I wish people were not so adverse to unions. The company will never be your friend. You will almost never have much leverage over what the company wants to do. The information you have will most likely be very asymmetrical to what the company has insight into, putting you at a disadvantage. Unions are imperfect. Unions will have its own inside politics. You will pay a union fee.
I think humans are fundamentally flawed in not being able to see alternate history. If they have to pay a union, they will not see all the benefits, and only focus on the 50 dollar union fee.
Software developers have enjoyed decades of high demand for their skills and the companies that hired them have enjoyed decades of an abundance of capital against a low interest rate. You didn't need a union because you had leverage due to the demand for your skills and companies didn't need to be particularly efficient.
This was a time where companies were hiring talented developers just to deny them to their competitors. Nobody was interested in shaking up that status quo by becoming part of a union.
People were never good at thinking about a pessimistic future to plan ahead BEFORE the shit hits the fan. Those who did were sidelined as naysayers or buzzkills.
Just look at European government run pension systems which are basically legal pyramid schemes, that everyone knows are unsustainable the way things are going right now, but nobody wants to do anything about it when it's more convenient to kick the can down the road until it become a problem under someone else's watch.
and we're hitting that point. now. but the gist of the parent's arguement is that we didn't before.
also keep in mind that unions first popped up in places were people were, like, dying, or getting maimed: trains, mines, electrical, gasfitters, ironworkers. up until now programming has been easy money sitting indoors while sipping lattes.
You form the union while you have leverage, not in the down times.
The first unions aren't the only kind. Unions benefit all sorts of fields. They continue to fight on behalf of labor. In all fields, management and labor are at odds and management has a collective bargaining voice so labor needs one too.
As I write on a sibling comment, in many European countries, unions are by industry sector, not specific professionals, so everyone on the sector is able to enjoy being part of union agreements, regardless of their roles.
The amount of unioned workers keep decreasing because the firms with unioned workers fail or the work is outsourced. I think open source software is the best protection against abuses because workers can take the means of production elsewhere if a company becomes dysfunctional or greedy. The consolidation of patents in other engineering fields has killed the industry in the US.
I'm traditionally pro Open Source but I don't see how it helps much in this case, because whatever effort you put into Open Source software equally benefits the corporations you are fleeing from who can just take your work for free now.
And this is more true now than ever before since they can (so far legally, if not morally) also use LLMs to whitewash off GPL and other such licenses that would in the past have put practical limitations on their usage.
If you've built up lots of experience working on a closed-source in-house code base that expertise will be tied to the company you're working for and once you're fired all that knowledge becomes useless to you.
If you've built up expertise in an open-source projects that lots of other companies use that knowledge is a valuable asset on your resume.
>because the firms with unioned workers fail or the work is outsourced
Sorry, you misspelled "decades of Republicans disassembling labor protections and enacting garbage like right to work laws, corporations hiring thugs like the Pinkertons to break up and discourage them, and conservative media spewing lies to discourage membership".
I don’t think there is a contradiction here. Cheap, un-unionized labor has put many unionized firms out of business. It is extremely rare for a firm to be “de-unionized”.
You're totally correct, but it wasn't _just_ Republicans. The Democrats are incredibly anti-labor. Even Biden, who was marketed as "most pro-labor president since FDR" forced the railroad workers back to work.
Both parties are so in capital's pocket that, at least on labor issues, they are essentially the same.
They are absolutely not, and at this point anyone claiming as much is being malicious.
Yes, Biden could have done better on railroads, but his administration:
* Made millions more workers eligible for overtime pay
* Installed union leaders on the NLRB (contrast to Republicans who fired members, defunded efforts, and gave access to NRLB data to Musk/Palantir/etc.)
* Those new NLRB members issued the Cemex decision making it harder for companies to suppress union voting
* Ensured that companies couldn't avoid penalties by forming smaller companies - a process the Trump NLRB created to make it harder to penalize companies unionbusting
This is only a few things. There is a world of difference.
None of the little technocratic nonsense matters though if you blow it when workers are actually trying to directly exert their power. The power of the workers doesn't come from the NLRB or any of these government institutions, it comes from their ability to withold their labor, and when they do that it becomes clear that both parties are funded by the same oligarchs because both of them will step in and stop it.
> I think open source software is the best protection against abuses because workers can take the means of production elsewhere if a company becomes dysfunctional or greedy.
OSS? You mean copyleft? Who does that? Who would use that?
OSS, even MIT licensed, embodies an radical idea that is counter to how most other engineering fields operate. The software required to design a chemical plant can cost 60K+ per year, per license, which locks in engineers and drives down their wages.
Yeah, look at union successes like dockworkers holding economy hostage via a legalized monopoly, while having more striking non-working members long useless due to automation than actual workers! I sure aspire to work in an industry like that.
Or like teachers in new York getting paid to sit in the rubber room as union fights for months to defend them after chronic drinking at work. I miss my beers in my terrible non unionized workplace.
And it's not like I plan on doing anything illegal, but if I ever misuse user data or whatever it would be nice to have a wall of silence (just need a color, blue is taken), instead of all those pesky whistleblowers.
