that would have been nice to keep around because, to certain consumer markets, these products actually ARE cool. How silly of me. And here I was thinking we should have kept Flight Sim because it was profitable, unlike a great many E&D products. I can't imagine what I must have been thinking.
Re: the 360 review. This is a common practice. As stated in here some managers use it, some managers don't.
Sometimes it can be used to go on a fishing expedition to find a reason to not give you a promotion, big raise, or stock grant. But it can also backfire.
I had a manager where after 3 months I realized I couldn't work for her. She ran the team like a high school clique and had an established culture of mediocracy that wasn't apparent in the interview process.
Her team wasn't representative of the Microsoft I wanted to be a part of, so, I decided to get an exception and transfer out of the group after just 3 months to another part of the division. Rumor has it that she'd made the case to promote me, was embarassed by my departure, and wasn't keen on rewarding me for it at the end of the fiscal year (despite a strong track record).
As I left just before the end of the fiscal, she owned my review for the year. Come review time, she asked that I provide a series of 10 names for a 360 review.
All of the reviews were absolutely glowing, so it backfired on her. She literally said to me in the review - 'Did you pay these people to write a good review for you?' (and in a pissed off, non joking way). With that and a glowing review for H1 from my old team, she was obligated to give me a good review (still screwed me on stock, but a small price to pay for my freedom)
"Then there are the golden handcuffs. A superstar (someone who has risen up through a few levels) is now sitting on some pretty sizable deferred compensation. A few months severance isn't likely to cover what they'll be leaving behind in deferred compensation. Otherwise they'd just negotiate a signing bonus equal to (or greater than) their likely severance and leave whenever it suits them. (i.e. they'll leave when it suits them, layoff or not)."
I agree with deferred compensation part - since some of the superstars might have a ton of stocks/option that would vest soon. But if he/she is a superstar and brainy, i'd say he'd still be better off with severance from voluntary layoff. As you say that he can get a signoff bonus equal to severance, why not take the severance and that signoff bonus too?
tried bing.com. Seems to have improved a bit in terms of web searches. But the shopping search (which is supposedly a big revenue puller) is laughably hilarious. For e.g. do a search on a popular camera - say 'sd 1100'. Then click 'Shopping' link on top - bing shows plastic cases for sd 1100 camera. Is it hard to think that the person might be interested in the actual camera rather than accessories for the camera.
Same thing on google just works flawlessly.
Another semi-failure/semi-success from search team. Not complete failure, since the relevance seems to have improved for common search keywords. But still - does the search slt understand that producing results 90% as good as google would still not be enough to gain marketshare? I mean why should i use bing when google is guaranteed to give me better/accurate results?
Wait.. this was the May layoffs?
I thought severence didnt kick in until <=30 days of July 4.
The severance was paid out on may 29 for may layoffs (at least i got it on that day).
"I agree with the commenter about UC and ResponsePoint. The OCS group has been painfully slow in getting anything done besides pretty powerpoints. ResponsePoint moved quickly and garnered good reviews.
"
I am an outsider. I reviewed both Response Point and OCS. MS is insane to shut down Response Point and put more shit on OCS. I don't care about your internal political struggle between RP vs OCS, but check how MS partners reacted with your short-sighted decision. http://sipthat.com/2009/05/28/response-point-deserves-better/
Where is BillG now?
Tried bing. Much better than what live.com was. It now even searches kb articles within msdn (cool - seems like someone in search was paying attention to comments here at mini msft).
But I thinnk it is still David vs Goliath in this marketshare battle. Reminds me of money vs quickbooks battle, where even though money matched quickbooks featurewise and was quite good, it still could not dislodge the incumbent. So bing, even though improved, not sure how it will win marketshare from google. Maybe they should start offering cashback from bing too - to gain marketshare.
Someone asked if you can refuse to sign your review.
I was told by my manager that if I didn't sign mine, I would no longer be paid.
So I guess that does offer you two options...
"Why does everyone assume that the best and brightest (a.k.a. superstars) would leave Microsoft in a New York minute if they were offered a voluntary layoff? That would assume that all those superstars are just chomping at the bit and waiting for an excuse to leave.
That just doesn't grok."
Correct from my POV.
I've been identified by Microsoft as a superstar (keep your yaps shut, I'm not claiming any objective reality here :P) and I'm working on cool shit that I love. If Microsoft offered me a severance with a voluntary layoff I wouldn't even think twice -- I'm exactly where I want to be, and when/if the time comes when I want to be somewhere else I'll leave and go there... a check for 50 or even 100k isn't going to make me leave a job I love.
Superstars tend to graviate toward challenges we find rewarding, and there are plenty of those at Microsoft even in the current climate. If I ever feel like I'm pissing in the wind I'll pack up and go to greener pastures, but until then I'm happy where I am.
But the Bing UI is too complicated and gaudy. I am browsing from my netbook (1024X600 screen resoloution) and some of the links in left side are hidden. .
.
Live search has been like this for a while. The worst is the image search. The magnification on mouseover behavior is annoying, adds no value, and bogs down on netbooks. This kind of stuff gives end users like me the impression that they're working on style rather than substance and turns me off to the service. Surely there are ways to differentiate the service from Google without resorting to big background images and cheap Javascript tricks.
"Most of the people who uses search engine are expert computer user and do not need any fancy UI."
Errr...what?
It is time to modify the stack rank.
Collision Domain
Re: "Voluntary layoffs"
When we went through this at Compaq the package was not attractive enough to entice top performers to leave as mentioned above. We did lose some, but for the most part it was effective at providing a carrot to moderate performers or somewhat recent hires.
Any thoughts on what would a non-compete would look like in the package?
Is this even a valid concern at this point? Very few people are going to hit their number this year so effective July 1 most will be let go for performance. Thus, no severance or buy-out needed.
http://www.bingisnotgoogle.com/
it did not take not that much time by this domain. Even before the release.
Have anybody look at Google Wave?
I wonder how OUTLOOK will response againt this?
Refer this:
http://wave.google.com/
project natal...
Ok, so it's cool tech. Now, can anyone explain how we're going to benefit as a company from creating a high-techy, very complex and highly expensive (200 USD? Come on, that's nearly the price of a console?!) device to compete with the little company with the n that ship a console with a cheap motion controller for the same price that we'll charge for the add-on?
Here's a clue, E&D: if a console has a 100% attach rate for a new controller type and all games use it, it's going to be a fun experience. If a console is selling a very expensive add-on years after launch, most titles won't have support for said controller and it'll be a frustrating experience for game developers, customers and all the people at MSFT who actually pay for E&D shenanigans.
Superstars tend to graviate toward challenges we find rewarding
I see, so "superstars" graviate toward the gravy train that is the partner program.
I was shocked at first by "Bing" but it turns out I was wrong. The buzz is strong and Microsoft might have a winner on its hands.
As for crys of how many jobs did it cost? ... What is Microsoft in business for? To make money or provide jobs? This layoff appears to be Microsoft mostly reshaping and updating its workforce. I know that sounds uncaring but companies are in business to make money.
Cost cutting seems to be new mantra at microsoft. In Jan, some analyst had estimated microsoft would save 10-11 cents a year by firing 5000 employees. From comments here, another 5000 might be shown the door after windows and office releases in few months (although this one is purely based on rumors here at mini's blog).
20-22 cents a share boost to eps and release of new windows and office - hmmm seems like good time to buy microsoft stock. Bad for employees and morale, but good for shareholders - from what i see.
bing, bing...
Hello?
"So bing, even though improved, not sure how it will win marketshare from google. "
Marketshare on search?? It's the wrong fight, people! Google's already so ahead of the game (that it continues to define).
See Googlenomics
Someone asked if you can refuse to sign your review.
I was told by my manager that if I didn't sign mine, I would no longer be paid.
So I guess that does offer you two options...
Your manager lied to you.
It is time to modify the stack rank.
