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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]