I would especially love to be paid based on seniority and have (the small minority, but still) useless, lazy and incompetent coworkers I had keep their job and be paid the same, especially the guy I repeatedly caught playing fantasy baseball. He got fired (I didn't say anything, his lack of performance was also pretty obvious), I think it would be much more equitable and would really motivate me if he got to keep his job and was paid same as me.
Where do I sign up to pay only a small fee for these benefits?
Ah, the insightful leftist response. I was born in the USSR, so this drivel doesn't really work on me. I hate marxists/etc probably more than even fascists/etc.
But regardless, American style unions are just a uniquely malignant institution. They do/did unions better in Japan for example or even in Europe; although I still think these are a net negative, compared to them US style unions are just tailor made to suite parasites and criminals. Or as they say, my opinion of them was better before I heard of the union-mafia connections, but now I've lost all respect for mafia.
> If they have to pay a union, they will not see all the benefits, and only focus on the 50 dollar union fee.
This is the worst part of averting disaster - people never see you fixed something before it became a problem. That's why there are so many "disaster-driven organizations" out there, where the people who prevents disasters gets passed over by the people who often provoke them in order to be the hero that fixes the problem.
IG Metall is excellent, and I highly recommend working for companies whose employment contracts were negotiated by them - that would be a lot of “traditional” German industrial firms. When layoffs happen, you find out over a year in advance, usually two or three.
I got my dues’ worth in just the agreement they quickly got to during the post-COVID inflation to adjust our wages. Of course, I would have still gotten it had I not been a member, but it takes people willing to be members to make them (us!) strong enough that employers take them (us!) very seriously.
Oh, and the pay is way better than a lot of IT consultancies here, not to mention the hours and general working conditions.
This. In Germany there have been and still are plenty of layoffs happening, most at jobs part of strong unions like the auto industry. Strong unions just means better severance packages than those not in unions when you get laid off, not that you're protected from ever being laid off. To me that's a pretty fair balance IMHO.
IIRC, only in France unions can prevent companies from doing redundancies if their bottom line looks good, but that's probably also why many companies aren't hiring much in France to begin with, why skilled wages are lower and youth unemployment higher there compared to other equally developed economies like Netherlands or Germany for example.
There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve and in many cases they would exacerbate the ones we do have.
Most of the issue is that there's too much administrative policy (whether the imposition is internal or external doesn't matter) for us to effectively communicate and collaborate. Unions would only add to that while collecting fees from us. Most of us are intelligent enough to know this which is why we never form them.
It's more in favor of the employee than a lot of people admit. The problem isn't the negotiating power it's that there's so much noise when you're switching companies it's impractical.
Most financial advisors tell you to keep a rainy day fund with a 3-6 month runway.
Given what's been happening in the tech industry and the economy at large, I now keep a 1-year emergency fund in a money-market fund at 4% (Fidelity SPAXX). I'm probably losing out on some growth (SP500 grew 11% over the past year, despite the massive drop in April 2025), but at least I have liquidity in case I get laid off.
That's the kind of game I feel I have to play these days.
I think OP is speaking about people who have 5x or more than their current salary in equities, where even a 50% temporary drop in assets will have no meaningful effect in lifestyle (and a long-term 50% drop in S&P would be apocalyptic, bigger fish to fry).
I think that's a bet that is contingent upon not getting laid off for more than a year during a period when there is 20-30% drawdown. If that happens, then any growth differential between equities and SPAXX's 4% is going to be wiped out -- in which case it was better to have stayed with SPAXX which offers liquidity and modest but stable growth at near zero risk.
It's not a sure win rule.
A better strategy is to hedge (bet maybe 3 months of your 1 year emergency runway), but that requires some acumen.
>A better strategy is to hedge (bet maybe 3 months of your 1 year emergency runway), but that requires some acumen.
Yeah that’s what I was suggesting when I said you don’t need keep your entire 1 year emergency fund in low risk investments (assuming you have much more than a year of runway).
Umm, my search engine says US inflation was 4.7 percent in 2021, 8 in 2022, 4.12 in 2023, 2.9 in 2024, 2.4 this year. Will you choose this in the 4+ percent years too?
Did you also check 7 day yields (interest) in those years? SPAXX is currently 4%. But was 5% in previous years (it holds US treasuries and has a very low expense ratio and holds its NAV)
This overlooks the 2009 and 2014 layoffs and the notorious Mini-Microsoft blog, still up over 15 years later(!), where they were discussed. The notion of a "Microsoft Pact" is absolute baloney but, had there been one, it was broken back then, not anytime recent.
Right, but there is even an implicit pact, you get lower-than-market compensation but you get better benefits and long-term stability. At least that's the mental math you did when joining the company and comparing offers between employers.
The notion that layoffs are something new at Microsoft is weird. I joined it in 2009 in the middle of a large layoff, and I've seen several more over the 15 years I've spent working there. E.g. almost 8k people were gone back in 2015.
Nor is it something unique to them. As far as I know, the only large US tech company that didn't do layoffs in the past decade is NVIDIA (their last one was in 2008).
