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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: 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.
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