The morale there must be awful.
My current company recently had a huge round of layoffs. When I asked what leadership planned to do about the hit to morale, we were told we need to ask ourselves whether we really want to be here. I just tendered my two weeks’ notice.
I swear, such stories seem as if all these bosses really expected to become some sort of Soviet directors. There’s no way they can expect this shit to work in a market economy.
Maybe they really believe into that “replace everyone with AI” thing.
Then we’ll see evolution at work.
I don’t know why I feel that urge to compare what happens with western societies today to USSR. Probably has similarities with the moment when Soviet space dream found its’ model’s ceiling of capability.
In the early 2000s I had a manager who hardly ever gave me anything to do. Like in 6 months I did maybe 3 weeks work. And it’s not like I never asked. I was already fairly disgruntled and had other reasons, but it led to me leaving the company for a job at a cancer research center. The problem with not doing anything at MS is that unless you can hide it somehow your review comes up and you have nothing to show for the year, you’re kind of screwed. So after a relaxing 6 months it was a good time to jump ship. Anyway, a couple years later I read MS was laying off like 600 people - which might have been their first layoffs ever, I dunno. It was supposed to clear out “deadwood” - so I checked after another couple months and found out my old manager was still there! So much for “clearing out deadwood” lol.
Capitalism fanatics will say with great conviction that business has to be efficient because of competition, while government is inherently inefficient because it has no competition. There’s a little truth there, but the complete truth is that business is as inefficient as it can afford to be. The more money a company has, the more inefficiency they can absorb. In my mind that’s one good reason not to allow these gigantic mergers of mega-billion-dollar corporations. Huge entities with tons of money can be inefficient and sloppy as hell for a long, long time before they fail.
MSFT is about as evil and shitty as a corpo can get. Helps that their products are terrible and anti-user. Anyway I hope everyone who gets laid off repents and uses their knowledge to harm the corpo.
I have a friend who was part of their 1900 layoff shortly after acquiring Blizzard in 2024. Basically, brought into a meeting and then no more job.
She learned last week that every single person who remained in her former group except one had been laid off in this last round. We’re talking about people who had been with Blizzard for years and years and had been happy with their jobs and loved even playing the games that they were making. Just poof! Gone.
The layoffs have been asinine enough, but the completely tone-deaf response from one of their leaders saying “use AI to help with the trauma of job loss” has just been the icing on the cake.
one of their leaders saying “use AI to help with the trauma of job loss”
no way
Man… I really want to kick this guy right in the dick.