That wasn't a traditional layoff - it was a reimagining of the development process and the elimination of SDET which was overwhelmingly a good thing - I also joined in 2009, and SDET was an utter disaster. All the good SDETs got out of that job - either to SDE at Microsoft or to SDE at another company. Those that were left were largely a waste of money, and the entire culture of "this person writes the code, this person writes the tests" meant that a lot of devs got high recognition and rewards for writing untestable unmaintainable garbage that someone else had to try to cover.
Meanwhile, outside of the Redmond bubble, people keep hitting bugs in MS products that never would have gotten past the STEs and SDETs back in the day. Microsoft was forced to build its QA discipline in the '90s and early '00s because they were being torn to shreds by the press and public for the legendary bugginess of their products. Now we're seeing that bugginess creep back in thanks to Nadella.
Whenever it comes up among my co-workers as a Microsoft product falls on its face yet again, most recently MS Project Online screwing up something as simple as completion percentages during a meeting, I just sigh and quip "Maybe Microsoft ought to consider hiring a QA department."
As a manager I’m going thru performance management myself. It’s a hard experience.
What I learned is: you need to hold a high bar, because people can do anything to keep their job, and often not what you want them to do
What you want is someone who is open to feedback, understands it, and takes effective action.
Outside of that, there’s a whole gamut of people. Some get defensive. Some are politely open to feedback but don’t actually try to understand. Some understand but don’t care enough to follow thru. And some try hard but aren’t effective. All of that is bad for your team, and unlikely to change. Just need to cut your losses to open your seat for someone who can do it.
The current person i have is open to feedback, but doesn’t fully understand it and doesn’t care to. It’s like dragging a horse to water. After doing that for six months my manager pointed that out, it’s just not a good fit. I like to see the best in people, and even a little bit of improvement gives me hope. But it’s dragging down our team potential. It’s a hard truth.
And what I’ve found is your team knows who is and who is not performing. And if you fail to do something about the low performer under the guise of being a nice person (or hoping they’ll eventually figure it out), your team will lose respect for you.
A team of high performers does not want to have to carry along a straggler, no matter how nice they are.
In my experience, I wish I’d made those hard decisions sooner in hindsight, rather than hoping they’d get where I wanted them to be.
It can create some weird unintended consequences though. Like if people know you regularly manage out low performers, they might be risk averse to try something difficult for fear of failing and losing their job. They need to be able to see exactly why someone didn’t make the cut.
It’s a difficult line, especially when complicated by blunt corporate incentives like stack ranking and PIP’ing the bottom 10%, etc where it can be less than clear sometimes.
You are not being paid by a company “to be human”. You are being paid to produce. If you don’t produce it makes sense they don’t want to pay you, especially if it’s easy to find someone else to produce in your place.
You've perfectly described why most corporations get low-engagement employees producing whatever is asked without much questioning because they simply don't care. You pay me, I produce what you asked, no matter how shit it is since I'm not paid to be a human with qualities that could produce something better.
Evidently. If you produce more than you’re being paid for, or you produce something different than you think suits the job better, you are making a mistake that you should correct: you are giving away your labour. You probably think your labour is valuable which is why you shouldn’t give it away.
Paying 35% below market and promising security to those willing to believe it is a sure way to slowly brain drain the company. People forget how dominant Microsoft used to be in tech.
They just didn't hire a lot like other companies. No cloud or AI bandwagon with tons of hiring and then later finding no work recently hired folks. Also work conditions were more traditional and stiff compared to pure software play companies so lot of people weren't falling over each other to get job at Apple.
Also Apple is good at lot of outsourced work for long time compared to many other companies. So they don't tons of non-core software stuff in-house. In that matter they are more like typical Fortune 500 companies than SV company.
Apple's headcount grew at a much slower pace during COVID/ZIRP in comparison to other FAANG/MANGA companies, so they're less likely to cut full time roles. Contractors have been cut, but there are many fewer guarantees when a contractor rather than a W-2 employee.
Microsoft definitely does underpay the market significantly! Like 60% of what other companies of the same level pay, unless you're in the Copilot org. Maybe you'll get a little bit higher.
The majority of Microsoft employees are in Seattle/Redmond, which has no state taxes and a lower cost of living than the Bay Area, so it isn’t a straightforward comparison.
It's a straightforward comparison in the area. Below Principal/Staff, Microsoft's stock awards are a (very unfunny) joke and their comp is pretty meh.
I left in 2018. I was 63 (first level senior) and had offers from Google and Meta for a downlevel (L4) at a 40% increase in total comp. The gap has closed slightly in the last 7 years but not much at those levels.
Same experience for me, I still remember at IC1 getting 7k stocks over 5 years as my "stock bonus" for the year. which meant getting 1 or 2 MSFT stock every 4 months :D
Amazon is in the same ballpark AFAIK, but the other two have noticeably better comp. The "Microsoft deal", such as it is, was that it's a place where you don't have to grind hard. This has changed now though.
It certainly didn't work that way for me, back in the late 2000s - my stint at Microsoft was the most exhausting grind of my career.