Collision Domain
They already did.
Notice the difference?
Microsoft management blames the economy and the people they laid off for any problems they have.
People gone. Problem solved.
Notice the difference?
>> James Whittaker is leaving...
>So what?
So what? Are you, by chance, the voice of our august Test Leadership Team? (Only joking, you're probably just some random clueless moron - I don't have the smarts to differentiate.)
I think that James has very different ideas about testing than those that hold sway currently, such as:
- It was a *really bad* idea to get rid of STEs
- Any amount of wishful thinking, PPTs on offshoring and automation just won't replace a capability that is actually (gosh) a distinct skill. Fancy that!
Having some appreciation for James's take on what we've done with/to Test, I imagine that there may have been some irretrievable "differences of opinion". Just a guess.
So to the "so what" responder, we've lost one of the most respected voices in the world of software testing. To our arch competitor. Whose efforts we seem to spend most of our time/money emulating. With little success.
Perhaps this competitor "gets" testing. This should have been a prerequisite for TLT membership, rather than the apparent overriding desire to save (in theory) money at the expense of quality. In a decade or so with the company, in a number of roles, I've never seen Test more demoralized, and testing in worse shape. But that's just me - draw your own conclusions.
Here's a clue. Gobs and gobs of test data without analysis and effective feedback is a waste of everyone's time, although it does look impressive.
So Bing is announced to a flurry of press and media, when it still isn't ready...for days...and then when it "launches", it's pretty much Live Search revisted. And yet I was labeled a "Kim" , even with more than ten years of experience in my field (more than my manager),and great marketing results. What am I missing here?
"MS is insane to shut down Response Point and put more shit on OCS. "
Tell me why Microsoft is not insane? Why do you think they would care about small business users? They will follow where the money is, aka enterprise customers. Although OCS is many light years behind Cisco's UC, I admire that UCG team is still day dreaming that they can catch up. UCG's leader is only good at talking rubbish. They never deliver anything real.
I was laid off in the 2nd round on May 5th. So wondering if I get a job offer with another company before July 4th, do I get to keep my severance package? Anyone know?
"I had a manager where after 3 months I realized I couldn't work for her. She ran the team like a high school clique and had an established culture of mediocracy that wasn't apparent in the interview process.
Her team wasn't representative of the Microsoft I wanted to be a part of, so, I decided to get an exception and transfer out of the group after just 3 months to another part of the division"
How did you get an exception? I'm in a very similar situation - I really really want to get out. I'm just not sure if I should attempt anything before the reviews.
A photocopy of one of the letters where Microsoft was initially asking some employees they laid off to pay them back.
Severance Letter - part 1
Severance Letter - part 2
From a Seattle Times article about GM:
On Jan. 21, 1988, a General Motors executive named Elmer Johnson wrote a brave and prophetic memo. Its main point was contained in this sentence: "We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute."
Doesn't sound familiar at all, does it?
But hey, check it out, Microsoft is still showing itself to be a company of overachievers. What took GM many decades to accomplish, Microsoft apparently did in just two.
Severance pay out is determined by when they received your signed severance agreement.
>Yeah, sounds like you've really >moved on. LOL.
Well, I'm now making about 3 times what I was making at Microsoft. So yeah, I've moved on.
That doesn't mean I've forgotten all the morons and stupid leadership I came in contact with - especially one of my managers, one of my GMs and one of my VPs. Microsoft does have a management problem.
But that said, I have not forgotten either that I worked with some really really good, ethical and honest people. Sadly, those are a minority now at Microsoft.
The question you should ask yourself is:
Am I part of the cure?
Or am I part of the disease?
Ballmer, go bing yourself.
'a check for 50 or even 100k isn't going to make me leave a job I love.'
You might be a self-proclaimed superstar in ur team, but you sound like a super sucker when it comes to finance. Tell me how high can your bonus possibly be - at job you love at MS? and can you hit that high bonus consistently year after year?
'Superstars tend to graviate toward challenges we find rewarding, and there are plenty of those at Microsoft even in the current climate.'
Agreed - in fact in current climate there are plentiful challenges for even "ordinary" folks in a team. For e.g. how to load-balance work when a good chunk of your immediate team is fired. How to cope up with the policially charged and vicious environment, which has been further embittered by this layoffs. I wholeheartedly agree - if folks can cope with these challenges, they're probably set to face any other challenges in their future stints.
Honestly - you sound like a manager - who is trying to shove cheerleading propaganda down the throat of folks. This might work on a new hire, but not for folks who've been here and seen it happening in past. Thanks, but no thanks for your dishonest advice.
Heard there's a new googlegroup created for the people whoever got impacted and would like to network with each other to carry on with the lives...
ms5000- a group of impacted
Join the group here
Could someone re-post any resources/newsgroups/facebook groups/etc. to help those who have been laid off in their job search? I'm in the Puget Sound region, but any and all assistance or advice is appreciated. Thanks!
"'a check for 50 or even 100k isn't going to make me leave a job I love."
You might be a self-proclaimed superstar in ur team, but you sound like a super sucker when it comes to finance. Tell me how high can your bonus possibly be - at job you love at MS? and can you hit that high bonus consistently year after year?
Listen, please: I'm not doing this job for maximum dollars, I'm doing it because it makes me happy.
I make plenty of money to be happy, I don't need more. I really enjoy my job, I really like the people I work with, more money isn't the issue.
Should I some day decide that it's really all about the money, or should I decide that my job no longer is satisfying, then I'll leave. My point is that as a "Microsoft identified superstar" I am not susceptible to a few bucks waved under my nose for a voluntary layoff -- I can get a job elsewhere any time I want. I'm here because it's where I choose to be.
Sounds to me like this is a lesson you could stand to learn.
Superstars tend to graviate toward challenges we find rewarding, and there are plenty of those at Microsoft even in the current climate. If I ever feel like I'm pissing in the wind I'll pack up and go to greener pastures, but until then I'm happy where I am.
There was a time when I was on the 'fast track', told I was central to my orgs success, and so on. My raises were excellent, and bonuses were plentiful.
However, that didn't last forever. Eventually, a reorg will take nearly anyone, and after enough of them you'll end up under someone who just doesn't like your face.
Out of the blue, you receive a review in the cellar. How you went from a stellar review to a relatively poor one in a year is explained only by "you dropped the ball", or vague wording like "you did not meet expectations" without ever actually explaining which expectations.
At this point, you can LEAVE Microsoft or STAY at Microsoft.
If you LEAVE Microsoft, be prepared to drag your kids out of school in the school-year, get the house on the market for sale, and get ready to move (unless you're a web developer, I suppose). This might be the best thing for you, but if you have a family, you have to gauge how much pain you'll take in exchange for how much comfort you can provide them.
If you STAY, you can either stick it out in that org, convinced that you'll somehow "turn it around", or find a new position. If you stay, the well has probably been fouled, and despite any effort you make, you're now off the "high performer" gravy train, and the plum assignments go to others. (In time, you might find yourself reporting to a one-time peer, or even after several reorgs reporting to someone who was your subordinate several years before.)
If you STAY but leave the org, you end up joining another. Surprise! You're not exactly welcomed with open arms by everyone. In the new org, many are irritated that you haven't been there for eight years like most of them (in other words, you're perceived as competition, and unwelcome competition at that), and discover that GM/VP-level management is actually only trusting of people they've known for eight years. You're expected to prove yourself. Depending on the people, that's six months to a full release cycle (say 3 years on average). Since you're not part of the trusted 'clique', you never get a high-profile opportunity and never quite have the ability to prove yourself. Some can never be convinced, as you're an "outsider", and you find zero upward mobility and after two years you move again. Repeat this paragraph. Possibly several times.
My point of this (I admit, diatribe) is that no one ever seems to believe that some of the ugly things they read about could ever happen to them. Most people are even told that they should be wary but dismiss that as applicable only to someone else.
