Most of the time, anyway.
As far as business is concerned, the thing often runs better with mid people with less leverage. They just do their job, don't have any ideas and you can squeeze them.
Because it's not all the best that are leaving. Just the ones not stuck with a mortgage or similar stuff. This cuts the wings of very capable people and completely strips them off their bargaining power. Which is very useful to management.
Not all employees need to be the "best". But if you are a top tier company in a given field like Microsoft, you need the best minds to stay top tier, otherwise you will descend. But on the other hand you don't need the lower tier performers to stay top tier except for scaling reasons because the supply for top tier performers is a very small pool...
I might be wrong, but I doubt that these mass buyouts were also offered to those that are strategically relevant. Though I guess that can happen if that specific branch of the management tree is bad at their jobs
The execs want to run the most profit to cost they can squeeze out, usually short term. The employees see the value in the senior and knowledge rich staff with higher costs long term.
Which hurts me to say. But engineers tend to make for terrible businessmen. (There are exceptions of course, and the opposite is _even worse_)
I think the efforts on cutting edge works has been reduced and redirected to more market-dominating trends like LLM optimizations. This is a bet. Cut off the finger for a stronger arm. And I think this bet will fail. But I thought the same about this new Gemini after Bard, and boy I was wrong.
That is true for monopolies. Once you get a monopoly, you do not need to compete anymore. Lower the salaries. Make products worse. Increase prices. Monopolies do not need to care. We used to break them because that. Nowadays, bots just will tell you that they are monopolies because they are "so good". So, here we are.
It is not true if you are determining the correct feature to add to microsoft's money making products. That requires deep knowledge of users and the industry and the existing product. It requires understanding the industry and users far in advance, the turnaround time for a feature in Windows or Azure is likely 6 months or longer, sometimes years. It requires acumen and an ability to think about customers and the market and sales. Microsoft doesn't have 5000 people who can do this. They probably don't have 1000. These people can go start their own business or consulting firm today. There are lots of people they worked with in the past who know how good they are so they can get another job.
The same is true for engineering. Out of 500 engineers, there are 10-20 that are doing the really important work that you can't just find someone else to do. They know everything about the system and everyone comes to them for advice or to get explanations about how things are put together and why. You can't just find some average engineer and put them in the same desk as these 10-20 and magically things are fine, the mid tier person doesn't have the years of experience nor the potential to fill this role even if they did have the experience.
I.. uh. I hate to break it to you, but that's not as deep of a moat as this reads like you would believe it is.
Engineers (like me, fwiw) would love to believe all these things about themselves, but they're not really true.
Of course, there is a difference, but the difference just doesn't matter all that much in the real world. Markets do not care.
Which isn't to say that people shouldn't know their worth. But it is to say that one can better defend their worth when armed with an accurate assessment of reality.
It's effectively that the more desirable elements leave, the less desirable parts stay behind and get more concentrated... So the bad employees are the salt in the dead sea
It was coined by this chap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Webster#Career
Ultimately, you can only take equity away from people like that for so long. We're taking the people who actually create the value and firing them so that we can satisfy the hangers-on, meaning shareholders who often 1) don't know they even own MS and 2) are often diversified as to make a real problem with Microsoft not a dealbreaker for their financial goals.
having to get "promoted" to even get a perm job is not 'exceptional job market'
The more senior you are, the more you will need to rely on network referrals. Most HR processes are designed around filling average positions and filter for it especially when the number of applicants are high. I switched jobs around 2024 and all the interviews I got was through referrals or directly reaching out to the founders. I got zero callbacks from applications to HR.
Also five years ago, we had a once in a generation pandemic that forced all retailers to go online at global level, pushed remote work to be the norm and the tech workers suddenly had access to a growing global job market. That was the exception not the norm.
You, probably, talk about something else.