Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce
Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29608536
Cool. I mean I haven't been able to get past a single 10-minute "I just want to go over the job with you and collect some basic information" phone interview in 6-months.
But ya know. Another 6,000 people on the market is cool too.
I keep hoping this will spark some sort of anti-capitalist zeitgeist. But labor might be too scattered and individualistic.
Like, why are we all scrambling for a handful of jobs when the rich have so many resources?
Because have fun doing anything about it while scrambling to survive
"But that's communism!"
It's easier to fight with each other than it is to fight our puppet-masters.
I mean, what would that even look like? New "software communes" getting founded? I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I'm curious what that would actually look like on the ground.
I lost my job in April 2024 and I finally got my new job at the end of January. Keep your chin up. Look for people you know who could give referrals. That's how I ended up getting hired. Good luck!
I do try.
Every single former co-worker has ghosted me at this point and even my friends have basically taken a "Hahaha, for sure mate, for sure, hey have you guys ever changed the conversation?" attitude when I bring up connecting me with people.
People suck lol.
How many recruiter screens are you getting? If you are getting a decent amount, your resume is likely good.
If you are failing recruiter screens, you are saying or doing something that is turning them off.
I would see if you can get feedback or have a friend “screen” you.
There are some services or organizations for mock interviews. Utilize them!
I'm right there with you. A few years ago, if I got one interview I was guaranteed to be in round 3 or 4. Now, I'm lucky to get the intro call and then "we'll be in touch". If anything, my skillset is improved from a few years ago.
You aren't alone, many people from former companies I used to work with are reporting the same thing. Unless you have a buddy at a company that can get you in, people aren't finding seats nearly as easily as they used to. I'm saddened but I don't see an end to this anytime soon. To be honest, I wish I had chosen a different career, as I feel slightly held hostage now.
There has never been a better time to switch to Mint, Pop_OS, or Bazzite.
You could just say Linux, lol.
We gotta stop upvoting distro-shilling.
Right and people that don't know which distros to use will get lost
How are you supposed to get new people in without advising?
They are probably the best distros for newcomers. I think its an absolutely valid comment.
You could just say Linux, lol.
Yeah, but which one? There are hundreds of distros. There's nothing wrong giving some pointers to begginers out there.
GNU / Linux :)
I find that’s very unhelpful to potential Linux converts. They will quickly find out that there are infinite flavors of Linux, become overwhelmed, and give up.
When you are introducing newcomers to Linux, it’s best to make specific suggestions.
Try just telling someone that they need to switch to Linux with no other details. They'll either get confused/overwhelmed by choice, or possibly choose one that isn't user friendly and hate it.
People have to start somewhere, and I see no issue with recommending user friendly distros to get them going.
I am sure the people who just lost their job will be super happy about that.
This place is constantly shilling Linux, decrying LLMs, and downvoting anything that doesn’t fit the status quo.
Don’t get me wrong I like this place on the whole, but I’ve just come to realise nobody here actually wants to engage with anybody different and just dog piles.
We are the left wing version of r/conservative.
Yeah, went Mint 18 months ago. Started at MSDOS in the 1990s, ended at W10.
Already on the way babayyy. Ubuntu gang here we gooooo I know, i know. There are other popular distros but I wanted to start there
Ubuntu is perfectly valid, feels very mac os
Ubuntu is great for begginers, go for it
Way to go!
I will be looking into these, thanks for sharing! Any top recommendations from the three??
Pop!_OS is my top recommendation for Windows expats, followed by Mint (Cinnamon Edition), and then Bazzite (KDE Plasma desktop). Bazzite is so, so, so good, but it has some unique features that make it a little more frustrating for Windows power users who are new to Linux. But honestly they are all good. Pick one, and if you aren’t vibing with it, try something else.
Also, keep in mind that “distro” and “desktop environment (DTE)” are two different things. Sometimes a distro has a default DTE and sometimes it gives you a choice. The DTE makes the biggest difference to your experience. There are many different DTEs, but the two biggest are GNOME (MacOS-like and moderately customizable) and KDE Plasma (Windows-like by default, but very customizable).
I recommend Mint. It’s super easy to install and maintain. And very easy to use.
It's not on the list, but I've been rocking the same KDE fedora installation through about ten version upgrades. Once you dial in your settings and software choices, it's fairly solid.
The only issue I can recall was some weirdness with steam's dependencies blocking my last version upgrade, but it was easily bypassed.
I cannot recommend Bazzite. It's an atomic distribution, which is pioneer tech that tries to make some things better but in effect makes a lot of things more difficult. FWIW, I've been using Linux for 20+ years.