As friendly advice: Don't allow praise, rewards, and kudos to lull you into believing that you're truly a superstar. Let them say it, but be cognizant that everything could change on a whim of someone n levels above you.
It is getting really ugly: Jun 03, 2009 (SmarTrend(R) News Watch via COMTEX) ----According to comments made by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, once thought of as a Democrat friendly company, will move jobs overseas if Obama proceeds with certain tax proposals. Ballmer said, "while the Obama proposals would preserve expense deductions related to research and experimentation costs, the overall deduction limits for companies that defer tax on foreign profits would raise the cost of employing U.S. workers. Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders would require Microsoft to cut costs, he said, meaning many jobs would be moved out of the country." In short, the CEO of one of America's largest tech companies just threatened the current administration with outsourcing employment.
>>Ok, so it's cool tech. Now, can anyone explain how we're going to benefit as a company from creating a high-techy, very complex and highly expensive (200 USD?<<
Where did you get pricing info from?
I am impressed with the audacity of the Bing commercial to try to blame Google for the collapse of the economy and position Bing as the upstart alternative. (Upstart... from Microsoft... right.)
I have spent more time than I should on Bing to try to see what the fuss is about. From what I can tell it does nothing to help me with "decisions." Typing "digital camera" into the box yields a page that looks the same as Live Search's, or Google's. The secret sauce is supposed to be the links at the left? Going through them 1 by 1, they all seem fairly worthless. Shopping yields a page of random cameras, basically the same as what you get on Google's Shopping feature. "Brands" seems to just re-search with the term "brands" added. Etc. Similar results when searching for flights and for medical information.
It seems Microsoft considers search a problem of marketing and not product, i.e., instead of making improvements that are obvious to customers and have obvious value, the site is renamed and re-termed.
Shame, really. A "decision engine" sounds like it might be pretty cool. Maybe some artificial intelligence to scour the Internet and help you try to decide stuff. Hey Bing, "what digital camera should I buy?" Instead of giving me a bunch of links to sites with those words, how about you try to read and summarize all of them for me?
a check for 50 or even 100k isn't going to make me leave a job I love
I'd take the 100k and try to find the next gig i love. Gigs to love can be found, but sitting duck 100k dont come everyday :).
Does anyone know what happens to paternity leave if you are terminated for poor performance? If you had been delaying your paternity leave does that mean you lose it altogether when fired?
Maybe a person should who expects to be fired should take their paternity leave immediately, instead of risking that they could lose it later down the road.
"My point of this (I admit, diatribe) is that no one ever seems to believe that some of the ugly things they read about could ever happen to them. Most people are even told that they should be wary but dismiss that as applicable only to someone else.
As friendly advice: Don't allow praise, rewards, and kudos to lull you into believing that you're truly a superstar. Let them say it, but be cognizant that everything could change on a whim of someone n levels above you."
Again, I'm the "I'm happy here right now" OP.
I'm not sure why everyone is having such a tough time with someone saying "I'm happy where I am now and it's not about the money, and should I ever change my mind I'll go somewhere else."
It shouldn't be a controversial topic, right? I have no illusions about Microsoft looking out for my best interests, I'm only saying that right now, at this moment, Microsoft has been generous to me and has identified me as a "superstar", I'm very happy where I am and I would not take a cash reward for a voluntary layoff.
Microsoft is a job -- at the moment it's a job I truly enjoy and I'm working with a bunch of people I truly enjoy, which is rare no matter where you go and therefore not something I'm inclined to leave at the moment. I'm fully aware that this could change at any time for any number of reasons (including all of the reasons everyone has been calling-out on this blog for years), and should that sad day come I'll ditch Microsoft like a bad date; but until something out of my control happens that makes me no longer love my job then I'm going to enjoy my good fortune and not risk my happiness for a few thousand bucks.
Makes sense, yes?
Anonymous said:
There was a time when I was on the 'fast track' [...]
However, that didn't last forever. Eventually, a reorg will take nearly anyone, and after enough of them you'll end up under someone who just doesn't like your face.
Out of the blue, you receive a review in the cellar.
I'm with you, bro, but I think the topic's been covered enough in mini that we're beating a dead horse now. Those that haven't gotten it by now will never get it. At least not until it happens to them, their significant other, or maybe their son.
Content yourself with knowing that you at least tried to warn them. That's what I've done.
And yet I was labeled a "Kim" , even with more than ten years of experience in my field (more than my manager),and great marketing results. What am I missing here?
It could be a lot of reasons - politics, personality, personal preference, connections, etc..
I talked to a plastic surgeon that said he had a lot of Microsoft executives as patients. I guess what you look like matters in some jobs in the Kingdom of Meritocracy. Are you youthful and vibrant? Or, kinda lumpy and frumpy? Maybe even grumpy?
Somebody has to go in the average bucket.
What's the reason they use on your review? Chances are it is useless for figuring out the real reason.
Even better, if you don't realize what is going on, when you earnestly ask what you can do better in the "problem" areas they identified, they have trouble keeping a straight face and don't really have much to say.
It sounds like time to try an internal transfer if it is not too late.
Does anyone know what happens to paternity leave if you are terminated for poor performance? If you had been delaying your paternity leave does that mean you lose it altogether when fired?
Paternity leave is not vacation. You will not be reimbursed if laid off. If laid off, the paternity leave counts as part of the two months Microsoft is using to get around the WARN act. I.e., if you're 2 weeks into Paternity leave and are laid off, your two months starts right then. They overlap, you don't get the luxury of them in sequence. :(
If fired, well, fired is fired. If you have a nice manager, they'll wait until paternity leave is over then give you the bad news. If you don't, you'll get a phone call and find your job eliminated in the middle of paternity leave.
Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders would require Microsoft to cut costs, he said, meaning many jobs would be moved out of the country." In short, the CEO of one of America's largest tech companies just threatened the current administration with outsourcing employment.
Microsoft used to be an American company.
It is now a multinational company.
Attributing any kind of loyalty to the United States by the company is misplaced. SteveB said "shareholders" not "U.S. citizens".
Microsoft India Development Center
Microsoft China R&D Campus
$300 million for Russia
Microsoft Israel R&D Center
Microsoft Research Cambridge
etc.
Funny thing happened. I generally google msft ticker to see it on google finance. But today on google search, on the right side, there was a paid link from 'bing.com' with tagline of 'visit Bing to make decisions quick and easy'
I clicked the bing.com link and the first link there is msn money. The google finance linke for msft was 6th in the list.
Thanks bing. You made my decision really quick and easy - I will continue to stick to google as search engine. (As a bonus, I made microsoft pay some money to google for clicking that bing.com link :) )
BTW - Why did they come up with name 'bing'? It sounds too much like 'ding'. Cant believe that is the best that some marketing manager came up with.
Does anyone know what happens to paternity leave if you are terminated for poor performance? If you had been delaying your paternity leave does that mean you lose it altogether when fired?
Take the paternity leave ASAP - espeically if you are in windows or office teams - 3-4 months down the road might be too late for you. (Why have you been postponing it anyway - dont you need time to bond with the young one?)
i would give up my job if all my stock awards are cashed today, even at the pathetic price of today.
the stock award i was given is based on my past work. anybody says otherwise is wrong. it is my earning and a firm should not be allowed to use my own earning to lock me in.
stock option and stock award can be used as incentive alignment tools. but when one leaves the job there is no reason to align incentives anymore. hence option should be immediately excercised. and stock do not even make sense, but they should still be given immediately except those which are given at the time of employment and promotions, and can be rolled on perpetually.
It is time to modify the stack rank.
Collision Domain
No need for anything so ambitious.
Microsoft management has discovered that getting rid of people who complain makes their OHI go up.
"If Response Point is mediocre, OCS is worse. The bloated UCG team is a strong candidate in the 3rd round of layoff."
