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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 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)