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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, 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)