Lode25 t1_iwsmx1p wrote on November 18, 2022 at 1:16 AM

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Have a look at Enron's rank and yank policies of yore. Microsoft tried something similar in the early 2010's. The policies are meant to retain the best workers but in reality all it does is retain the most ruthless pieces of shit. In Microsoft's case most people spent their working time trying to make their colleagues look bad rather than doing any actual work. In my opinion, Google's HR is bristling with fucking idiots who can't be bothered to look at the results of the stupid policies.

SomeDudeNamedMark t1_iwsz0wt wrote on November 18, 2022 at 2:52 AM

Hi. I'm a Microsoft employee that survived/thrived during that period and I'm not a ruthless piece of shit. Also didn't do it by tearing down others.

Mostly kept my head down (though I'd rock the boat if it was really necessary) and did my job. Also helped that I took ownership of some legacy code that was critical to some part of our team, and there was zero documentation for it. So basically I made myself indispensable! :)

But many of the more recent Microsoft layoffs have not been performance-based. Instead, they just decide to end entire projects. Even if you're a rock star, you still have to go through a round of interviews if you want to move to another team.

Celtictussle t1_iwtdk74 wrote on November 18, 2022 at 4:59 AM

Most people are shocked to learn that sitting down and working 40 hours a week legitimately makes you a rockstar in most workplaces.

WorkingClassWarrior t1_iwst5xl wrote on November 18, 2022 at 2:06 AM

Funny to assume HR has any say in these policies. HR is just an extension the the C Suite. So any shitty policies you see coming from HR are usually the C suite.

Desperate_Resource38 t1_iwt1xs3 wrote on November 18, 2022 at 3:16 AM

Since Satya Microsoft has gotten much mellower in terms of performance ratings maybe to a fault; 80% of interns get full time offers and I personally know of a team of five senior engineers making collectively over a million in base pay alone whose sole collective responsibility is managing the UI buttons for a fairly minor product. The issue in an industry that actually produces stuff (as opposed to creating like financial instruments from pre-existing assets and selling those) is that it's IC-based, and sometimes it's justifiable resource-wise to just keep on senior engineers that you know for a fact will be useful in the future even if you have nothing for them to do right now rather than go through the hoops to find actually good new ones at that level if and when the need arises. Balmer didn't understand this and tried to run it like a financial firm instead of a tech company, which I'm honestly shocked didn't kill it altogether. I think what Google is doing isn't what Enron was trying to do; what Enron execs wanted was to light a fire under their employees asses, what Google is doing is judging long-term growth and whether it's worth it to keep on engineers that aren't really necessary to whatever product they're working on right now. Not excusing them, just saying big tech is often pretty bloated and often prints enough money that it's not an issue for them to keep people on rather than hiring new, but things seem to be getting bad enough to the point that they feel the need to take such measures.

Fenix42 t1_iwtror5 wrote on November 18, 2022 at 7:49 AM

It can take over a year to onboard a new engineer. That process takes time from your current engineers to interview and then train the new person. That can mean over a year of lowered productivity before you break even or see an uptick in output.

That is why it's cheaper to retain people who are already trained on your code.