Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Some Microsoft organizations are looking to increase their span of control, defined as the number of direct reports or subordinates a manager or supervisor oversees. It also wants to increase the number of coders compared to non-coders on projects,
According to anonymous people familiar with the matter who spoke to Business Insider, Microsoft has yet to decide how many jobs will be cut, though one person said it could be a significant portion of their team.
Other companies such as Amazon and Google are also reducing the number of managers and executives in their drive for efficiency.
Microsoft wants to decrease the ratio of product/program managers (PMs) to engineers. Microsoft security boss Charlie Bell's division has a ratio of around 5.5 engineers to one PM, but he wants that to reach 10:1.
News that Microsoft is targeting non-coders in these cuts is in contrast to the many stories about generative AI replacing the need for programmers. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott made the startling prediction last week that 95% of all code will be generated by AI by 2030. He added that humans would still be involved in the process, though it's easy to imagine that there will be fewer of them.
At the start of the year, Microsoft confirmed it was implementing performance-based layoffs, though it said those let go would be replaced with new hires. Microsoft rates employees on a scale of 0 to 200 and bases their stock awards and bonuses on this rating. Anyone in the 60 to 80 range – 100 is average – is rated as a low performer.
Soon after those performance cuts were revealed, the company said it was making more job cuts across its business, impacting employees in the gaming, experience & devices, sales, and security divisions.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gznork26 on Monday April 14, @11:22AM (7 children)
Are they also turning testing over to AI? I can easily see them deciding that tech writers are no longer needed, and they can rely on alpha users to report bugs. At some point, upper management will say only they are essential.
I was a ‘softie in the 90’s on Fortran Powerstation. They abandoned the scientific computing field because they didn’t make enough money with it at the time. If they are still chasing money, software development may not be on their critical path any more.
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 14, @01:39PM (3 children)
Microsoft does documentation and testing?
Not entirely being sarcastic, at least WRT docs. I've dipped my toe into C# a couple times (surprised it didn't dissolve clean off) and my impression is they do a lot of wink-nod funded astroturfing. Everyone in the C# public eye is not a MS employee but has a very rich uncle, so to speak. All companies are like that, they just do a bit more.
C# is interesting. I'm scared off by who its owner is, but its a kind of cool language. LINQ is pretty cool. If you don't know what LINQ is, its "lets embed SQL in the program". I don't mean "call azure" I mean you can do stuff to iterables, or arrays at least, using SQL syntax. I know its probably huge and inefficient but I don't care nobody else has ever tried this AFAIK. Like make an array called "integers" then define a var evens = from integer in integers where (integer % 2) == 0 select integer; That is not pseudocode that is my memory of how the source code looks (although I'd hit enter a few times and maybe rearrange the order to more normal SQL order if I can).
On the other hand its async is just ... strerotypical async stuff nothing special nothing bad AFAIK. You can't have an "enterprise" "corporate" language without nulls LOL.
On the downside there was something weird about C++ templates vs C# Generics. IIRC it was "almost" as cool but not as cool, like take a C++ template and roll back 5% of the features. So, ah, how do you set a type parameter default type in C#, like translate "template " into C#... well I got bad news for you buddy... as I understand it, you aren't doing that in C#, find an alternative LOL.
Anyway... yeah I don't think MS employees do docs and I don't think they do much testing either, thats all 3rd party astroturfed semi-funded 3rd party contractor-ish peeps AFAIK.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 14, @02:00PM
Ha ha HTML rendering, something more like
template <typename T = int>
Class SomeDamnThing {
public:
T somedata;
};
Plus or minus typos having just woke up this morning in C++ that makes the default type for "T" be an int if unspecified like SomeDamnThing<> myNewObject; and you can't do that in C# AFAIK. Or perhaps they've added/changed something.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday April 14, @03:10PM (1 child)
When I first encountered it about 15 years ago, I remember encountering the idea of "partial classes" that were intended to separate out the auto-generated code and the custom stuff added to the class after the auto-generated code. It was an interesting idea, but of course made it much harder to figure out what was actually happening in a lot of cases.
However, I think Java landed on much better solutions to that problem with some aspect-oriented decorators like Lombok that handled that without any boilerplate code in the repository. And Python came in with another arguably even better option of allowing properties to be redefined with specific getter/setter methods, which eliminates a lot of the need to generate getter/setter boilerplate code which so often is a big part of it.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, @08:13PM
Hm....
(Score: 3, Touché) by Username on Monday April 14, @02:55PM (1 child)
All i know is who ever butchered notepad and the photo viewer on windows 11 should have been lined up and shot.
