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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: 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.