The common wisdom at the time was that different divisions of Microsoft had widely varying cultures, with as much difference as you'd expect to see between unrelated companies, so perhaps that was just DevDiv.
I never took implicit “they pay less but it’s more chill” culture stories seriously. You can classify certain job functions this way more readily than company wide cultures.
It was true though. And yes, you're right in that things can vary a lot from org to org, but there's still a median, and "they pay less but it's more chill" described Microsoft pretty accurately until a few years ago.
Can't generalize based on one data point but it really was historically low-stress and low-toxicity in every part of the company I've interacted with in the past 8+ years. If it had been combative and high-stress like some of the past places I've worked I wouldn't have considered the inferior compensation acceptable.
Yeah, I was afraid of generalizing throughout the company. I think compared to other companies it seems to have a benefit of being more "nice". Maybe it's mostly targeted towards tech roles at that?
I think everyone should dissuade themselves of the concept that such a thing as a "nice" company really truly exists. I've worked at close to 10 companies in my career both public and private.
Some of the companies I've worked the big "family" culture and "our people are our greatest asset" company principles were the ones to do the deepest and swiftest cuts. Meanwhile their supposedly comparatively ruthless shark infested competitors keep on keeping on.
The people I saw most impacted by this were the ones that took the culture both literally and seriously, staying in the big happy family companies long enough to develop far too much company-specific rather than industry specific expertise, just in time to get laid off at 50.
> big happy family companies long enough to develop far too much company-specific rather than industry specific expertise, just in time to get laid off at 50.
I think this is a great point. Lately this is number one thing I feel concerned about. Though paradoxically they are coming from different direction as pushing buzzword driven development too fast in process making stable products unstable, calling them out of date. And then getting rid of products along the people who worked on them as dead weight.
> This creates a system where companies find it easier to fire good employees in bulk than to fire bad employees individually. The legal protections meant to prevent arbitrary termination end up enabling exactly that
I have some passing familiarity with how (California) law firms approach firing, which this article gave me cause to consider:
- they do fire unproductive people aggressively (law firms bill by the hour and attorneys are very expensive to employ, so it’s very obvious and financially meaningful to the business when someone isn’t contributing)
- when they fire someone, they’re very secretive about it. The person stays on the firm’s website for months, and if you call HR, they’ll say that the person still works there (they probably do, in some narrow technical sense). This makes it somewhat easier for the person to get a new job.
Also this a nit but the legal protections aren’t meant to prevent arbitrary termination, which is pretty explicitly legal. They’re meant to prevent discrimination.
> For decades, Microsoft operated under an unspoken agreement with its employees—what I call “the pact.” The deal was simple: We’ll pay you 20-50% below market rate, but in exchange, you get stability, reasonable work-life balance, and most importantly, no layoffs.
This seems more of employee's made up rule rather than Microsoft's. I worked in a company in early 2000s' and old timer's told me similar rule "that here pay is less but little work and lifetime job guarantee". It was of course bullshit made up rule. As economy changed not only did they tighten the screws but also had many layoffs since then.
Right? I’ve never seen any company have a “pact” to not do layoffs. The more they try to sell this the more wary I’m going to be, especially if it’s an American company.
The powers that be realized an anxiety riddle fearful workforce can get stuff done too just fine as long as they don’t have a better option and you dangle the occasional carrot.
So as long as all corporations move roughly in lockstep you can drastically change conditions without much consequences
It’s a bit like the first big news website implementing a paywall was outrageous and deemed suicide. But if everyone does it…
There will be consequences, they'll just take some time to set in. But morale is in the gutter across the company now, and a lot of people who would previously go above and beyond to maintain some level of software quality have thrown in the towel now, since this last round of layoffs, by virtue of who was targeted, very clearly demonstrated that the company doesn't actually care about any of that one bit, and the sole reason to perform is to ensure that you stay above the cut (and even that's hardly a guarantee when whole teams get laid off).
Aside from that, there's also the matter of fewer people tasked with the same amount of things. The official line on that is that AI makes the remaining employees more productive. The reality is that it's nowhere near good enough for many products, so it just means overworked people making more mistakes and burning out faster.
There were already too few people for the tasks before this round of layoffs. The working order has been "do more with less, use AI" for over a year.
Every MS FTE whom I knew enough to have that kind of conversation with was stretched thin to the breaking point. Now half their team is gone, and the show must go on apparently. It does not seem viable to me, not even with AI.
This was always a con for suckers. The only ways out are unions and employee-owned co-ops by changing the interests to ensure stability rather than merely being fooled by corporate masters who can always change the deal at any time.
Unions don’t prevent layoffs. You’re bound by a union contract which will include conditions for layoffs. Unions can prevent overwork and burn out. They cannot prevent layoffs.
Unions can't (always) make an unprofitable company profitable, but they can prevent fake layoffs that aren't actually warranted by the company's economic condition, like the kind the article is talking about.
> Unions can't (always) make an unprofitable company profitable
Indeed, I think their major trick (in America, anyway) is to make a profitable company unprofitable. Much like the bad forms of private equity from above, they bleed a business dry from below.
