this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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This is so backwards. I had to read this a few times to try to make sense of the memo. Apparently, the reasoning is that instead of telling employees that they didn't get a raise because of company-wide cuts, try to convince them that they just did a bad job?
That's stupid. That would obviously have the opposite effect of softening the disappointment. Whoever wrote this memo is an idiot who has no idea what employees do or what they think.
It's only stupid if you think Microsoft wants to retain employees.
The tech industry is contracting after over expanding during the pandemic and, instead of layoffs, MS is hoping to get to their budget cuts by attrition.
Enjoy that Dead Sea Effect.
https://en.everybodywiki.com/Dead_Sea_Effect
Don't worry, if a competitor shows up (possibly started by an ex employee), they can just buy them. The lack of any kind of anti trust enforcement made the whole concept of innovation by competition irrelevant.
Yes, this is a tactic used by lots of the large software companies when they want to raise the bottom lines, and phase out an aging workforce because saying the word "layoffs" affects share price. It also helps to reduce the salary demands of any incoming workers to replace the outgoing, because the baseline gets reset without having to justify why profits are high, but workers won't be getting any of that (previous position at 75% premium, but incoming at 25% less than scale).
An example with Google in 2021-2022: tell all your middle-managers they'll need to do something unreasonable like relocate to keep their job, wait for some to leave, then put the rest on PIPs and promise their underlings they can apply for the soon-to-be vacant role if they keep up the good work. Effectively, Google only had to publicly acknowledge firing 12,000 employees, when closer to 20,000 were displaced for various reasons. It's a shitty shell game to keep the share price high, and force people who stick around to do more work for less money.
I might get sick. This is so disgusting I can’t even. Thanks for pointing that out. As an entrepreneur, I always try to make it worth everyones time. Seeing stuff like this just makes me sad.
This is what you do if you want to encourage attrition.
No companies will always frame any negative situation as the employees fault. It's gasslighting 101
My company tanked last year and I ended up getting laid off, and as part of the process senior leadership owned the budget problems and in my layoff, I was given full pay for 16 weeks and uncontested unemployment (which I did not end up needing), as well as a job recommendation. Fortune 100 company.
Microsoft fucked up here and this manager memo is ridiculously stupid. This is how you hemorrhage the talent you're trying desperately to keep during budget shortfalls.
Companies aren't supervillains. They're just people, and people here fucked up.