Just go with regular Fedora KDE Desktop. https://fedoraproject.org/kde/
I started with pop os 5 years ago and haven't found a reason to change. I'm not hugely techy and just wanted something to play games on. Had very few issues overall.
Of course we need three flavor so we don't have a single majority and each of them have their own nuisance. Same as JavaScript libraries.
openSUSE is also pretty great, and doesn't get the attention it deserves.
There really is a Linux for everyone.
But not Ubuntu. We don't like Ubuntu here, I feel like
Ubuntu is fine. I do understand the hate, though. Snap is contentious for very good reasons, Canonical makes major decisions by fiat rather than listening to the community (see Snap again), and they have corporate motives that are often at odds with the spirit and desires of the greater FOSS community (like forking upstream projects instead of contributing).
Mint is still based on Ubuntu, for example, but I feel it’s a more ethical suggestion than Ubuntu itself.
I work in games. Its fucking incredible looking at my linkedin. I would say about 80% of my coworkers throughout my career are out of work right now. I started my own company because I was sick of it.
I started my own company because I was sick of it.
I'm genuinely curious to hear how you've found it easier to land clients than employers. In my experience, you really need a good in with a bigger firm if you're going to have any hope of launching a business. Unless your old employer is jettisoning their contracts as quickly as they jettison their staff, that can be tricky.
Is it a cooperative one? Or are you on the road to becoming the next shitty owner?
Try from India or wherever they're outsourcing work to
AI is just a fig leaf for the outsourcing that is happening in the industry. SWEs got too fat and now they are being slaughtered by their beloved mage corps...
Online they been told to unionized for better part of the last decade but the mocked us for it because why would they do that!!!
Their daddy good, their daddy treat them right. They are not workers!!!! They are future owners 🤡
Should taken a hint when they were asked to use them Indian or other offshore contractors lol
You literally transferred know how to wage slaves in India and now they are cutting you loose. GG, played urself
Same, I got laid off recently and 12 years of experience isn't even getting me interviews at in-person jobs.
Well, shit. Here we go again.
Is there an over/under going on for the rest of the tech sectors 's layoffs this year?
There will definitely be more, especially as the economic situation in the US continues to worsen. Big tech works under the unsustainable model of unlimited growth, and even if profits increase, if they don't increase "enough" they lay off workers. They could save a ton of money by laying off execs, but they'll never do that.
I've found layoffs.fyi to be pretty up to date with tracking how many people are laid off in the tech sector. It's no wonder that it's nearly impossible to find a job in tech, and these execs and boards are to blame.
I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered a career change, not because of the work itself but because I'm exhausted from worrying about if I'll have a job to pay the bills tomorrow. The only thing stopping me is that I have no idea what I'd do otherwise.
I've been heavily considering a career change. I'm in government, so on top of the DOGE bullshit, I can't even look to the private sector for reprieve because tech layoffs have been insane for over 3 years.
By “Big tech” I think you meant “capitalism”
I have a question. Everyone keeps speaking of the "tech" sector. Does that only refer to IT or does it cover engineers as well? Because in Europe it seems they keep struggling to get enough people with IT knowledge into engineering projects.
is it still hard? even with layoffs, people can get some jobs, eventhough not as high as income as before.
cant say the same for other stem industries, where its already very difficult to get a job in the field prior to even the pandemic. im guessing with all the funding being cut from the sciences , universities might be suffering as are biotech jobs(which are limited and gatekeeped on purpose)
The beatings will continue until tech workers unionize.
I have no idea but I’m definitely going to say the tone of rolling big tech layoffs doesn’t stop here.
Dell just quietly laid off a bunch of people last week
How is gaming on linux? I really don't want to "upgrade" to windows 11 but I also barely have any time to game in the first place let alone fool around with settings and drivers for several hours every time I install a new game or update and existing one.
Thanks to Valve, Linux compatibility has become industry standard.
The only teal obstacle is some anti cheat software, mostly kernel level anti cheat.
So if you want to play shooters like fortnite, pubg, valorant or rainbow six siege, you are out of luck.
Otherwise, you probably won't have any issues.
I switched Windows our with Linux Zorin some weeks ago. Everything works perfect as well, I can play all the games I have on Steam
Lutris and steam do most of the heavy lifting for you. Driver side should work with no fiddling required for AMD atleast, somebody with Nvidia can chime in if it's the same for them too.
You may need to add a couple Launch options for certain games on steam here and there or swap proton versions.
Games do sometimes break but then you wait a day or two and it's usually fixed.
Question is what games are you playing? If it's CoD and Fortnite I'd say stick with Windows, they won't work.