Like every other stakeholder, workers and their representatives have their own interests, and sometimes those are in tension with other stakeholders. But while it's very easy for workers and management to end up blaming each other in the aftermath of a failed company, in my experience the failure is usually for more fundamental reasons. When the business is sustainable and growing, the pie is growing for everyone and the conflicts are manageable, and when it's shrinking you're probably doomed anyway. But then I tend to feel the same about most cases of private equity.
why does this not mention ai? these layoffs are essentially only because of ai both indirectly and directly, perhaps not because of current impactful productivity gains but realignment of strategic resources to invest in ai infrastructure (capital vs labor) and then also likely preparation for the continued exponential improvement of models and coding agents which will require humans to get out of the loop
essentially imo all 'pacts' between employers and companies is going to change because basically the entire category of economic work we are doing as a society will become not necessary over the next decade due to this
its just that software development is going to come earlier due to its critical nature to the roadmap of model improvement and increasing lab research speed. also due to the fact that RL works quite well for software development, including the more advanced applications like model research
also as a preemptive rebuttal for anyone saying i have no idea how swe/ai research works i am a swe who also does ai research work
There was a paragraph about AI somewhere in the middle.
> The AI efficiency narrative provides the perfect cover for these layoffs. Companies can frame headcount reduction as “leveraging AI to increase productivity” or “optimizing for the future of work.” It sounds forward-thinking and strategic rather than admitting they failed to manage performance or simply want to cut costs. Whether AI actually replaces the laid-off workers’ productivity is rarely measured or proven, but the narrative sells well to investors and the media.
This is a butthurt Microsoft employee. They've laid off/performance-pushed 20% or so of employees a year. Concentrated in certain departments more than others. Do Google, Apple Netflie and others not have layoffs?
I wish people were not so adverse to unions. The company will never be your friend. You will almost never have much leverage over what the company wants to do. The information you have will most likely be very asymmetrical to what the company has insight into, putting you at a disadvantage. Unions are imperfect. Unions will have its own inside politics. You will pay a union fee.
I think humans are fundamentally flawed in not being able to see alternate history. If they have to pay a union, they will not see all the benefits, and only focus on the 50 dollar union fee.
Software developers have enjoyed decades of high demand for their skills and the companies that hired them have enjoyed decades of an abundance of capital against a low interest rate. You didn't need a union because you had leverage due to the demand for your skills and companies didn't need to be particularly efficient.
This was a time where companies were hiring talented developers just to deny them to their competitors. Nobody was interested in shaking up that status quo by becoming part of a union.
You need a union when there's demand precisely because there will be down times.
People were never good at thinking about a pessimistic future to plan ahead BEFORE the shit hits the fan. Those who did were sidelined as naysayers or buzzkills.
Just look at European government run pension systems which are basically legal pyramid schemes, that everyone knows are unsustainable the way things are going right now, but nobody wants to do anything about it when it's more convenient to kick the can down the road until it become a problem under someone else's watch.
and we're hitting that point. now. but the gist of the parent's arguement is that we didn't before.
also keep in mind that unions first popped up in places were people were, like, dying, or getting maimed: trains, mines, electrical, gasfitters, ironworkers. up until now programming has been easy money sitting indoors while sipping lattes.
You form the union while you have leverage, not in the down times.
The first unions aren't the only kind. Unions benefit all sorts of fields. They continue to fight on behalf of labor. In all fields, management and labor are at odds and management has a collective bargaining voice so labor needs one too.
As I write on a sibling comment, in many European countries, unions are by industry sector, not specific professionals, so everyone on the sector is able to enjoy being part of union agreements, regardless of their roles.
The amount of unioned workers keep decreasing because the firms with unioned workers fail or the work is outsourced. I think open source software is the best protection against abuses because workers can take the means of production elsewhere if a company becomes dysfunctional or greedy. The consolidation of patents in other engineering fields has killed the industry in the US.
I'm traditionally pro Open Source but I don't see how it helps much in this case, because whatever effort you put into Open Source software equally benefits the corporations you are fleeing from who can just take your work for free now.
And this is more true now than ever before since they can (so far legally, if not morally) also use LLMs to whitewash off GPL and other such licenses that would in the past have put practical limitations on their usage.
If you've built up lots of experience working on a closed-source in-house code base that expertise will be tied to the company you're working for and once you're fired all that knowledge becomes useless to you.
If you've built up expertise in an open-source projects that lots of other companies use that knowledge is a valuable asset on your resume.
Yup. The GPL is the software version of a union. You know it works because of how aggressively companies like Apple avoid and hate it.
>because the firms with unioned workers fail or the work is outsourced
Sorry, you misspelled "decades of Republicans disassembling labor protections and enacting garbage like right to work laws, corporations hiring thugs like the Pinkertons to break up and discourage them, and conservative media spewing lies to discourage membership".
I don’t think there is a contradiction here. Cheap, un-unionized labor has put many unionized firms out of business. It is extremely rare for a firm to be “de-unionized”.
You're totally correct, but it wasn't _just_ Republicans. The Democrats are incredibly anti-labor. Even Biden, who was marketed as "most pro-labor president since FDR" forced the railroad workers back to work.
