Both Meta & Microsoft have said they're shedding staff explicitly to free up cash flow to invest in AI;
on one level this is unemployment linked to technology, but its a bit different from *actual* technological unemployment - the latter sees people losing jobs due to the deployment of technology to do their jobs. Microsoft & Meta on the other hand are sacking people to take a (bigger) punt on a business strategy that is yet to prove its transformation of productivity.
I was at Microsoft when the pandemic hit. Amy Hood told all of the employees that they were not going to rush into hiring (unlike many competitors) because they wanted sustainable growth. Hiring people to deal with a spike in demand and then firing them when the spike subsides would be bad for everyone, she said.
Since then, Microsoft has got rid of about 20% of the workforce. That counts only people in the big redundancy rounds. A lot of people I respected left voluntarily and they ended the policy that orgs reclaim headcount when people leave and so can hire replacements: if someone left, you needed to explicitly request new headcount from your management to get a replacement. A lot of the folks who left had their role filled by promoting someone else, who was then not replaced.
The culture of lying to management means that the senior leadership has no idea how under resourced most of the critical revenue-generating business units are. Anyone who tells them anything other than ‘everything is great, I bet we don’t even need all of the people we have!’ gets a reduced bonus and learns not to do it again.
The company reminded me of a dead oak tree. It looks strong from the outside but a single storm could knock the whole thing down.
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
Serge 🔻