"Microsoft is laying off 10,000 people today, including in its gaming divisions such as Xbox and Bethesda."

wow 10k is a lot

"The American technology company Microsoft employs approximately 221,000 people in full-time positions worldwide."
still a lot
 
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Not good news at all. Ms should be spending more not less on game development based the this last year's lack of releases.
 
It won't affect affect Starfield. Starfield is nearly done, so certain sectors of the games development are being let go. This is normal, it's just sensationalism.

They will scale up again as ES VI production ramps up.
 
That is a lot of people losing their jobs. And the worst part is that this is not the only giant corporation firing people.
2023 is going to be a terrible year for a lot of people.
 
Bethesda employees? That sucks. MS so recently acquired them. At the same time, they are onboarding more people by acquiring Activision. I do not understand the rationale behind it.

Anyway, 10K people are too many. Best wishes to the people who lost their jobs and their families. I hope they find themselves back on their feet very soon. Being downsized sucks.
 
rofif said:
wow 10k is a lot

"The American technology company Microsoft employs approximately 221,000 people in full-time positions worldwide."
still a lot
Click to expand...

So bloated.

If done correctly they can get rid of 40% and still run properly. Just look at Twitter.
 
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Layoffs have been trending in big tech. There are jobs are still out there, they might just make $130k a year instead of $200k at Microsoft.
 
Just sounds like a company shake up and reorganization. But man, 10K is a LOT. That's a shame. Hopefully everyone involved gets back up on their feet easily.
 
winjer said:
That is a lot of people losing their jobs. And the worst part is that this is not the only giant corporation firing people.
2023 is going to be a terrible year for a lot of people.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's not looking good. I wish everyone the best. These are going to be tough times.
 
rofif said:
wow 10k is a lot

"The American technology company Microsoft employs approximately 221,000 people in full-time positions worldwide."
still a lot
Click to expand...

Is this your way of damage-controlling it? Just because it's a fraction of their total workforce doesn't mean those 10K people are insignificant. That's still 10,000 people now without jobs.

Like others have been saying, this is to please shareholders. That's it. Unless you're a shareholder I don't see why you'd be trying to minimize the scope of the layoffs as being little, just because they have over 200K employees all around. People are still being fired and that's the point.
 
twilo99 said:
So bloated.

If done correctly they can get rid of 40% and still run properly. Just look at Twitter.
Click to expand...
Twitter released more features in the last month than in the last 2 year....A lot of people in these giant corporation do nothing. I am pretty sure many of the MS layoffs will on the non-operational side. Marketing snowflakes and such...
 
It's only like 5% of their workforce. The company will be fine, and the unemployed have a nice bullet point on their resume. I don't expect the effects of this to trickle down to the end user all that much.
 
geary said:
Twitter released more features in the last month than in the last 2 year....A lot of people in these giant corporation do nothing. I am pretty sure many of the MS layoffs will on the non-operational side. Marketing snowflakes and such...
Click to expand...

Unless you know something we dont, losing a job is not something to dismiss. You dont know what people are getting fired, if they are, so going around saying "ah its prolly just useless people" just so you can suck MS dick, is petty af. Grow up.
 
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thicc_girls_are_teh_best said:
Is this your way of damage-controlling it? Just because it's a fraction of their total workforce doesn't mean those 10K people are insignificant. That's still 10,000 people now without jobs.

Like others have been saying, this is to please shareholders. That's it. Unless you're a shareholder I don't see why you'd be trying to minimize the scope of the layoffs as being little, just because they have over 200K employees all around. People are still being fired and that's the point.
Click to expand...
what damage controlling?!
I am saying that 10k is a lot even if they employ 210 lol. Read again
 
Mr Moose said:
Wait what? Why Bethesda too?
Click to expand...
Any acquisition comes with massive redundancy. They literally don't need Bethesda to have their own separate marketing, accounting, PR, HR, or publishing capability. MS can already do that. They literally have doubles of whole departments.

In addition, all tech companies have gone on hiring sprees for years and are now downsizing.

This won't impact developers or IP. Sucks for those losing their job but its not unexpected.
 
I love this line: "This mass layoff arrives exactly one year after Microsoft announced plans to purchase Activision Blizzard for $69 billion." As if you can't have fat stacks AND reduce your workforce for more efficiency.
 
Microsoft PR: We're letting our game developers form unions!!!

Microsoft behind the scenes:

awkward-black.gif
 
Rykan said:
It won't affect affect Starfield. Starfield is nearly done, so certain sectors of the games development are being let go. This is normal, it's just sensationalism.