Both parties are so in capital's pocket that, at least on labor issues, they are essentially the same.
They are absolutely not, and at this point anyone claiming as much is being malicious.
Yes, Biden could have done better on railroads, but his administration:
* Made millions more workers eligible for overtime pay
* Installed union leaders on the NLRB (contrast to Republicans who fired members, defunded efforts, and gave access to NRLB data to Musk/Palantir/etc.)
* Those new NLRB members issued the Cemex decision making it harder for companies to suppress union voting
* Issued any number of rules in favor of workers i.e. https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/olms/olms20230727
* Raised the contractor minimum wage
* Increased funding for the NLRB
* Ensured that companies couldn't avoid penalties by forming smaller companies - a process the Trump NLRB created to make it harder to penalize companies unionbusting
This is only a few things. There is a world of difference.
None of the little technocratic nonsense matters though if you blow it when workers are actually trying to directly exert their power. The power of the workers doesn't come from the NLRB or any of these government institutions, it comes from their ability to withold their labor, and when they do that it becomes clear that both parties are funded by the same oligarchs because both of them will step in and stop it.
So that makes rhem "essentially the same??"
> I think open source software is the best protection against abuses because workers can take the means of production elsewhere if a company becomes dysfunctional or greedy.
OSS? You mean copyleft? Who does that? Who would use that?
OSS, even MIT licensed, embodies an radical idea that is counter to how most other engineering fields operate. The software required to design a chemical plant can cost 60K+ per year, per license, which locks in engineers and drives down their wages.
Yeah, look at union successes like dockworkers holding economy hostage via a legalized monopoly, while having more striking non-working members long useless due to automation than actual workers! I sure aspire to work in an industry like that.
Or like teachers in new York getting paid to sit in the rubber room as union fights for months to defend them after chronic drinking at work. I miss my beers in my terrible non unionized workplace.
And it's not like I plan on doing anything illegal, but if I ever misuse user data or whatever it would be nice to have a wall of silence (just need a color, blue is taken), instead of all those pesky whistleblowers.
I would especially love to be paid based on seniority and have (the small minority, but still) useless, lazy and incompetent coworkers I had keep their job and be paid the same, especially the guy I repeatedly caught playing fantasy baseball. He got fired (I didn't say anything, his lack of performance was also pretty obvious), I think it would be much more equitable and would really motivate me if he got to keep his job and was paid same as me.
Where do I sign up to pay only a small fee for these benefits?
I've always wondered how much one has to lick the boot until they stop tasting leather. Or maybe it's an acquired taste.
Join this guys union.
Ah, the insightful leftist response. I was born in the USSR, so this drivel doesn't really work on me. I hate marxists/etc probably more than even fascists/etc.
But regardless, American style unions are just a uniquely malignant institution. They do/did unions better in Japan for example or even in Europe; although I still think these are a net negative, compared to them US style unions are just tailor made to suite parasites and criminals. Or as they say, my opinion of them was better before I heard of the union-mafia connections, but now I've lost all respect for mafia.
> If they have to pay a union, they will not see all the benefits, and only focus on the 50 dollar union fee.
This is the worst part of averting disaster - people never see you fixed something before it became a problem. That's why there are so many "disaster-driven organizations" out there, where the people who prevents disasters gets passed over by the people who often provoke them in order to be the hero that fixes the problem.
In Europe though, usually European unions apply to everyone on a specific sector, regardless of what they do in the building.
I enjoyed many years the agreements of IG Metal in the telecommunications and life sciences sectors, as software engineer.
IG Metall is excellent, and I highly recommend working for companies whose employment contracts were negotiated by them - that would be a lot of “traditional” German industrial firms. When layoffs happen, you find out over a year in advance, usually two or three.
I got my dues’ worth in just the agreement they quickly got to during the post-COVID inflation to adjust our wages. Of course, I would have still gotten it had I not been a member, but it takes people willing to be members to make them (us!) strong enough that employers take them (us!) very seriously.
Oh, and the pay is way better than a lot of IT consultancies here, not to mention the hours and general working conditions.
Being in union doesn't protect from layoffs. Part of the recent layoffs were in a union
This. In Germany there have been and still are plenty of layoffs happening, most at jobs part of strong unions like the auto industry. Strong unions just means better severance packages than those not in unions when you get laid off, not that you're protected from ever being laid off. To me that's a pretty fair balance IMHO.
IIRC, only in France unions can prevent companies from doing redundancies if their bottom line looks good, but that's probably also why many companies aren't hiring much in France to begin with, why skilled wages are lower and youth unemployment higher there compared to other equally developed economies like Netherlands or Germany for example.
Companies with CBAs can downsize as well. Union or no union does not really matter.
There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve and in many cases they would exacerbate the ones we do have.
Most of the issue is that there's too much administrative policy (whether the imposition is internal or external doesn't matter) for us to effectively communicate and collaborate. Unions would only add to that while collecting fees from us. Most of us are intelligent enough to know this which is why we never form them.
