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Sivart13 | on: Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
I've heard this "reversing covid-era headcount growth" for every layoff for the past 4 years, how much headcount growth is there to reverse?
compiler-guy | parent | next
There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount, adjusted for business changes in that time. The exact adjustment is hard to know, but in general, if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue. Very generally speaking.

For example, Google had been growing somewhat quickly for decades prior to 2020, but in 2021 and 2022 it grew by over sixty-thousand people, and the crazy growth actually started in 2020, so even more than that. Sixty thousand!

Undoing that takes a very long time--they should have been much smarter about it. You need four rounds of twelve-thousand person RIFs (whether layoffs or buyouts) to get back to the earlier growth trajectory. Each round generates several stories that hit HN.

Is this MS still dropping back to pre-Covid? I would bet at least some of it is.

fzeroracer | root | parent | next
> There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount

This is an incorrect way of looking at it. Microsoft was growing at approximately 10-15% headcount year over year prior to COVID. If they reverted to the approximate 2020 headcount that would mean an overall decline in growth in comparison to a situation where COVID did not exist.

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logicchains | root | parent
>if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue

A company growing 10% per year would be around 7x larger 20 years later. There's a limit on how big companies can get.

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jambalaya8 | parent
a lot of places, including Microsoft, drastically cut or are in the process of cutting down on WFH also means what, vast distances between teams, coworkers, buildings, cafeteria, etc (for campus based companies). How many of these places that are "going back to office" (or have already) are doing more in-person and less or no Zoom/Teams meetings now, anyway?