Yes, our OCS team is bloated. We are slower. We are a year away to match you on the PBX voice feature... So What? You guys need to know who is the boss. BG decides the future, not MSR. You guys only know how to spend our money. We know how to make money.
"I am an outsider. I reviewed both Response Point and OCS. MS is insane to shut down Response Point and put more shit on OCS. I don't care about your internal political struggle between RP vs OCS, but check how MS partners reacted with your short-sighted decision. http://sipthat.com/2009/05/28/response-point-deserves-better/
"
I know Response Point is a great product. However, the team didn't bring in enough money in the first year, which made it harder to argue with Gurdeep Sin Pall. It is arguable if the team should have had more time to scale the business. If BillG had been here, Gurdeep Sin Pall would have been silent :-) Too bad for a great innovative product that ended this way. I don't work on Response Point but I am very disappointed with SanjayP/Craig Mundie who didn't do a good job to defend the young startup.
@11:49:00 AM [the guy who thinks he's entitled to all of his unvested stock immediately if he leaves his job]:
The scale on which you're failing to grasp the basic concept here is grand indeed.
A) Stock incentives are not compensation for your past work. They are an enticement to stick around and do future work. That's the whole point of them. Yes, the size of your grant is based upon your past performance, but that's because rational people assume that your past performance offers an indication of your future performance. People who have done well in the past are given a greater incentive to stick around, because they'd be missed more if they left. Handing that whole incentive out in one lump sum right up front would not accomplish the desired goal, to put it very mildly.
B) In your dream world, I have a choice between staying with the company for the next four years while my stock slowly vests, or quitting tomorrow and claiming all of it immediately. Can you see how this might create a wee bit of an incentive problem? Do you think any employer on Earth would be stupid enough to offer such a plan?
C) Even if company stock plans were required to adhere to the rules you're proposing, then companies would simply stop offering stock plans. Period. Or did you honestly think they'd just continue handing everyone a giant gob of stock every year, free and clear, on top of their regular salary and their bonus, without gaining anything in return for it? What would be their incentive to do this, exactly?
D) Stating repeatedly that something should be true does not make it true -- especially when the "something" in question is patently dumb and would require people to do things in perpetuity that work directly against their own interests. It's hard to offer many useful suggestions about how the world should work when you have no understanding whatsoever of how (and why) it does work.
"the stock award i was given is based on my past work. anybody says otherwise is wrong. it is my earning and a firm should not be allowed to use my own earning to lock me in."
Say what?
If Microsoft says the award you're given is based on your future potential, and you say "no, it's based on past work", who exactly do you think 1) knows what the hell they're talking about, and 2) will win that argument?
Hint: it's not you.
Microsoft can structure its rewards program however it chooses to do so, and indeed vesting stock plans have been highly successful over the years in retaining top talent at tech companies. Microsoft has chosen a mix of rewards based on past work (bonus, merit increases and promotions) and based on future potential (stock awards that vest over several years).
The point of giving awards that vest over time to those with strong future potential is to keep them from leaving -- Microsoft is saying "hey, we think you're going to be important to the company's future, so we want to throw a bunch of deferred compensation at you that will add significantly to your overall package in the coming years."
This is why these programs are called golden handcuffs.
It should be obvious that if your yearly stock awards are very small, then Microsoft is saying "you know what? you're maybe good enough to keep around but not so important that we really care if you leave." You should consider your salary and a mid-range bonus as your compensation for the work you've done, and any stock awards as an extra incentive.
I'm not sure where you got the notion that Microsoft doesn't have the right to provide these kinds of bonuses, but you're wrong not only legally but from a pure common sense standpoint. :P
If you STAY but leave the org, you end up joining another. Surprise! You're not exactly welcomed with open arms by everyone. In the new org, many are irritated that you haven't been there for eight years like most of them (in other words, you're perceived as competition, and unwelcome competition at that), and discover that GM/VP-level management is actually only trusting of people they've known for eight years. You're expected to prove yourself. Depending on the people, that's six months to a full release cycle (say 3 years on average). Since you're not part of the trusted 'clique', you never get a high-profile opportunity and never quite have the ability to prove yourself. Some can never be convinced, as you're an "outsider", and you find zero upward mobility and after two years you move again. Repeat this paragraph. Possibly several times.
this sounds like OMPS
It is getting really ugly: Jun 03, 2009 (SmarTrend(R) News Watch via COMTEX) ----According to comments made by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, once thought of as a Democrat friendly company, will move jobs overseas if Obama proceeds with certain tax proposals.
This is one more knee-jerk reaction from someone who is not equipped to be CEO. We have some really cool technologies coming to fruition, but this kind of reaction is distracting and will gain more enemies in the end.
Dear Board of Directors: keep this man from bringing down this company any more than he already has. KTHXBAI
I'm not sure why everyone is having such a tough time with someone saying "I'm happy where I am now and it's not about the money, and should I ever change my mind I'll go somewhere else."
Perhaps your "communication problem" has not reached your review yet.
You sounded like a naive kid drunk on company Koolaid flying high on the "superstar" label. The same reaction an elementary school kid has when their teacher sticks a gold star to their homework.
You see more extreme examples of the condition in celebutard Hollywood youth.
A few more years of experience and you might see it yourself.
I hear that a major re-organization is planned in the Windows division during July (in both engineering and marketing). There isn't anything sinister in this, per-se, since re-orgs are always done at the tail end of every ship cycle.
Nevertheless, if managers wanted to trim some of the headcount in Windows, this would be the ideal time to do it.
Does anyone know what, if any, job search resources Microsoft makes available to staff that are still employed? I know that those who have been laid off were referred to agencies that offer some sort of job search services. Is it possible for those still working as FTEs to utilize any of these services in a search for new employment?
Just because someone was "lucky" enough to avoid the lay-offs doesn't mean they want to keep working at MSFT.
Again, I'm the "I'm happy here right now" OP.
I'm not sure why everyone is having such a tough time with someone saying "I'm happy where I am now and it's not about the money, and should I ever change my mind I'll go somewhere else."
People have commented mostly I guess, because although you might recognize the true risks, an unexpected number of people have said very similar things and don't understand the risks. They are horribly shocked later.
I'm glad you understand the situation clearly, so I won't try telling you things you already know.
There's nothing personal here: It's like seeing someone saying they plan to do something that seems risky but not being sure they know the risks. Out of courtesy, telling these people "By the way, you are aware that this is risky, right?"
" Ok, so it's cool tech. Now, can anyone explain how we're going to benefit as a company from creating a high-techy, very complex and highly expensive (200 USD? Come on, that's nearly the price of a console?!) "
Where are you getting you price from, I haven't heard anything about that. However it has been indicated that the device is mostly software, it sounds like the hardware involve could be pretty cheap.
Perhaps your "communication problem" has not reached your review yet.
Thank you for my Friday evening belly laugh.
In a few words, you've given fair warning that at any time, someone who doesn't like you, or who has a limited resource pool and simply likes others on the team more, can pull "superstar" status from you, using any one of a number of subjective excuses. And for good measure, you've implied that it's less a matter of it possibly happening in the future, than it is one of it being all but inevitable and just a matter of time. Good job.
To those who haven't yet had the pleasure that allows the reader to see the humor in the OP's statement. Communication skills is a perennial managerial favorite when they need to find something wrong with a person to justify ranking them lower than others because it's subjective and difficult to argue.
Fortunately, most at Microsoft understand the code. We see statements like that and think, okay, the manager didn't have anything else on the guy but he ended up lower in the stack rank than some others. Keyword "most", and that's the risk.
"the stock award i was given is based on my past work. anybody says otherwise is wrong. it is my earning and a firm should not be allowed to use my own earning to lock me in."
How much is the stock award anyway? At level 60, i have been getting about 200-300 stock for past 2 years. So each year 40-60 stocks of a review period will vest. Of about $800-$1000 worth of stocks would vest. If i stick around for 5 years, it will reach $4k to $5k. Is it worth waiting, if you have a good opportunity?