"There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve"
Question for you about this. Is the balance of power in negotiation equal between a lone developer and a company?
I ask, because in my little world, it sure seems like the company has way more of the cards than a developer does.
It's more in favor of the employee than a lot of people admit. The problem isn't the negotiating power it's that there's so much noise when you're switching companies it's impractical.
Unions could only make that worse.
"It's more in favor of the employee than a lot of people admit."
But is it equal? It is hard to scientifically to prove, but it sure seems like companies have way more leverage than a lone developer.
I am not trying to antagonize you, btw, I am just seeing where you come from in your points.
Most financial advisors tell you to keep a rainy day fund with a 3-6 month runway.
Given what's been happening in the tech industry and the economy at large, I now keep a 1-year emergency fund in a money-market fund at 4% (Fidelity SPAXX). I'm probably losing out on some growth (SP500 grew 11% over the past year, despite the massive drop in April 2025), but at least I have liquidity in case I get laid off.
That's the kind of game I feel I have to play these days.
If you only have a little more than a year in total assets that probably makes sense.
But if you have much more than that, there’s no reason to keep an entire year in such a low return investment.
Money in say an S&P500 ETF can be liquid in 1-3 days.
SP500 can go down a lot and stay down for a long time.
We went through this in 2022 when most stocks were down 20% for a year. SP500 is not a low risk short term investment.
How would you feel if your rainy day fund lost 20% of its value?
I think OP is speaking about people who have 5x or more than their current salary in equities, where even a 50% temporary drop in assets will have no meaningful effect in lifestyle (and a long-term 50% drop in S&P would be apocalyptic, bigger fish to fry).
I think that's a bet that is contingent upon not getting laid off for more than a year during a period when there is 20-30% drawdown. If that happens, then any growth differential between equities and SPAXX's 4% is going to be wiped out -- in which case it was better to have stayed with SPAXX which offers liquidity and modest but stable growth at near zero risk.
It's not a sure win rule.
A better strategy is to hedge (bet maybe 3 months of your 1 year emergency runway), but that requires some acumen.
>A better strategy is to hedge (bet maybe 3 months of your 1 year emergency runway), but that requires some acumen.
Yeah that’s what I was suggesting when I said you don’t need keep your entire 1 year emergency fund in low risk investments (assuming you have much more than a year of runway).
Same! Still good that you can get 4% on a risk free investment these days
Or put another way, your income is depreciating at at least 4%.
Umm, my search engine says US inflation was 4.7 percent in 2021, 8 in 2022, 4.12 in 2023, 2.9 in 2024, 2.4 this year. Will you choose this in the 4+ percent years too?
Did you also check 7 day yields (interest) in those years? SPAXX is currently 4%. But was 5% in previous years (it holds US treasuries and has a very low expense ratio and holds its NAV)
https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/summary/31617...
This overlooks the 2009 and 2014 layoffs and the notorious Mini-Microsoft blog, still up over 15 years later(!), where they were discussed. The notion of a "Microsoft Pact" is absolute baloney but, had there been one, it was broken back then, not anytime recent.
Right, but there is even an implicit pact, you get lower-than-market compensation but you get better benefits and long-term stability. At least that's the mental math you did when joining the company and comparing offers between employers.
The notion that layoffs are something new at Microsoft is weird. I joined it in 2009 in the middle of a large layoff, and I've seen several more over the 15 years I've spent working there. E.g. almost 8k people were gone back in 2015.
Nor is it something unique to them. As far as I know, the only large US tech company that didn't do layoffs in the past decade is NVIDIA (their last one was in 2008).
>almost 8k people were gone back in 2015
That wasn't a traditional layoff - it was a reimagining of the development process and the elimination of SDET which was overwhelmingly a good thing - I also joined in 2009, and SDET was an utter disaster. All the good SDETs got out of that job - either to SDE at Microsoft or to SDE at another company. Those that were left were largely a waste of money, and the entire culture of "this person writes the code, this person writes the tests" meant that a lot of devs got high recognition and rewards for writing untestable unmaintainable garbage that someone else had to try to cover.
Meanwhile, outside of the Redmond bubble, people keep hitting bugs in MS products that never would have gotten past the STEs and SDETs back in the day. Microsoft was forced to build its QA discipline in the '90s and early '00s because they were being torn to shreds by the press and public for the legendary bugginess of their products. Now we're seeing that bugginess creep back in thanks to Nadella.
Whenever it comes up among my co-workers as a Microsoft product falls on its face yet again, most recently MS Project Online screwing up something as simple as completion percentages during a meeting, I just sigh and quip "Maybe Microsoft ought to consider hiring a QA department."
As a manager I’m going thru performance management myself. It’s a hard experience.
What I learned is: you need to hold a high bar, because people can do anything to keep their job, and often not what you want them to do
What you want is someone who is open to feedback, understands it, and takes effective action.
Outside of that, there’s a whole gamut of people. Some get defensive. Some are politely open to feedback but don’t actually try to understand. Some understand but don’t care enough to follow thru. And some try hard but aren’t effective. All of that is bad for your team, and unlikely to change. Just need to cut your losses to open your seat for someone who can do it.