(Score: 3, Touché) by cmdrklarg on Monday April 14, @07:51PM
It's one reason why I use Notepad++ and IrfanView instead (main reason is that they are just better).
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, @09:24AM
From what I see they're testing their stuff on the World before they're moving it to Microsoft production: https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-reveals-cause-of-widespread-windows-server-issue [techradar.com]
BTW some claim that their UI designers don't use Windows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 [ycombinator.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Monday April 14, @01:28PM (2 children)
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott made the startling prediction last week that 95% of all code will be generated by AI by 2030.
Short Microsoft. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? And now stack ranking for the staff. How delightful.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 14, @01:49PM
My suspicion is AI generated slop will soon destroy the free public internet/web leaving nothing but corporate login pages and paywalls and lots of unusable spam wrapped with megatons of unskippable ads.
At that point it'll no longer be possible to google for "Java enterprise design pattern factory example" so people who don't like memorizing and typing super verbose languages but do like the copy-paste-edit workflow will use that as an AI prompt, so "95% of code will be generated by AI" because web searching will no longer work and AI will be the new "search". Remember, create the problem and sell the solution at the same time for maximal profits!
In the old days compilers cost $500/seat but had excellent docs. Now we're in a lull where compilers and IDEs are free and so is a world of documentation. Soon compilers will still be free but if you want any docs at all you'll have to pay a monthly AI subscription. That'll destroy the book market so you won't even be able to buy (or pirate) a book. Once people are used to paying $100/month for their AI subscription it'll be time to get rid of those pesky free compilers and go back to charging, probably an additional monthly fee. "Why would you want a makefile, just as the AI to compile it for you and return an I'm sure perfectly trustworthy and bug-free executable for an extra fee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jb on Tuesday April 15, @08:11AM
In most cases, yes AI generated code will always be absolutely dreadful in comparison to code produced by skilled programmers.
But remember, this is Microsoft we're talking about here. "Stochastic parrots" LLMs may be, but then I'm pretty sure some of the real live parrots I've met could probably ship less buggy code than Microsoft ... so it may still end up being a net gain for them.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 14, @02:00PM (7 children)
Since "Direct Reports" seem to be such an important bragging right, I have an idea.
How about change corporate organization from a hierarchy tree like structure into circle (really polygon) of employees. Every employee is connected by two line segments to adjacent employees on the chart. Sort of as if everyone were holding hands in a big circle.
Now we redefine "Direct Reports" and make it be something like "People in the circle I am in charge of". And you can count people all the way around the circle back to yourself, and then around the circle again, and again until you are too dizzy.
Now those people who care about such things would be able to use arbitrary large natural numbers to describe how many people they are responsible for. They could put anything down on paper.
The people who find these bragging rights to be the most important in their lives will invent ever larger numbers. They might even invent (and patent!) much more cleverer ways to draw org charts thus maximizing the counts of people they can brag about.
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 14, @02:19PM
My first day at the Department Of Transportation, as a minimum wage summer intern, my "boss" made a huge point to show me the org chart, how I reported directly to her, and the rest of the structure which she was basically already dangling off the bottom of.
Yeah, so within 3 weeks I had her boss' boss coming around to my desk - sort of a piece of a cubicle stuck in a hallway - about twice daily working directly with me on the big spreadsheet he needed to take to daily update meetings with his boss' boss. Then the sales tax increase came through and his boss was too busy to shuffle all the projects on the spreadsheet forward to use the extra 25% income we suddenly had, so his boss (her 3 over) told me: yeah, just prioritize airports, ports, multi-modal rail projects, there aren't that many of them anyway, and move the rest up to use the available budget. Yeah, me, 19 year old college kid making $3.35 per hour, juggling a hundreds of millions budget allocation. I decided I liked the moving sidewalks project for Miami International Airport, so I pushed that one straight to the front of the list, that got a smile and a nod from the big man.
Yeah, after all this was going on, my "boss" went away on vacation for two weeks, and while she was gone some map racks (for the maps I worked with on a daily basis) came in, and they were too short to hold the maps properly - they stuck out and got tattered as (the very rare) people came by and squeezed between my desk and the map rack on the way to my boss' full cubicle. So, I asked if they had a bigger size, they did, and I sent the racks back to get the bigger size. Well, on return from vacation, my boss was purple in the face because I had made a decision in her absence, and it impacted her daily trip in and out of her cubicle and that had to be reversed so that she could have an extra two inches of space at the expense of the maps getting tattered... yeah, whatever, glad you've got somebody you can push around.
