2024 has seen two mass layoffs at Microsoft, with 1900 staff laid off in January, before a further 650 Xbox employees were shown the door in September.

Regardless, Microsoft’s shares are up and the company’s market value is now higher than $3tn, as it works to capitalise on the rise of AI.

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    9 months ago

    When I entered the work force in 2005, it was with a company that had never had a layoff in its thirty-year history.

    Then, in 2009, they had their first layoff, and I learned later our CEO had taken an 80% pay raise that year.

    Taxes aren’t theft. Literally firing people and taking their salaries is theft.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
      cake
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      9 months ago

      Taxes are theft the specific way they are designed in most countries.

      Another example of theft is a hired administrator administrating by the criterion of their own pay.

      I mean, it is understandable how this works - their pay is a counterweight to the incentive to “mismanage” the company if someone else pays a fitting price. The issue here is that these two incentives do not completely neutralize each other, in some dimension their components add up.

      Why I had to say that taxes are still theft - because a CEO is equivalent to a state official in this issue. It’s the same problem.

      Political ideologies divide these problems, because political ideologies are like hedge funds, they diversify investments, so that every political ideology could be usable in every landscape for every policy. They are the opposite of consistent, by design.

      • HerrBeter@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        9 months ago

        Taxes aren’t because they come from societal structure i.e agreement that we’re better off pooling resources

            • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
              cake
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              9 months ago

              OK.

              The CEO is supposed to maximize the profits of investors or owners or whatever, not act like in this example.

              Just like the government to which you pay taxes is supposed to use it for some public good.

              Neither do what they are supposed to do, because that requires some kind of checks by a mechanism above both, and there’s no such.

              Is that more clear, or have my bad English and bad explaining skills failed you again?

              • syreus@lemmy.world
                cake
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                9 months ago

                This is much better but your previous comment was awful. It read like a LLM alone wrote it.

                That being said I can’t tell you why specifically it reads like that. I’m forwarding it to my friend who is a English professor to find out. If English is your second language then just keep at it and please don’t take the criticism here personally.

            • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
              cake
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              9 months ago

              OK. I further made equivalence between that CEO and the government which you charge with making use of taxes.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
          cake
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          9 months ago

          and I feel dumber to have read your comment

          Then I have improved your self-consciousness. Thank you.

        • iii@mander.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          9 months ago

          I’m self employed.

          Found out I’m depressed, decided to reduce work to 3 days a week.

          Raised prices to reduce clients. Turns out I now make more, doing less work. It is what it is.

          • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            9 months ago

            I once quit my job at a software company I really hated. They were desperate to keep me around for the projects I was leading so they asked if I would work hourly for a while. I quoted them a go-fuck-yourselves hourly rate which they immediately agreed to, which made me even more angry about my prior years of poor compensation. I worked under this agreement for about half a year and further improved my effective hourly rate by not working very hard.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      9 months ago

      Well his compensation is tied to the stock price so it’s not exactly a “raise.” My employer’s stock is near an all time high right now so I’m not complaining about how much I made from the shares I sold, but neither do I consider it a “raise” because it’s not guaranteed to be the same next year.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        9 months ago

        At my last company, they usually gave end-of-the-year bonuses instead of raises. They were pretty generous, usually amounting to about half of our annual salaries, but it of course prevented us from being guaranteed that level of compensation the following year. That’s why I always describe bonuses as raises followed by pay cuts.

        • scarabic@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          9 months ago

          Yeah pretty much. Everything about it is a hedge. They can pay less if their numbers tell them to. They can lay you off and not give you anything. They can make more cash disappear if they have to. It’s the squirrelliest shit yet they cast it like a gift from god.

    • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      9 months ago

      Sounds like an easy sell to the board, then. It it’s that much of a net positive in economics.

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      9 months ago

      So the CEO gets less than half their salary for the year?

      Sounds like a great deal for the company. Until, you know, the whole thing collapses because they laid off the workers who kept the whole thing running

    • weew@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      If they were software engineers, they saved $200,000+ per person laid off

      That’s how he makes dem big bux, by telling other people to fuck off

            • lol_idk@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              9 months ago

              Yeah. He was already making 49, I was looking at how much of the redistribution went to him, not much, but I imagine it’ll go to stock buybacks or AI electricity

              • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                9 months ago

                Yeah maybe to their three mile island project. What a weird sentence. Just a few years off from our Weyland Yutani future

  • interurbain1er@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    9 months ago

    In case you missed it, in our broken model of civilization a CEO’s only responsibility is to increase value for shareholder. Not to clients, not to employees, not to the biosphere.

    Market cap increased, job’s done successfully.

    • Prehensile_cloaca @lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      A) 1971, Economist Milton Friedman explicitly told business the “only social responsibility” for businesses is to increase shareholder value. The Business Roundtable heartily endorsed this view, setting the stage for the next half century of villains to gleefully enrich themselves without compunction.

      B) 2019, Business Roundtable reversed their 50 year position to include that businesses should be beholden to all Stakeholders, not just shareholders.

      But of course the damage has been done, and continues onward. To compound this, the FED’s open-purse monetary policy for 14 YEARS ushered in the worst inflation in 40 years, while wages have stagnated for 4 decades, kicking off around the time Baby Boomers were birthing the first Millennial children.

  • OutrageousUmpire@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    9 months ago

    He deserves it. He made the deal to own 49% of OpenAI, which is quickly becoming one of the most valuable companies of all time.

    • UnfairUtan@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      9 months ago

      You can feel that he made good business decisions, but it’s pretty awful to be rewarded so much for being the root cause of so many layoffs, don’t you think?

  • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    9 months ago

    He’s doing what the Board wants, stock price is up. If there was a worker advocate on the board, maybe things would be different.

  • ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    Thank god, all these employees lost their jobs so Satya Nadella can pad out their already insanely high salary.

    We don’t want Satya to starve like the rest us of plebs!

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      9 months ago

      This is the shit we need to be thinking about when we read about a black person getting shot by a cop for stealing a loaf of bread, if you ask me.