Why all this fuss about stock awards, when they seem to be puny. How can they stop the talent from moving on? Am I missing anything?
I am very disappointed with SanjayP/Craig Mundie who didn't do a good job to defend the young startup.
Please name one product that either SanjayP or CraigMu shipped that ever became a mainstream profitable product. Neither Sanjay nor Craig got any clue to make a successful business. What can you expect from these two? They are not even remotely close to BillG's insight in terms of their deciding which startup to fund and which startup to shut down.
Project NATAL looks really, really cool. If they can deliver, and the SDK is sufficient for 3rd party developers to build stuff as good as the mock-up demo videos, I bet it would SELL. Some 'ifs' involved though. To the naysayers, NATAL combined with XBOX LIVE could be the version 3, no new console needed.
"I'm not sure why everyone is having such a tough time with someone saying "I'm happy where I am now and it's not about the money, and should I ever change my mind I'll go somewhere else."
Perhaps your "communication problem" has not reached your review yet.
You sounded like a naive kid drunk on company Koolaid flying high on the "superstar" label. The same reaction an elementary school kid has when their teacher sticks a gold star to their homework.
You see more extreme examples of the condition in celebutard Hollywood youth.
A few more years of experience and you might see it yourself.
You guys just can't handle someone who works at Microsoft for the job satisfaction, can you?
I'm an L64 IC and I've been at the company since 1996. I have no interest in ever reaching 65, yet I work on excellent projects and with a few notable exceptions get excellent reviews, and have consistently through the 13 years, 3 divisions and 15 managers I've had.
I have almost left the company 3 times, due to 3 of those 15 managers attempting to tank me for their own fucked-up agendas and because they were vile wastes of skin. Each time I was about to leave the company, I was either convinced to stay by someone willing to move me under a different manager (twice) or presented with an opportunity to go to a new job in a new group that I couldn't pass-up (once).
I have no illusions about Microsoft and have lived through 3 abhorrent managers who are evil scumbags, and I'm fully aware that I could end-up roadkill -- just as I could at any other company. As long as Microsoft treats me well and as long as I truly enjoy the work I do and the people I do it with, I don't need to look a gift horse in the mouth and go elsewhere.
Perhaps when you're my age (41) you'll realize that the good times rarely ever last, and that whenever you find yourself happy -- even if it's at the devil Microsoft -- you make sure to smell the roses and appreciate what you have while it's there.
When it goes away and you can't get it back, you leave. Dead simple.
Here's a text mashup of sorts.
In an earlier post to Mini, I mentioned that when I heard "bing", I thought of Southwest Airlines.
Recently, various netters have discovered that Bing will preview porn just as well as it will preview any other media, circumventing web filters that block the original sites on which the media is hosted.
So, someone on CNet connected the two and wrote:
"isn't "Bing" the sound that Southwest airlines makes?"
You are now free to porn about the country
Oh, I wish I'd never seen that, because it's going to be a while before I forget about it. So naturally, I just had to share.
Have fun trying to get the slogan out of your head.
BING. Such a silly choice of names for a search engine. Naturally, one would hope that eventually it becomes so well-known that it becomes a verb in its own right; as with "I Googled for ..." or even "I have Googled for ...". What are we going to say with 'bing'? Will we conjugate it like the verb "to sing", and get "I Bang for ..." or even "I have Bung for ...". Why, Oh why can MSFT not get the simplest of things right?
I know Response Point is a great product. However, the team didn't bring in enough money in the first year
XD did a sloppy job. Why is he still employed?
I hear that a major re-organization is planned in the Windows division during July (in both engineering and marketing). There isn't anything sinister in this, per-se, since re-orgs are always done at the tail end of every ship cycle.
WARNING: FUD follows. Take the following with many "grains of salt".
When people say "Windows Division", I'm immediately skeptical. For the non-employees, there are two divisions that own 'Windows'. (COSD & WEX)
Having stated that, I've heard about a fair number of reorgs scattered in the summer. Some definitely result in merged orgs that show overlap and seem like wise opportunities to eliminate the overlap.
I would expect the company to act on that before the end of summer. That would be a smart use of announced-but-unused layoffs, but the SLT hasn't used layoffs wisely so far, so assumptions are probably a mistake.
Anonymous @Saturday, June 06, 2009 3:51:00 AM:
Do you think, maybe, possibly, people will say "Binged"?
It's not like when somebody uses the Ping command they get confused whether they Pang or Pung the server. They Pinged the server.
Not to mention, I've certainly heard people say things like "the microwave dinged" and never "the microwave dang", and as for "the microwave dung" that clearly has a different meaning.
In fact:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dinged
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dinged
Man, I don't like the name Bing, but some of the complaints about it are beyond ridiculous. Nobody thought the verbified past tense of Google would be Guggle or Giggle either.
Does anyone have any idea how long "poor" performance situations can drag out before management decides to fire someone? Isn't termination relatively swift once managers start issuing dire e-mails about how your employment is in jeopardy due to poor performance?
Is it possible that an employee can remain in a limbo state, with a continual series of reprimands, and dire warnings, for 6 months, or even a year? What things can factor into the timing of a performance termination? Could there be broad organizational budget, or review period, issues that can contribute to a decision to delay someone's termination?
I know of several people who have been living with a sword hanging over their head regarding poor performance for well over 6 months, and I don't understand what is behind their manager's decisions to drag this out.
Could it be that the managers genuinely want to give the employee in question more of an opportunity to actually improve?
@ this poster: "At level 60, i have been getting about 200-300 stock for past 2 years. So each year 40-60 stocks of a review period will vest."
Yeah, those are just token awards. If you have superstar status, you get superstar awards that are extremely significant. Even at L60, if you combine a few years of rolling awards, you should be receiving much more value from your yearly award vesting than from a measly bonus, even if you get near 20%.
Ballmer's comments about offshoring jobs if the Obama aministration goes ahead with tax reforms bear the mark of Kevin Turner.
I'm not saying that Ballmer isn't dumb enough to believe he can get away with pissing off the US gov despite the beatings he took at the hands of the EU. Actually that's _exactly_ the kind of stuff I expected from the man. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is after all the definition of stupidity.
But the threat on jobs, that has Wal-Mart boy's foul smell on it.
Wal-Mart is the mother of eveil corporations. We're talking about a company that takes life insurance policies on its employees and then works them to death. And I am not talking about executives but cashiers and shelf stockers.
The hiring of Kevin Turner was a wake up call for me. After his appearance at the 2006 company meeting I knew this was my last. Mere months later I was out.
Anyone hear about the level adjustment that is going to occur in E&D?
You guys just can't handle someone who works at Microsoft for the job satisfaction, can you?
There's a big difference between just saying It's a Wonderful Life versus sharing what you had to navigate to get what you want.
Why all this fuss about stock awards, when they seem to be puny. How can they stop the talent from moving on? Am I missing anything?
What you're missing: that they're not puny for everyone, even at lower levels. But don't expect MS management to admit that and risk alienating the other 90-95% of the company.
You can review the chart of target and maximum award shares per level as of a few years ago online somewhere. The maximum award is 5 or 6 times the target number of shares for the level, if that gives you any perspective.
Please name one product that either SanjayP or CraigMu shipped that ever became a mainstream profitable product.
Speaking of CraigMu's MSR does anyone know if there is any layoff there. There plenty of people are getting paid where MS does not get any business benefit from their works.
Okay, so anyone wanna bet that Ballmer's going to listen to these friggin' financial wiz bozos about buying Yahoo!?
I mean, he's done everything stoopid until this point.
And Bing, Bong was totally worth the millions spent on "user research" to come up with a Google-beater name.
(after all, icing can indeed cover up the crud underneath, for a while atleast.)
Yee hah!! Let's go get em'!! (again!)
