Microsoft Staff Explains How Microsoft Swindled Employees and Avoided Paying Out Severance Pay (Microsoft Hasn't Much Money Left in the Bank)
Hours ago: "If their employer has over 100 billion dollars in debt and 17 billion dollars in "cash and cash equivalents" (money in the bank is less than that), then no wonder there are so many layoffs and other cuts."
THIS new thread is very, VERY interesting. For Gemini and bulletin readers, we'll reproduce this as plain text. "NotSatya" wrote some hours ago that "Managers [Were] Trained and Directed towards “LITE” (we recently learned about anxiety among managers at Microsoft). To quote "NotSatya": "Microsoft leadership held sessions to enforce and push managers to bell curve employees and use the LITE identifier and encourage. Fast forward to the past couple weeks we are now being forced to fire these same employees without severance and blindsided. All planned from the first moment and employees effected should be weary as it was cold and calculated."
The first comment says: "The culture and pure toxic environment that’s been created over the past year should be enough for anyone to quit. The employees that are sacrificing their own lives to keep this company moving getting thrown out like garbage is the new corporate life." The next comment (also last comment) says it is "100% true".
This is a classic way to avoid paying workers, first 'resetting' their time in the company or introducing a new contract/company name (malicious and possibly illegal trick). Should one expect lawsuits over this? The lawsuits would cost Microsoft more than severance.
Over in IRC, Ryan recalled some possible analogies (Brawndo and RCA). "They all run pretty much like the Brawndo corporation in Idiocracy these days. Their only playbook is that when the stock goes down, they fire people to appease investors. In Idiocracy, the Brawndo corporation responded to a total stock drop by firing everyone including the CEO. It was funny because it's so formulaic you could just have a computer in there running everything and calculating who to fire. You have to seriously wonder if they keep more employees than they need until... product divisions actually start dying. Like the Google announcement for its platforms and devices division."
"I remember when a new plant manager got flown in from India to shut down RCA in Marion, Indiana when my Dad worked there. Every round of layoffs got closer to his department until they got him too because they wouldn't need any more designs. Then they started taking him back on contract work several months later after his unemployment ran out, and eventually he worked for them again on contract in Mexico helping set up a plant there, which didn't last. It turned out that their problem wasn't that they couldn't make their picture tubes cheaper, it's that in single digit numbers of years after Marion shut down, nobody used tubes at all and they had a new tube plant in Mexico. Sometimes companies are just operated this poorly. You get leaders that are remarkably tunnel visioned. Microsoft did the same thing to Windows for sure as what RCA did with picture tubes. Try to get the costs down instead of realizing that the product itself would be dying and then dead soon. It wasn't like, overnight nobody made a TV with a tube, it's that they were just a lower share of the new TV market each year until they were gone."
"Microsoft has operated as something of a self-funded cash furnace for many years. They made so much money on a couple products that they could just bury their many failures and never talk about them again."
"I remember that the plant manager at RCA was always breathing down people's necks. My dad said the guy was so toxic he made one woman break down crying and he shouted at another man until the guy had a heart attack and they had to take him in an ambulance to the hospital. They elevated that plant manager to sainthood in his obituary though. They said that he was charitable and even donated "a brand new mansion in India" to a women's college. But I remember in 1998 when that guy became the plant manager because dad came home every day furious about something that the guy did at work. Never understood how much stress my parents went through until I got older and got a job and ran into people like that. [...] My thinking is that almost every workplace is toxic to some degree. And it's deliberate. They can dial it up or down depending on how many people they want to quit, or target it at people they'd really rather be rid of. It's not a mistake. My dad loved his career at RCA until that guy showed up near the end. My guess is that he was trying to drive people out by turning it into a madhouse to limit how many people they'd have to lay off and owe something to." █