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.
Would you be willing to explain how you poison AI?
Monopolising data sources is a race because there's a limited supply, a bit like space for LEO satellites.
All of these companies are monopolists at heart and as a nation the US is trying to monopolise data capture like any other global resource.
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.
@david_chisnall @ChrisMayLA6 A pet hate is where expert gamers or game developers determining the user experience of games they develop. The 'Easy' level to them is often tortuously hard for me.
They should have a set of testers who represent the public better. Then watch them behind one way mirrors ...
@david_chisnall @ChrisMayLA6 You have to be a bit careful with the "headcount" figure, as sometimes very creative bookkeeping is used.
I used to work for GE in the '90's, every quarter we got idiotic headcount limits from the States. In Europe they had a deal with a local IT company (owned by an ex-GE manager), every time the headcount went down, people were transferred from the payroll to that IT company (so costs moved from Payroll to IT budget, but effective headcount didn't change).
That was not happening at Microsoft. Contractors were the first to be let go because they have higher overheads and are on fixed-term contracts. And that was not counted towards the layoff targets.
@david_chisnall @ChrisMayLA6
> 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
I have often joked that any sufficiently large organism or company is indistinguishable from Communism (obviously any target-focused totalitarian regime will do)
@h0gh @ChrisMayLA6 @jonpsp @david_chisnall
The "VP of ensuring he gets his bonus" might as well be an actual title at a lot of companies.
Key words in this sentence? “Have said”.
“Meta & Microsoft have said they're shedding staff explicitly to free up cash flow to invest in AI”🤥
Now fast becoming a fashionable excuse for need to cut staff because line went down. 😐
So sorry for all the people who believed in the good things & values. Hope you all get better work with better employers. 🙏🏻
Oracle invoked the same argument.
Extraordinary times whatever the interpretation.
One possibility is that they don't think its a risky move. How can they be so sure? Only if they know they have a stranglehold on users and can push "AI" in all eventualities.
Another possibility is that they are actually "bust", not literally - as in bankrupt - but in terms of defending their astronomical valuations: the risky bets aim to avoid a massive correction.
Time will tell I suppose...
I think the final post may be right - one last throw of the dice in a bid to avoid a 'correction' in their share price (see the warning today from the BoE about UK share prices, which is just as applicable to US ones, in my view)
@ChrisMayLA6 yes, I have seen today an economist talk about the Wile E Coyote effect (in relation to the Iran war and the oil crisis). People seem to want to have their stock market party go on forever, decoupling it from annoying reality.
But in the end, forecasting is hard, especially when it is about the future 🤣. A tech bubble burst has been predicted several times already. The monopoly position of those companies does give them remarkable resilience...
Ahhh.... but you're expecting our political class to think beyond the next electoral cycle there, aren't you, and we know they find that almost impossible (for a range of internal & external reasons)
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