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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, 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.
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