About that time my boss' boss' boss' "found some funding" that re-titled me as an engineer technician and got me $8 per hour instead of $3.35. Incidentally I think it leveled me even with my boss, I'm not sure, I never bothered to ask about that, but she never spoke with me again even though our desks were about 6' apart.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 14, @02:23PM (3 children)
My big corporate experience is they really like having their guys fight their enemies guys, warband style. Who reports to whom is very important. Eventually, a large enough company expends almost all its efforts fighting internally making it easy, or easier, for small companies to beat the big company in the market. Its an interesting solution to the monopoly problem, any company bigger than "one tribe" eventually separates into internal civil war and smaller companies overwhelm them due to distraction. We only see the odd exception make the news and the history books (Ma Bell, "big oil", the railroads, Google, Apple, MS, etc)
At my last W-2 job, which was awhile ago, my departments enemy list to compete against was customer service, IT, HQ management, and to a lesser extent HR (they wasted our time a lot with classes). Other companies, nah we're chill we'll probably end up trading employees over the course of a career no sense burning bridges with those bros, I might need a job there someday or my old buddy works there now. Our enemies were all internal to the megacorporation. This was engineering at a "small city" size number of employees around the world.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday April 14, @05:17PM
My experience is that the internal fights really start happening sometime between when the survival of the business is no longer in doubt and when the business has grown to its likely maximum. After that point, the executives know that internal power is more likely to lead to raises and promotions than improving the state of the business by, say, increasing sales or decreasing costs.
However, that doesn't always allow smaller players to move in successfully. The big boys have a lot of advantages that make them hard to dislodge, not the least of which is the fact that they likely own a few pet politicians, have an army of lawyers, and generally have a much better chance of bending the political system to satisfy the whims of their business model rather than having to do things the other way around like they're supposed to.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, @08:46PM
This sounds like the "entrepreneur incubator" idea that universities swallowed wholesale. Aka a shitfest where nobody can stand anybody else. Aka the academic model of autocratic countries whose "winners" have been creamed off to work in the US.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday April 15, @07:30AM
Yes, this is my experience of any large corporation. My manager once told me its because humans are only really adapted to work in groups of up to 100 or so people. That is roughly the size of the old human tribes with a tribal leader at the top.
Above that size you end up with multiple tribes/leaders, who sometimes collaborate and other times compete against each other, and internal infighting increases as the number of total employees increase.
Couple that with managers for who the goal of their career is "empire building" (i.e. accumulating enough direct and indirect reports in order to have the most influence inside the company) and will aggressively work to grow and/or undermine others in pursuit of their goals, you find that most companies are pretty dysfunctional internally.
This is especially bad in international companies (where you have cultural/language differences between the different offices, resulting in natural tribes forming around cultural/geographic/linguistic proximity) and companies that grow by acquisition (where the management of the acquiring and acquired company will internally fight it out over control of the new amalgamated blob)
Still, despite this dysfunction large companies are still dominant in the world, so the benefits of economies of scale and/or sheer capital under the companies control makes being a large company a net benefit, despite the internal problems and organisational dysfunction.
(I mean if you think about it, the above applies to human society in general, which is why the larger the country/federation/political unit, the more dysfunctional it is, but still the benefits outweigh the disadvantages of being a small political unit)
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, @07:18PM (1 child)
My sympathies to anyone who was forced to work in THAT environment.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday April 15, @03:03AM
My sympathies to anyone who was forced to work in THAT environment.
Nope. I have not one drop of sympathy for those creeps. Working at M$ is an entirely voluntary venture and you have to actively want to be part of that toxic culture to even get an interview let alone onto the payroll. So, again, nope.
I do have sympathy for the places which wrongly hire "former" microsofters because managers mistake them for having actual talent rather than identifying them as vectors for the spread of unfit technologies and products. That is on top of them actively spreading an exceedingly toxic work culture. It is thus a terrible mistake to let them keep pretending that they know anything about computers and use that posing to get into ICT proper. That only ever carries their problems, not just their not-fit-for-purpose products but their toxicity in general, into the rest of society. Better to find a place for them outside of ICT, say as valuable contributors to agriculture [nature.com] if the PFAS, plastics, and heavy metals can be removed first.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 14, @02:43PM
>rates employees on a scale of 0 to 200 and bases their stock awards and bonuses on this rating. Anyone in the 60 to 80 range – 100 is average – is rated as a low performer.
First off, 0-200 completely misses employee contribution reality. Where's the negative part of the scale?