(Ummm... Side Note: wasn't Credit Suisse one of the 1st companies stained by the credo of greed that basically got us into the current economic toilet??)
>>BING. Such a silly choice of names for a search engine. Naturally, one would hope that eventually it becomes so well-known that it becomes a verb in its own right; as with "I Googled for ..." or even "I have Googled for ...". What are we going to say with 'bing'? Will we conjugate it like the verb "to sing", and get "I Bang for ..." or even "I have Bung for ...". Why, Oh why can MSFT not get the simplest of things right?<<
Yet, somehow, people don't have a problem with Yahoo, or Photoshop etc.
Whats the past tense for Ping then? Is it Panged? In other words, think before you type.
I'm getting so sick and tired of all these people coming out of the wood work claiming that when they first heard the word "Google" they thought, "OMG what a perfect name for a search engine."
Can any body who is part of the management in MS and accessing the blog....which I am sure is....share with those affected by the layoffs....if they are doing anything to help those who got affected by the divisions..teams folding up due to business realignment...afterall it was not their fault that the managemnt decided to realign/reorganize the organization.....I am not a MS employee but just a HR Professional who has been following what MS has been doing as a company passionately......MS HR needs to look at the basic premise of layoffs....which in their true sense were a short term measure in a time when a company was going through a slow down in business.......apparently it does not appear so as far as MS is concerend.It would be worth the effort if MS HR revisits how many numbers who were affected in January have been genuinely given a chance to be rehired in MS.After all this population is/ was MS resource...well up to speed....at least those whom were eased while their review scores/performance was good.......
LoL. They don't give a rats ass.
When I got my "your job terminates now, your job ends with the company in 60 days" speach with the HR rep and our senior manager... I was honest to god told that I would have until the end of the week to schedule time with my manager to make sure job transitions could occur so that "it would not be hanging over my head that my projects were orphaned or may run into problems.. to make sure that all loose ends are tied up to reduce my stress about my previous work so I could focus on future jobs" ... as I look for work at MS or elsewhere.
I actually laughed. I am kind of chuckling again now.
When I get the shaft from my company for the work I did on projects, the *least* I could ever be worried about is mental baggage about what will happen now that I am gone.
The fact they actually positioned my "transition" meeting as a way to sooth my mental state is fucking priceless.
Priceless :D
MS management is so degraded, what hapens to good people flat out does not matter any more. How you are percieved a level or two up from you current rank is all that matters.
They are not even remotely close to BillG's insight
If Responsepoint is so good, why can't you raise cash and do a v2? Projects like Responsepoint is what is wrong with Microsoft. Atleast you got your severance.
Couple of interesting observations on the state of affairs in Microsoft India.
1. 250+ laid off... Mostly ICs across and only IC's in case of SMSG.
2. Freeze on Promotions but select few get double promotions to become directors.
3. Leadership teams continute to grow in rank and scale.
4. TechReady & MGX seats are cut but we're sending more than 60 directors to US for these.
When top becomes too heavy the building is all set to fall thats the law of gravity. Who will tutor mcirosoft on this?
Since this all anonymouse, do people want to post to this blog with a few facts?
Why not give:
1) Level/title
2) Stock awarded last year
3) Personal speculation of where you think you sit on the Kim/Average/Superstar scale
If a few people post maybe we'll find a spectrum
"I know of several people who have been living with a sword hanging over their head regarding poor performance for well over 6 months, and I don't understand what is behind their manager's decisions to drag this out.
Could it be that the managers genuinely want to give the employee in question more of an opportunity to actually improve?"
In a company the size of Microsoft there are as many reasons for this situation as there are grains of sand on a beach.
Sometimes it's a manager who's gone too far in giving an employee the opportunity to improve -- 6 months without demonstrated improvement means you should be aggressively managing that person out, or at the very least moving them into a different role.
Sometimes it's a manager who's afraid of conflict and doesn't really do anything.
Sometimes it's a manager who has a very strong team and uses the poor performer as an easy out to balance the curve (I've used this one myself to help compensate for our shitty review system).
Sometimes it's an employee who plays the "I have a note from my shrink that I'm depressed and you can't touch me" card. I rarely feel any sympathy for these people, as the majority of them are basically assholes who everyone hates working with.
Ditto the above, sometimes it's someone who goes to HR with a "hostile work environment" claim and gets a few years of untouchable status while they piss the days away fucking around on the internet. NOTE: there is a very big difference between legit hostile work environment claims and the opportunistic ones made by under-performing douchebags.
Sometimes it's just that nobody has been paying attention, or frequent reorgs prevent a ton of traction...
etc. etc.
Some friends told me the other day that a number of posts mentioning SanjayP and SBA were posted, so I just had to see it for myself. Couple things: Response Point, .NET Micro Framework, and MSN Direct were indeed obliterated. As for none of the SBA central teams not being touched, not true. Two, what I'd call, "legacy" people from the SBA central marketing team were laid off. The remaining people are "Sanjay hires", as well as a couple of vendors. Like many of the people on the teams that were laid off, these were in the trenches people that were kick ass performers, well liked, and had deep relationships within the businesses and other BGs that helped bring the businesses to market and to the top of the media's attention and brought in supporters--internally and externally. On May 5, I was told a number of times that Microsoft lost today. True, and I win...I get to move on, no longer have anxiety attacks at the thought of having to deal with what was coming next, no longer have to put up with someone undermining and undervaluing my talents, and no longer have to be under the thumb of SBA. As Bill Murray said in "What About Bob?": I'M FREE.
Yeah, those are just token awards. If you have superstar status, you get superstar awards that are extremely significant.
How many people get "superstar" status? Is the top 20% bucket considered superstar? Do all of them get awards 5-6 times the target at their level?
I'm one of the long time guys who was shown door last month.
Does anyone know how/when can i exercise stock options? I have quite a few at the strike price of $22 (from the days they used to give options rather than awards). Never even bothered to check the broker or sell them. But with share price crossing that level, I'm thinking of selling them. Any suggestions?
"I'm getting so sick and tired of all these people coming out of the wood work claiming that when they first heard the word "Google" they thought, "OMG what a perfect name for a search engine."
AMEN, brother.
Google was a stupid ass word everyone laughed at in the beginning, but it became a household word (and verb).
Other search engines need not be a verb in order to succeed -- we don't need people to say "I binged it" to compete with Google, we need people to use the shit. When they do use the shit, they will come up with a snappy way of referring to it.
For the record, nobody Facebooks it but that service is doing just fine.
>> If Responsepoint is so good, why can't you raise cash and do a v2?
Because of short-sighted risk-averse management. ResponsePoint was cancelled before they had a chance for V2. On the pretext of saving the company's bottom-line ($100million marketing for Bing not counting)
>> Projects like Responsepoint is what is wrong with Microsoft.
Really! Do you homework on the product before you make ignorant judgement calls like that.
>> Atleast you got your severance.
Some great engineers were thrown out as a result. Much loyalty and goodwill (for the company) was destroyed. Both directly (by those thrown out onto the streets) and indirectly (by those watching what's going on)
Other employees watching what happened to this team that took the risk and created an industry-defining product from scratch are now sitting pat holding onto their dear jobs (or rather their health-benefits), and doing just what is asked of them. Let's see how many of these folks will be willing to take risks, go against the status quo corporate grain and do something innovative that may or may not pan out. Instead of just continuing to churn out the same-old-same-old (ie maintenance)
Yep, Microsoft is really going to beat the competition with such a "motivated" workforce in such an environment that "encourages and fosters" creativity, risk-taking and innovation.
Any idea when the next round of chopping is scheduled ?
When I got my "your job terminates now, your job ends with the company in 60 days" speach with the HR rep and our senior manager... I was honest to god told that I would have until the end of the week to schedule time with my manager to make sure job transitions could occur so that "it would not be hanging over my head that my projects were orphaned or may run into problems.. to make sure that all loose ends are tied up to reduce my stress about my previous work so I could focus on future jobs"
That's awkward on a par with Lisab's comments about people thanking the company for being laid off.