They will scale up again as ES VI production ramps up.
Click to expand...

Kacho said:
Pretty sure this was expected. They're cutting redundant positions and such.
Click to expand...
I don't think you both understand how big this is, 10K is a lot of people to lay off at one time this isn't normal at all.

No way all those positions were redundant
 
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The Cockatrice said:
Unless you know something we dont, losing a job is not something to dismiss. You dont know what people are getting fired, if they are, so going around saying "ah its prolly just useless people" just so you can suck MS dick, is petty af. Grow up.
Click to expand...
You lost me on the bold side, but keep fighting the good battle.
 
Less than 5%, but yeah, still sucks. I just saw more and more companies are also laying off thousands of workers :(. That is sad.
 
Humans tend to be an unforunate requirement for companies. It will be interesting to see what society does with this information.

I expect there will start to be humanity goals for companies some day, with executives rewarded or penalized for these activities. You cant sell to people if there is no planet. You cant sell if there is no one left to buy.
 
They hired 50k during the pandemic..

All the tech companies went on massive hiring sprees during the pandemic.
 
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And 18,000 more laid off at Amazon announced :( Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Sales Force and JP Morgan just announced big layoffs now too. Are we going back to the COVID days? :(
 
geary said:
Twitter released more features in the last month than in the last 2 year....A lot of people in these giant corporation do nothing. I am pretty sure many of the MS layoffs will on the non-operational side. Marketing snowflakes and such...
Click to expand...

Yep. HR departments are extremely overweight as well.

This kind of excess hiring is normal when corporations start making so much money.

2019: ~144,000 Microsoft employees
2020: ~163,000 Microsoft employees
2021: ~181,000 Microsoft employees
2022: ~221,000 Microsoft employees

It makes no sense. Not sure how much of that is from acquisitions, etc. but they should go back to pre 2019 numbers
 
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dem said:
They hired 50k during the pandemic..

All the tech companies went on massive hiring sprees during the pandemic.
Click to expand...
Because tech companies were making record profits during the pandemic.

The money is always there, companies are just greedy. This is why the idea of a "career" isn't real anymore when it comes to working at these big companies. Why work your ass off for a place that will let you go to save a few dollars.
 
MS has tons of employees offering consultancy regarding their products. A lot of companies reduce the need of those products, so the department who offer consultancy have a lot of employees with no clients. This is something which happens in MS HQ right now in my country.
 
geary said:
Twitter released more features in the last month than in the last 2 year....A lot of people in these giant corporation do nothing. I am pretty sure many of the MS layoffs will on the non-operational side. Marketing snowflakes and such...
Click to expand...
I just got off a Microsoft cloud AI services presentation and by god the lady sounded like me at a high school presentation, just reading from the slides, stuttering and going but'um. Absolutely pathetic.
 
Punished Miku said:
Any acquisition comes with massive redundancy. They literally don't need Bethesda to have their own separate marketing, accounting, PR, HR, or publishing capability. MS can already do that. They literally have doubles of whole departments.

In addition, all tech companies have gone on hiring sprees for years and are now downsizing.

This won't impact developers or IP. Sucks for those losing their job but its not unexpected.
Click to expand...
The acquisition closed in early 2021 a while ago, that's not what this is. Also:

 
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feynoob said:
I feel sorry for the people who are going to lose their work.
The times are hard these days.
Click to expand...
I agree. I would personally hate to be in their position and lose my job. I have been at my job for almost 25 years now, and I don't think I would ever feel safe these days.
 
rofif said:
what damage controlling?!
I am saying that 10k is a lot even if they employ 210 lol. Read again
Click to expand...

My bad. It's just that I saw Tom Warren on Twitter highlighting how many people they've employed in the past few years and was wondering what relevance that had to 10,000 people losing their job today. He just put the info out there and no context or perspective, so I thought he was trying to downplay the scope since it's not a large part of their workforce.

And for whatever reason I thought your post was more of the same. Apologies if I misconstrued.

geary said:
MS has tons of employees offering consultancy regarding their products. A lot of companies reduce the need of those products, so the department who offer consultancy have a lot of employees with no clients. This is something which happens in MS HQ right now in my country.
Click to expand...

That's the majority of who are going to be impacted, and those jobs are among the most "expendable", generally speaking, at these big tech companies.

Still though, it's sad those people have to go; in the past people from smaller departments would have had a chance to work their way up the corporate ladder and become big. That's how Satya Nadella eventually became CEO (tho I think he started out as a smaller-scale programmer way back).

That corporate mobility dream is more or less dead these days and these types of layoffs don't help in fixing that.
 
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