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[mckmas8808]

And we've been seeing that side effect from them in gaming for over a decade now.

Even their OS is a suffering and bugged out broken mess.

It's the new lie that "middle managers" ruin companies. It's so surprising when narratives like that get started and then pushed out.

 

[StereoVsn]

Admittedly, I only run Windows in a VM, and begrudgingly so when it is absolutely necessary for some legacy application. But I find it absolutely insane that there are these major updates ($yearH$half), that have public betas and such way in advance. And almost without exception, it's still a shitshow whenever said update goes live. I'd blame this on replacing QA employees with AI, but it started much before this current AI craze.

They killed off QA before ChatGPT came along. Basically they started relying on "some" machine learning, developers, customers, and now LLMs. They also cut support engineers despite charging arm and a leg for their "Unified" contracts.

But issues really started increasing now that MS is proudly boasting about most code being written by AI.

 

[nowhat]

But issues really started increasing now that MS is proudly boasting about most code being written by AI.

I'm not saying this was AI (I'm also not saying it wasn't), but a recent example just came to mind:

Windows 11’s New Agenda View Isn’t Native, And Users Are Already Worried

Microsoft is testing a new Agenda View for Windows 11, but its WebView2-based design and early performance issues have raised concerns among Insiders.

windowsreport.com

MS: Bring back a feature we had before!
AI: Sure, here's a scaffolding prototype that is less functional and uses more resources
MS: Great, people will just get more RAM! Ship it!

 

[mayham2199]

I have been "experiencing" this from the Enterprise side. Their release quality has gone down tremendously, outages went up and support has gotten shittier.

It's crazy how bad 365 support is. It's like their answer to everything is making one small settings change and then waiting 24 hours. I finally had to tell the guy enough we need to escalate this and like I knew it was an issue on their end that was resolved with me not needing to do anything.

 

[Quantum253]

I dont know about layoffs, but the changes to H1B visas, and the 10 billion dollar increase (3 to 13) investment into India's core AI infrastructure (training, development, maintenance, data centers), along with the 5.5 billion into Canada. I think they're going hard and it could lead to more offshoring.
It seems every few years, they go through a lot of staff changes.

 

[Oixte]

85% Nvidia Gross Margin or closed!1!!1!1!1!1!1

Pathetic….

 

[UltimaKilo]

They have let go (and will fire more) a lot of devs, support engineers , qa engineers and more. It's a myth that these are mostly middle managers.

And hell, if you want the company to run properly you need managers, once employee to manager gets to a certain point , projects start suffering.

Not quite, middle managers are the death of a company. This is usually taught as early as business school at most institutions and there are various books on the subject. I suggest Parkinson's Law by C. Northcote Parkinson (1955) which you can find on amazon, or checking out the original article here: https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law

The classic Peter Principle by Laurence Peter and Ray Hull from (1969) is another required reading on the subject. They have since re-written it a million times and you can find it on Amazon for cheap.

 

[Hudo]

Satellite Nutella should lead by example and fire himself.

 

[Sentenza]

I thought it was leaked that there would be more layoffs coming

I don't even need to get it from any specific source, at this point.
I'm going with the default assumption that more and more tech companies are going to lay off more and more people over the next years.

 

[NickFire]

I know they pay well but man I can't imagine the stress of working for companies who may think Christmas is a good time for layoffs.

 

[mayham2199]

I know they pay well but man I can't imagine the stress of working for companies who may think Christmas is a good time for layoffs.

Well to be fair this will happen after xmas.

 

[Ronin_7]

Google is a behemoth and seems to be doing better than ever.

This is a Microsoft problem.

 

[PauloRoberto]

I dont know about layoffs, but the changes to H1B visas, and the 10 billion dollar increase (3 to 13) investment into India's core AI infrastructure (training, development, maintenance, data centers), along with the 5.5 billion into Canada. I think they're going hard and it could lead to more offshoring.
It seems every few years, they go through a lot of staff changes.

Not 100% related. MS maintain contractors for 18 months, tops. After that, they are replaced for other contractors... and now you now why MS looks like is losing knowledge instead of gaining...

 

[IDKFA]

the executive indicated that Microsoft was moving away from Bill Gates' revolutionary software vision, which helped build and contribute to the company's immense success. He claimed that the approach might become obsolete in the AI era. Moving forward, Microsoft is poised to double down on security, quality, and AI transformation as its core business priorities.

That doesn't sound too good for Xbox.

 

[ReBurn]

A company as large as Microsoft can't be as nimble as OpenAI or Anthropic. No mystery there.

 

[Killer8]

"I prefer average sized companies like yours Microsoft, the big ones hurt too much."

 

[Quantum253]

Not 100% related. MS maintain contractors for 18 months, tops. After that, they are replaced for other contractors... and now you now why MS looks like is losing knowledge instead of gaining...

I do wonder how much Microsoft is hedging its bet on AI being streamlined knowledge (M&O) for customers, opposed to bringing in and retaining talent for all the business areas.

 

[PauloRoberto]

I do wonder how much Microsoft is hedging its bet on AI being streamlined knowledge (M&O) for customers, opposed to bringing in and retaining talent for all the business areas.

I would say ms is betting everything on AI... and if there is a company that never cared about talent retention, is this one. My employer (im a brazlian outsourced contractor for a US based company, btw) told me some stories about how MS treat contractors... and since i was a MS contractor 10 years ago, i KNOW they treat even full time employees as shit, so i dont need to explain what i lived there

 

[Sentenza]

I know they pay well but man I can't imagine the stress of working for companies who may think Christmas is a good time for layoffs.

What's bizarre (but basically accepted at this point) is that a lot of these gant companies aren't laying off employees during financial struggles, but while registering record profits and massive YoY growth.

I'm not typically one to bitch about "late stage capitalism", but Jesus Christ if that isn't shitty inhumane behavior on their part.

 

[rm082e]

Google is a behemoth and seems to be doing better than ever.

This is a Microsoft problem.

Microsoft is 220k people. Google is 185k people.
Microsoft's market cap is $3.66T. Google's is $3.8T.

Both companies have grown massively over the last 6 years in terms of value. However we want to define Microsoft's problem, it's unlikely we wouldn't be able to say most of the same things about Google.