My manager was not much in evidence after I received the news. Possibly uncomfortable about facing me because he knew I'd been railroaded by a prior manager. I'd expected a list of things he'd wanted me to complete, or, something... but, nada. And I returned the favor by not stressing over it.
I transitioned one project about which I had specialized knowledge. The others were piecework that could be added to a peer's queue as easily as they could be added to mine, with no specialized knowledge or turnover talk needed. I let them be and focused on finding my employment records, reading and following the "when you leave Microsoft" checklist, sending my official farewell email, making sure I had the latest copy of my resume, and packing up my office.
I heard of some strange ways the staff was let go in India - The GMs demanded that the employees sign a resignation letter and only then they will hand over the comp package. Is this ethical? Is this legal?
I was honest to god told that I would have until the end of the week to schedule time with my manager to make sure job transitions could occur so that "it would not be hanging over my head that my projects were orphaned or may run into problems.. to make sure that all loose ends are tied up to reduce my stress about my previous work so I could focus on future jobs" ... as I look for work at MS or elsewhere. I actually laughed. I am kind of chuckling again now.
Sounds like you are the kind of person that Microsoft needs to lose. When I got laid off, I put everything I was working on into as good a state as I could and handed it off. Not because I love Microsoft (the people who are crying about how they loved Microsoft creep me out) but because I'm a professional and that's what professionals do.
Professionalism pays off in the long run because it's a small world. People remembered me and I was able to get hired elsewhere pretty quickly.
@"Since this all anonymouse, do people want to post to this blog with a few facts?",
It'd be better to just look through a site like GlassDoor.com. People are going to be tempted to spread fud, or just make stuff up.
Additionally, award numbers for some are definitely outliners or unique enough that it wouldn't be smart to share that data. I've seen some amazing numbers in my time in management - both on the superstar and the not-a-superstar end of the spectrum.
"Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders would require Microsoft to cut costs, he said, meaning many jobs would be moved out of the country."
It's hard to believe a CEO who has lost 60% of shareholder value since 2000 can actually invoke the "Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders" meme with a straight face.
"Bang" would just have been so much better. "I'll bang that for you"... "I'd bang that if I were you"... "We can bang that out later." Bangin'!
Any idea when the next round of chopping is scheduled ?
The next layoffs are scheduled for Tue, June 30, 2009. Similar to the other previous rounds, it will begin with an e-mail by Steve Ballmer at 0900 EST.
The majority of the layoffs in this final round will be taking place within COSD and WEX (Windows, for those who may not be familiar). Following the layoffs will be a series of re-rog announcements within Windows.
This will conclude the official layoffs for FY09 (obviously) and for the remainder of calendar year 2009. The total figure this time around is appr. 1500 employees, which will bring the total to just around the 5000 figure cited when the first round hit on Jan 22.
Projects like Responsepoint is what is wrong with Microsoft.
I worked in the OCS team. I couldn't believe the responsepoint team could have done what they achieved with less than 1/10 of the resources we have. It is embarrassing that my team is still unable to deliver the kind of voice/PBX features. I thought the responsepoint team should have been the role model for the rest of the company...
"If Responsepoint is so good, why can't you raise cash and do a v2?"
2.0 was fully funded until Gurdeep Pall and his boss Elop forced Craig Mundie to shut it down. Responsepoint was funded by BillG, but Craig is not BillG and Craig can't tell Gurdeep to shut up. OCS fucked the young startup and it is unfortunate the internal politics killed Responsepoint. I heared Grdeep's days would be numbered anyway with the crime he committed.
Some great engineers were thrown out as a result. Much loyalty and goodwill (for the company) was destroyed. Both directly (by those thrown out onto the streets)
Dude, if the engineers are great there are jobs to go around. Your GM manages some useless projects while making millions. Why can't your GM share money with you?
Windows is doing a great example: they are saving on Ship-It awards!
RTM on July/15, and get a lot of people being laid off on June/30. Perfect timing!
Nothing is being done during those final 15 days anyway... Isn't it? May someone make sure the timebomb is removed, so that we don't have another SharePoint-like KB971620? Or do we make sure big failures only if the product costs more than U$40K per license? At least in IBM the VP of the division would resign after such fiasco, and in Oracle he/she would be fired, just to give an example. But in Microsoft, the guy just goes and blog about it... The joys of being a partner...
I heard of some strange ways the staff was let go in India - The GMs demanded that the employees sign a resignation letter and only then they will hand over the comp package. Is this ethical? Is this legal?
.
Not much is considered unethical or illegal in India.
That is another reason multi-nationals like to move jobs there.
>>The majority of the layoffs in this final round will be taking place within COSD and WEX (Windows, for those who may not be familiar).This will conclude the official layoffs for FY09 (obviously) and for the remainder of calendar year 2009.
For those about to get RIFF'ed. We salute you.
Thanks for everything guys. Especially for Win7. It IS way better than Vista.
Just remember, wacky as it may seem, times like these are opportunities for something way better.
What's been MSFT employee's experience with this year's OHI numbers? Todd Peters of MCB blamed his individual contributors for his bad numbers saying it was their responsiblity to fix. Did other groups get similar messages?
Anonymous said:
Sounds like you are the kind of person that Microsoft needs to lose. When I got laid off, I put everything I was working on into as good a state as I could and handed it off. Not because I love Microsoft (the people who are crying about how they loved Microsoft creep me out) but because I'm a professional and that's what professionals do.
I am not the OP. However, I'm more inclined to agree with him, than with the quote above. I think someone in HR/management deserved the chance to learn that a statement of the sort made to the OP is a bit too much of a reach. I don't know that I would have laughed, as I, too, would put on the professional game face at a time like that just instictively. But I'm not particularly disappointed that SOMEONE laughed.
To turn over all of my work WELL, as in transition introductions to v-team members, distributing all paper and electronic files to those inheriting the work, forwarding standing meeting requests to the person who'd be taking my place at them, cleaning up loose ends of tasks that were almost but not quite complete so that someone isn't required to spend 15 hours to do something I could finish up in 90 minutes, yada yada yada, would take far more than the day and a half given to many January, 2009 layoffs for those activities. It could have been done well in two weeks. Passably in one. But a day and a half? Reality intervenes.
Though it's not the ONLY reason, and maybe not even the most significant reason, an employer typically likes two weeks' notice when someone's leaving the company, transition time is ONE of the reasons for two weeks' notice to be the professional minimum.
A few days to wind up one's job, especially considering many didn't expect it, is unrealistic, though not much more unrealistic than many internal deadlines at MS. It's not unusual in the world of layoffs to have that little time (or less), but let's not pretend that the company doesn't lose something in knowledge/coordination lost during transition, when they're done that rapidly and with so little notice. When I've left positions, I've known for days or weeks prior to informing my employer that I was likely/definitely going to be leaving soon, and as a result, my projects were in "ready to hand off" condition the minute I gave the news.
When faced with an unrealistic request after having just been laid off, particularly if it's framed in a way that I'd describe as a very poor, naive attempt at manipulation, you do the best you can but otherwise don't let yourself lose sleep over it.
" The total figure this time around is appr. 1500 employees, which will bring the total to just around the 5000 figure cited when the first round hit on Jan 22."
The Math seems to be off. First round had 1400 layoffs. Second round had around 3000. So if 1500 are to be let go in COSD/WEX, the total would come to around 6000.
Seems like fud to me. In past, i have seen that the chatter here increases in the weeks just before the layoffs, with people getting 'mandatory' meeting requests from GMs. I havent heard anyone getting them this time as of yet.
Responding to a couple questions I think I can provide insight on:
How many people get "superstar" status? Is the top 20% bucket considered superstar? Do all of them get awards 5-6 times the target at their level?
