Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
seattletimes.com829 points by doctorzook 13 hours ago
829 points by doctorzook 13 hours ago
Ex-MSFT here. I resigned in June, I was an L63. I spent 8 years at MSFT across two stints.
My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement.
I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent.
In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout.
I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
The big tech companies are getting old. I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time, driven by the fact that a person will more readily hire someone they can understand than someone that is more intelligent/competent/effective. This causes a slow degradation.
I also think there's been a drastic shift in the working culture of tech/engineering spaces, in general, over the last 15 years. From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.
Maybe I'm just lucky but I have a few gen Z coworkers and they are probably more often than not the voice of reason in our org (start up with 8 engineers). I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
I did used to work for a consulting firm about a decade ago, and I was leading a staff augmentation project with another company and I was once chastised for saying "hey guys" in a chat because there were women in the group. I was encouraged to use "y'all" but not wanting to sound like I was from the south, I just used "peeps" which was somehow okay.
I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.
A coworker was asked in a meeting how he was holding up after pulling an epic two day sprint to deliver a project that saved our butts. He replied “I felt like jumping out of a window.”
Someone reported him for not warning the room about suicidal ideation before saying it and not considering that it might be triggering. He was actually reprimanded.
Unfortunately typical of the place. I left soon after.
Reminds me of that one time my partner mentioned "Latino" in a meeting, referring to people from Central and South America in broad terms (this was a marketing meeting, where customers are naturally grouped together along various dimensions).
She was told to not use "Latino"; but to use "LatinX" instead. What hurt more was the implication that she was being insensitive.
When I learned of it, I asked my Mexican friends which one they preferred. None of them had heard of "LatinX" and were as confused as I was.
“Latinx” is weird because it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers deciding that poor downtrodden Latinas were being hurt by a word they never complained about and pushing this as the “appropriate” word. It’s so clearly not born of the Latino community because that’s not the construction they would use.
I remember reading about some similar thing with French and the French president’s wife responding that the language was beautiful the way it was and they don’t need outsiders telling them how to gender (or not) their words.
> it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers
I'd recommend getting out a bit more or reading a bit more:
> According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[7][21][22] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language."[20][23] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.[24][25] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.[21] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[10]
From the same wiki:
> Despite the increase in awareness, use of the term to describe oneself has not greatly increased over time.[4] As of 2018, use of the term Latinx was limited nearly exclusively to the United States.[29] Manuel Vargas writes that people from Latin America ordinarily would not think of themselves using the term unless they reside in the United States.[29]
Maybe it didn't technically originate in privileged English speakers but it certainly seems to have arisen in popularity among them.
As someone who lives in a 99% hispanic region in the US, I've never heard anyone use this term to identify themselves. We're right on the border and that sort of thing seems to mainly happen in larger cities north of here.
I’m not saying no one who identifies as Latino/Latina/Latinx has ever used the word, or even advocated for it. But the only people I’ve ever heard use this term are, bluntly, very white.
To the extent that the term has become widespread, it seems to have piggybacked on other diversity and inclusion efforts. People who identify as Latino/Latina seem overwhelmingly to dislike the term.
> Among Hispanic and Latino Americans, knowledge of the term is not widespread, and reception to the term as a potential classifier for the entire Hispanic/Latino population has been overwhelmingly negative. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly half of U.S. Hispanics were not aware of the term Latinx; of those aware of it, 75% said it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, preferring instead the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" by large margins.
Ironically, the also relatively uncommon “Latine” is in decline but still more popular than Latinx for all of recorded Google trends history. Except in the US. Of course.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=latinx,L...
Here in Spain both the 'x' and '@' versions are really common in written language. The 'e' version I've not seen. But they're not really spoken because the X and @ versions are weird to pronounce. Replacing the o and a with an e makes more sense but it hasn't really seemed to have reached here.
And no it's not just privileged white people. My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.
My native language has no gender. Every time I see these conversations I wonder “why not do away with the gender?”
It often leaks information the speaker didn’t intend to share. e.g., “I met a friend. She was late.”
Did the speaker mean or care to share to gender of this friend? Is it relevant? I don’t think so.
And I find it especially interesting when people argue for gender-neutral plurals, but then happily use gendered noun. It sort of feels like “everyone must stay in their lane” type of expectation.
Even the patriarchy argument is weird. The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context. Wanna stick it to patriarchy? Nix the gender from all languages!
Interesting. Google trends shows that Latine is more common in Spain (and everywhere that isn’t the US).
Nonetheless I appreciate a perspective from someone who has an affiliation with the culture term refers to.
Latinx appears to be on the way out now as well, to be replaced by Latine, for exactly the situation you described. "Latinx" didn't come out of the broader community of native speakers, and was seemingly rejected due to that fact.
… I wish they picked a better word, because I actually misread that as Latrine… definitely not going to be referring to anybody with _that_ at least.
Both were presumably invented by insufferable white people.
9/10 Latinos would roll their eyes and get back to doing actual work, they don't have time to be offended.
Latine comes from South Americans (primarily chileans and argentinians). Whether the people from those countries that came up with it are insufferable white people is up to you.
No one has been saying LatinX for years. Why the anti-lib propaganda from 2022? Are y'all really that desperate to connect with folks?
Was I wrong in assuming that "Latinx" was only intended for written language? Because it's not pronounceable in any way that makes sense.
I pronounce it "la-tinks" if forced to read it aloud. Always gets some side-eye from coworkers you probably already find obnoxious.
It's all a performance to them anyway, and I'm not playing the game.
That's exactly how my Mexican friend says it, and he's about as liberal as they come
> I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
and then
> I was encouraged to use "y'all" [..] I thought that was a bridge too far.
I wonder if there might be a small bias on your part. The criticism you deem constructive everyone shall endure, but the other criticism you deem a bridge too far you yourself shall not endure.
The original story about not handling criticism well was someone crying after a kind question, not merely saying something was a bridge too far. (FWIW if I saw someone cry once, I would consider it might be a one-off due to stress at home etc, not necessarily a constant personality trait I'll have to deal with regularly.)
There’s a difference between feedback regarding your work and language policing something like “you guys” which some people have just suddenly decided is offensive as of 2016 or so because I guess we’ve already solved the rest of sexism.
No one decided it was offensive. Show me anyone saying they're offended by the use of "guys" as a gender neutral term.
People get lumped into "guys" and feel excluded. That's such a different bar than feeling offended.
It's ok for you to say, "I'm sorry my language makes you feel excluded, but I'm not going to change" and it's ok for someone to think less of you as a result.
Why does everyone jump to the idea that people who want more inclusive language are offended? Or that the critique being offered here is that the language is offensive?
(Granted, sometimes that is the critique. Plenty of casual racism or ableism is offensive. But that's not the case with "guys".)
This really feels like splitting hairs.
As a woman in this industry, being told that using “guys” to address mixed groups is non-inclusive/insufficiently considerate/worth thinking less of me for (just wow) is much worse than being addressed by “guys” when I’m in a mixed group.
Like… we have real problems with equality in tech, right?
Yes we have real problems, and this one isn't and it takes 1 minute to solve. "Okay thank you, will change it for next time".
Why spend even one minute "solving" a non-problem? What would even qualify as a solution to a non-problem? Or maybe it's a problem, just not a real problem, although if a problem is imaginary, surely the solution can be too.