100 as an average is a nice idea. 60-80 "needs improvement" isn't a bad threshold, but how can you possibly cap the top end at 200?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Username on Monday April 14, @02:53PM (5 children)
I don't understand the process software companies are using. So do they have small teams maintaining or developing each aspect of Windows? Like some guy redoing a 32b legacy app into 64bit, and a separate person testing it, another making the msi, with a dedicated manager for this team?
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 14, @03:48PM
There's a pattern to the process at our company: whatever the process is, if you don't like it just wait a few months, it will change.
I exaggerate, slightly. I've been on the same project for 10 years, it launched under "the new" PDP (that used to stand for Product Development Process, but what we refer to the process as changes a little more often than the process itself.) Long before the product launched, there was a new "unification" of our PDP with a wider portion of the larger company, so we can all use the same process across timezones and countries. Not a bad goal, but... our project was excused from the change since we were "near launch" so we stayed in the legacy process. Sometime after product launch, yet another process was adopted and this time we did say that we were "on the new process" but basically shifted from post-launch of the old process to post-launch of the new process. The 1.x revisions rolled on. 2.0 has been "under development" for 6+ years - longer if you count all the features that were being developed for 1.x that got punted to 2.0. It's not totally clear what process 2.0 development is under, in theory it's not "in development" it's more "investigational, proof of concept" though we do try to build our requirements definitions along with the code of the bigger investigations. So, instead of a maintenance release, 2.0 is now a shaping up to be handled as a whole new project - and guess what? No, there's not a new PDP, but there is an all new tool that we will be managing the project trace matrix in - lucky me, having ignored the previous tool which replaced the god-awful we just can't get anything done in this systems engineering tool that was mandated for 1.0 (yeah, we did what we could with that, but actually used another tool to do the real work because "the server is down" gets to be a really lame excuse the 100th time you use it.) So, that "backup tool" that 1.0 really got done in, yeah... 2.0 will be using that too, but like we did for 1.0 we'll be translating our tool "important points" into the new company wide mandated management tool, and I hear there's a new process being developed specifically with that tool in mind...
So, yeah, I try to focus on making things that actually work and leave all of the process stuff to the people who seem to enjoy it. If they ever work up the nerve to tell me I'm "not doing the process correctly" I patiently ask them how it should be done, then follow that pattern until the next person tells me I'm doing it wrong. Last year that got into a loop where two different "process owners" had contradictory opinions of how things should be done, so when I made full circle from A-B-A I informed A: "So, here it is, I'm doing this A way, but you need to talk with B..." about a month later I heard from A that I should do B...
I think our work item tracker on the tool we actually use is about to pass 30,000 items - anytime that has happened with a tool I used in the past it was replaced with another soon thereafter, but this one is rented to us by M$, I suspect they can keep it going well past 100,000.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by turgid on Monday April 14, @05:38PM (1 child)
It's a widely known fact in this industry that you need at least three managers to empower, encourage and coach a single Software Developer and to make sure that s/he's going to use ZeroMQ at all times.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by Unixnut on Tuesday April 15, @07:39AM
And here I thought it was just my company that had that. We on average have 3 managers per employee (i.e. someone who actually does the work), I beat the average by being blessed with 4 of them, most of which give me contradicting instructions as part of some internal power struggle.
Needless to say getting anything done is a very long/slow process, with lots of re-doing and re-starting of projects depending on which manager temporarily gets the upper hand and insists on things being done "their way".
Not to mention 4 sets of 1-1's and performance reviews, and of course I am marked as an average to poor performer for "not listening to instructions" and "not finishing projects within given ETAs". which of course is impossible to do with you have four sets of instruction, the requirements keep changing and you have four sets of admin/meetings/report writing, for each manager.
I don't understand how a company can be so management heavy yet not go bankrupt, it is basically impossible to get anything done yet the company carries on existing and getting income. It is like its being levitated against the gravity of dysfunction somehow.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 14, @06:46PM
Don't fret - as far as I can tell, nobody else does either, including the people who are supposed to be using it!
At least, at my large company jobs, the official process was always in flux as managers tried to put their stamp on things for internal-political reasons, and the real process amounted to:
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday April 14, @08:21PM
You know, there are reviews. You generally do not want 1 person responsible for all the code or shit will hit the fan sooner or later. As an example, as soon as they leave. Secondly, you can divide tasks and features for different people. The reason why you have teams of maybe 6 people is that is the number of people that can be managed effectively. So if an org has 600 people working in it, and generally you have 6-10 people teams, that org is 3 managers level deep.
Your statement is kind of naive, like if nothing else happens except "1 person responsible for MSI" -- if you release MSI, that's an automated process anyway.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday April 14, @07:19PM
In an established corporation, a manager at any level can be replaced by a Lisp program without anyone noticed.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.