I mean if I laid off %25 of my dev team we would see a boat in productivity. They leech time from one of my senior devs and don't get any better. Def getting rid of 2/4 useless guys and giving 1 of them as much of an opportunity I've given any body and one is going to be next to go of he doesn't shape up.
Attitude like that You sound like you would be a horrible manager. No wonder they don't have the motivation or support to perform better
Real life doesn't work like that
They didn't do that. They went "Eenie meenie meiney moe" in the general direction of various PMs.
And the good ones run away as fast as they can. Good luck with it!
This would LITERALLY Not have Happened if we just CUT THEIR TAXES! LITERALLY that's the ONLY Reason Companies LAYOFF Staff!
We should have given Elon another billion! Then, we would truly live in utopia. Alas, it was not so.
now its going to be run by none other than VOUGHT, which is also the evil nazi corporation in the BOYZ.
And if they did cut taxes, they didn't cut them enough! In fact, the state should just pay them!
Wait what? They already do that? With walmart?
pre-empting the AI non existent returns
The tech industry is about to become a total shit show. Mark my words
About to? It’s been brutal for the past 3 years.
It's been a total shit show for quite some time now...
its been bad since it started in 2023. i shudder to think about stem labs though.
The article says that they outperformed expectations, and that they'd decided that they didn't need some layers of management. I don't think that that's intrinsically crazy; there are tech companies that have emphasized having a relatively flat structure, like Google.
Don't worry sounds like they are setting up sweat shops to keep these people busy.
Don't worry sounds like they are setting up sweat shops to keep these people busy.
Sounds great!
I hope they lay off the world of warcraft class balancing team those fuckers have no idea what they are doing
Probably working on windows 13 on a direct Elon special implant with autodoxing and auto migrant deport reporting of brown people.
Did they ever ?
Not really lol. Great time for m$ to get some new blood in there
They didn’t have growth mentality.
They know what's coming and That's going to make America grate again.
It is very vague and it says it is not for performance reasons. I wonder if early retirement packages are being offered too. If they are getting rid of some management layers they are looking to remove some of the higher paid staff so they can bring in younger folks who will be making less to start and also opening up opportunities for advancement. Over time those management layers get overfilled and no one below them can move up and that incentive is lost.
I used to work for a west coast tech giant. Their early retirement package was: "you are retiring now, goodbye" along with a severance just large enough to disqualify me from unemployment. At least I didn't have to spend months pretending to look for work.
One objective is to reduce layers of management, the spokesperson said. In January Amazon announced that it was getting rid of some employees after noticing “unnecessary layers” in its organization.
Sucks for those that lost their jobs, but this sounds promising. Layer after layer of management slows everything down. It turns a 1 hour task into a 3 month crawl of endless meetings and back and forth and waiting.
The problem with companies like Microsoft is that they’ve become completely pointless. They don’t innovate anymore. They don’t make anything useful. If you make Microsoft more efficient, they’ll just suck ass more efficiently.
They have a shitton of other products, services, and tech though?
Just because it's not marketed at you doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I interact with the development ecosystem that Microsoft largely controls. They're constantly doing new stuff there.
Shit megacorps? Yeah. No innovation? No.
Sorry but this is completely untrue. Microsoft are still a very innovative company.
"In January, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts that the company would make sales execution changes after the company delivered slower growth than expected in Azure cloud revenue that wasn’t tied to artificial intelligence. Performance in AI cloud growth outdid internal projections."
Translation: "No one gives a shit about Azure, except for the people we could hoodwink with AI."
Azure and AWS both have a pretty solid chunk of the data center market.
Like 1/4 and 1/3 respectively.
Who will fuck up the settings, control panel, registry, etc. interfaces now? The person who keeps putting Candy Crush on the start menu like it’s their life mission?
an LLM.
It's so funny going through the control panel, getting to more and more esoteric settings, and seeing the UI getting older and older. I ditched Windows after Windows 7 but remember seeing menu themes that looked like they haven't been updated since Windows NT
The Windows Webcam camera settings, when I finally find them on Windows 11 to control pan and zoom, have been the same for 25 years, maybe 30. The thing is, it used to be easy to find the controls, but they keep making Windows slower & harder to use. It’s such a rat nest.
That's because Windows NT is still in there
windows reminds me of the upper and lower facilities in Portal 2. once I somehow managed to trigger a warning window about the memory usage of 16 bit applications on windows 10, even though I think support was removed for them long ago
Dude a senior manager needs to get promoted somehow
Hey, they spent billions on their acquisition of ActiVivendiBethesdaBlizzArcaneKing and they're gonna Get. Their. ROI.
It's probably just another layer of "quality control" that's gone now.