No, this has never been the case. Companies are and always have been very conscious of wage and salary expenses, as it's one of the most controllable categories on the P&L.

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pseudosavant 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are making $600k in net income per employee. 10+ years ago, I'd never seen a mass layoff at any company making that kind of money per employee.

Their net income is up more than 2x in just the last 5 years. 10 years ago, Microsoft only had $85B in revenue, now they are up to $134B in net income, and they need to let 25% of the company leave?

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hibikir 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?

The total net income doesn't matter: The move is management saying they are overstaffed for the work they think they need.

Assume Microsoft is expecting just a third of people to take the offer. It's just too many people to want to move to a different division that needs more labor: It's basically entire divisions that they'd have to create from whole cloth.

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panta an hour ago | parent [-]

> If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?

yes, because, (a) you would be an amoral company otherwise and (b) the productivity and work quality of those remaining 15 will plummet if you don't and AI won't save you in the end: you'll build faster and cheaper, but the quality of your products will enter a downward spiral it will be hard or impossible to exit from.

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RivieraKid an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Why amoral? If a an employee costs the company more than they make, it means the owner of the company is essentially donating his money to the employee. Is it amoral to not do that? What if the owner wants to donate the money to cancer research instead?

	▲	panta 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		To expand on this, a company’s purpose should go beyond simply generating profit for its owners, imho; among other things, it should also include a duty of care toward its employees. Society instills a strong work ethic in us from childhood, teaching us that contributing to the greater good is our individual duty. Before the plague of neoliberalism, there was an expectation that companies would have a positive impact on society, too. Nothing, except greed, forbids to return to those values.

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redwall_hp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs. Mergers should also be off the table for the same period.

It's deleterious to the economy. As the recent Microsoft game studio apocalypse shows, mergers are also extremely deleterious. It would be better to have a dozen game studios employing people and competing rather than one shit company cutting expenses and reducing products going to market.

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mr_toad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> now they are up to $134B in net income, and they need to let 25% of the company leave?

Tomorrow they’ll announce that they’re going to spend $134b on new data centers.

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an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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ricardobayes 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Contrast that with NVIDIA's princely $2.5M net income per employee.

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bijowo1676 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

profitable divisions are making more than that per employee

while other divisions are sinking ship

there always a case for a yard cleanup and decluttering

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xphos 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But like if your company is making money hand over foot you didn't typically cut staff by 25%. You could just as easily do a hiring freeze and get out ahead of it. I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)

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RivieraKid 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)

Yes, it's cold, but in the grand scheme of things, it's good for the society if companies are efficient and the economy is efficient. An efficient economy means that we can produce and consume more per hour worked.

Such behavior by companies may not be in my self-interest but that's another matter.

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datakan 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They aren't cutting staff because they made a ton of money. They are cutting staff because they see trouble on the horizon and are positioning themselves for that. Layoffs are rarely lagging indicators. They are more often predictors of trouble coming. This bubble will explode, MSFT wants to survive it. Thats all there is to it.

	▲	allturtles 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This may be so but what others in this thread are trying to point out is that this is a relative novelty. Decades ago, layoffs were something that hapened at struggling companies trying to stave off bankruptcy (or already in it). It is a major cultural change to treat employees so casually as fat to be trimmed.