This will vary depending on your team's review model. Some teams will have rewards heavily weighted towards the very top performers, others less so. Talk to your bosses (in a polite way) and ask about the review model on your team: What are the targets for stock at your level? What's an "exceptional" reward at your level look like? Remember stock awards should be incentives, so good bosses will be happy to discuss in general terms. Our org is extremely open with the review model and incentive structure.
What's been MSFT employee's experience with this year's OHI numbers? Todd Peters of MCB blamed his individual contributors for his bad numbers saying it was their responsiblity to fix. Did other groups get similar messages?
No, couldn't be further from my experience: WEX's OHI numbers have been good and improving in general, and those areas that weren't so good are discussed openly in team meetings, with individual IC's forming groups to analyze what needs to be improved and providing this feedback to management, and management acting creatively to address concerns.
Plug and props for good management: JeffJo's WEX/COREUX org is excellent in response to both these points, and I imagine most of SteveSi's org would be similairly positive.
My lead emailed the reports to start writing self assessment last week.
Yesterday he came over to my office and asked me to not only write the self
assessment, but also find some other peers to provide feedback for me by early
next week.
It seems that some other guys in the team were also asked to do this (finding
peers to provide feedback), but not everyone in the team.
Does anyone have similar experience before? Is it a signal that one is on the
candidate list to be eliminated in the next round (probably end of June)?
When I was pointed at the door there were many critical things left hanging that could not be transitioned in time (plus many things that have come up since). I get emails asking for help to fix them - what should I do? The odd email here and there for a quick response is OK, but where should I draw the line? Ethically, practically? Financially? Does anyone have advice? Should I ask for a contract? Should I bring the matter to the attention of the senior managers of those left behind (that are asking for assistance) that they let some knowledge go? Does it seem somehow imply that they let the wrong people go, and the ones they have left can't do the work (will that damage my chances of future work?) Unless the senior management of the team swallows hard and has the interests of his product at heart instead of the perception of his own competance, this is not going to go well. How would it look if I was called back to fix things that those left behind after the cut could not?
If I did go back to fix things(contract or not), that sends a powerful message down the corridors about poor choice of the cut, and bad for morale for the middle managers trying to have to explain why their current teams can't get it working.
Wow - I just re-read my posting, it sounds arrogant, that was not the intention, I'm just trying to get advice as to a way forward. Should I just move on and say "screw you?" That's so incredibly hard when you've put your life into things (I will not say for how long as I think I've already hinted at too much for those reading who might know me).
"Windows is doing a great example: they are saving on Ship-It awards!
RTM on July/15, and get a lot of people being laid off on June/30. Perfect timing!"
Hmmm - seems like chatter for layoffs in WEX/COSD is growing. Has someone actually recived an "all hands mandatory meeting" request yet? Can any of the senior folks in these divisions (who's reading this blog) confirm the rumors?
"Grdeep's days would be numbered anyway with the crime he committed."
If Elop is doing his job, Gurdeep should have been fired a long time ago.
The Math seems to be off. First round had 1400 layoffs. Second round had around 3000. So if 1500 are to be let go in COSD/WEX, the total would come to around 6000
I wouldn't dismiss this prediction so easily. Given how well the cuts have been received by Wall Street I wouldn't be surpised to hear that the SLT has decided to "top it off" with an extra 1,000.
The Math seems to be off. First round had 1400 layoffs. Second round had around 3000. So if 1500 are to be let go in COSD/WEX, the total would come to around 6000.
Seems like fud to me. In past, i have seen that the chatter here increases in the weeks just before the layoffs, with people getting 'mandatory' meeting requests from GMs. I havent heard anyone getting them this time as of yet.
Not really.
1 - 1400
2 - 2800
3 - 1500
Total = ~5700
Remember, the original 5000 figure was not etched in stone, so anything that's within the range is probably spot on.
I'm now a believer of what we see here on Mini. The track record is pretty solid, so no reason to dismiss anything as FUD.
"I wouldn't dismiss this prediction so easily. Given how well the cuts have been received by Wall Street I wouldn't be surpised to hear that the SLT has decided to "top it off" with an extra 1,000."
You're right. The stock has gone up from $15 to $22 in space of few months. Stock market in general has gone up, but in past MS stock didnt use to go up when market went up. I'm going to hold on to my msft stocks for a few more months. Seems like SLT at least got this thing right.
On a side note - if firings is causing such a good reaction in wall st/stock, why not go "above and beyond" and unleash next wave of 5000 layoffs after august review. Eliminated employee with get good severance, onboard employees will see value of their stocks go up, Wall st. will rejoice and SLT will get right to brag about the positive change in share price and co. outlook. Seems like win-win for all parties. But will SLT do it?
The Math seems to be off. First round had 1400 layoffs. Second round had around 3000. So if 1500 are to be let go in COSD/WEX, the total would come to around 6000
Is the 1500 number all from WEX/COSD or are any other divisions contributing to the number ?
"Does anyone have similar experience before? Is it a signal that one is on the candidate list to be eliminated in the next round (probably end of June)?"
Can someone please answer this ??
Is the process of collecting feedback a signal that the candidate will be eliminated ?
If I did go back to fix things(contract or not), that sends a powerful message down the corridors about poor choice of the cut, and bad for morale for the middle managers trying to have to explain why their current teams can't get it working.
Wow - I just re-read my posting, it sounds arrogant, that was not the intention, I'm just trying to get advice as to a way forward. Should I just move on and say "screw you?" That's so incredibly hard when you've put your life into things.
Don't do a thing unless you're getting paid for it. Stop answering emails except maybe to say, "hey, that's too bad but this is not my job any more." Hell, the very people you're trying to help could get in trouble for it too.
I work in WEX.
When the company wide layoffs were first announced in Jan, IIRC SteveSi said WEX had already been managing its size/expenses reasonably. So there would be no layoffs in WEX as part of the broader announcement, which spans the next 18 months or so as of Jan 09. I don't understand the significance of 18 months as the time period.
I suppose they could change their minds or do separate layoffs unrelated to the 5000. Or just drop the axe immediately when the 18 months are up... etc.
Can't speak for COSD.
Speaking of the annual review cycle and how it drives certain people to behave badly, I just experienced something today that's utterly inmoral and probably is just cause for firing.
A co-worker in my group privately ask me if I can help him complete one of his commitments, today! It is something he has since the beginning of the year, and now he is desperate to get it done. We both report to the same manager. He even made a point of saying that all he has to do is to drive it, and I have to get it done.
If I don't agree, he said he would give negative feedback in my peer review, something along the line of "unwilling to help someone succeed".
This person is a long-time employee with 10+ yrs at MS, more of a talker than a doer. I am very upset that such blackmailing is actually going on in this company, particularly coming from someone I work with on a daily basis.
I am desperate for some advice. Do I sweep this under the rug and forget about it, do I comply, or do I go to my manager?
Pissed in Redw
Is there any reason (legal or otherwise) a person who has been fired for poor performance should not answer e-mails or phone calls from Microsoft employees?
I get several requests for advice on code I wrote years ago every week, and have even been asked to look over trace-logs to help with debugging. I am happy to do this since I have some spare time now (I don't currently have a job after all), but I don't want to be putting my old colleagues (or myself) at risk for liability.
Could my previous manager undertake some action to sue me, or some such, if he found out I was still helping other groups who use the components I built during my tenure?
I hope I won't get in trouble for spending time helping third party developers on newsgroups, giving them advice on how to use the APIs I built. I have actually been spending a lot of time on developer newsgroups in the last month.
I have even been writing sample code that I have been posting on blogs.
In fact, I told my old colleagues to pass my private e-mail address on to anyone with support issues, and have been getting a couple requests for help every day.
It really makes me feel great to know that people still want my help, and really like providing assistance (hey, I am thrilled people love using my APIs), but I do hope I am not setting myself up for unpleasantness if MSFT managers realized what I was up to.
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