The current person i have is open to feedback, but doesn’t fully understand it and doesn’t care to. It’s like dragging a horse to water. After doing that for six months my manager pointed that out, it’s just not a good fit. I like to see the best in people, and even a little bit of improvement gives me hope. But it’s dragging down our team potential. It’s a hard truth.
Well said.
And what I’ve found is your team knows who is and who is not performing. And if you fail to do something about the low performer under the guise of being a nice person (or hoping they’ll eventually figure it out), your team will lose respect for you.
A team of high performers does not want to have to carry along a straggler, no matter how nice they are.
In my experience, I wish I’d made those hard decisions sooner in hindsight, rather than hoping they’d get where I wanted them to be.
It can create some weird unintended consequences though. Like if people know you regularly manage out low performers, they might be risk averse to try something difficult for fear of failing and losing their job. They need to be able to see exactly why someone didn’t make the cut.
It’s a difficult line, especially when complicated by blunt corporate incentives like stack ranking and PIP’ing the bottom 10%, etc where it can be less than clear sometimes.
I would much rather work for a place where the culture allows people to be humans, and 1x and 10x people can coexist under the same management.
But hey I am judging off of basically one sentence you wrote so what do I really know about your situation?
You are not being paid by a company “to be human”. You are being paid to produce. If you don’t produce it makes sense they don’t want to pay you, especially if it’s easy to find someone else to produce in your place.
You've perfectly described why most corporations get low-engagement employees producing whatever is asked without much questioning because they simply don't care. You pay me, I produce what you asked, no matter how shit it is since I'm not paid to be a human with qualities that could produce something better.
It's a two-way street.
Evidently. If you produce more than you’re being paid for, or you produce something different than you think suits the job better, you are making a mistake that you should correct: you are giving away your labour. You probably think your labour is valuable which is why you shouldn’t give it away.
Paying 35% below market and promising security to those willing to believe it is a sure way to slowly brain drain the company. People forget how dominant Microsoft used to be in tech.
Google had the same "no layoffs" vibe too, and they paid better. Turns out that everyone is willing to do layoffs.
Still waiting for the Apple shoe to drop. Has Apple just not been as expansionist as these other companies? Or is it still coming?
They just didn't hire a lot like other companies. No cloud or AI bandwagon with tons of hiring and then later finding no work recently hired folks. Also work conditions were more traditional and stiff compared to pure software play companies so lot of people weren't falling over each other to get job at Apple.
Also Apple is good at lot of outsourced work for long time compared to many other companies. So they don't tons of non-core software stuff in-house. In that matter they are more like typical Fortune 500 companies than SV company.
maybe that's why their AI/Assistant suck
LOL. Could be. But why then Xcode sucks. Surely there is no shortage of Xcode engineers there.
Guess what they have a shortage of.
Apple's headcount grew at a much slower pace during COVID/ZIRP in comparison to other FAANG/MANGA companies, so they're less likely to cut full time roles. Contractors have been cut, but there are many fewer guarantees when a contractor rather than a W-2 employee.
My impression is that apple seems to have loads and loads of disposable contract workers. Does apple actually hire that much?
Apple is famous for keeping a huge war chest and not reinvesting it, right?
I know they were when Jobs was still in charge, not sure if it has been invested elsewhere since then
Apple decided it wanted to be fashionably late to AI so I assume it will also be fashionably late to layoffs too.
Microsoft definitely does underpay the market significantly! Like 60% of what other companies of the same level pay, unless you're in the Copilot org. Maybe you'll get a little bit higher.
The majority of Microsoft employees are in Seattle/Redmond, which has no state taxes and a lower cost of living than the Bay Area, so it isn’t a straightforward comparison.
It's a straightforward comparison in the area. Below Principal/Staff, Microsoft's stock awards are a (very unfunny) joke and their comp is pretty meh.
I left in 2018. I was 63 (first level senior) and had offers from Google and Meta for a downlevel (L4) at a 40% increase in total comp. The gap has closed slightly in the last 7 years but not much at those levels.
Same experience for me, I still remember at IC1 getting 7k stocks over 5 years as my "stock bonus" for the year. which meant getting 1 or 2 MSFT stock every 4 months :D
What companies do you think are at that level?
Google, Facebook, Amazon.
Amazon is in the same ballpark AFAIK, but the other two have noticeably better comp. The "Microsoft deal", such as it is, was that it's a place where you don't have to grind hard. This has changed now though.
It certainly didn't work that way for me, back in the late 2000s - my stint at Microsoft was the most exhausting grind of my career.
The common wisdom at the time was that different divisions of Microsoft had widely varying cultures, with as much difference as you'd expect to see between unrelated companies, so perhaps that was just DevDiv.
I was in DevDiv myself. From what I heard, Azure was where the grinding was at its worst.
I’ve never worked at Microsoft, but the author’s three takeaways is how it’s always been for other companies.
I never took implicit “they pay less but it’s more chill” culture stories seriously. You can classify certain job functions this way more readily than company wide cultures.
It was true though. And yes, you're right in that things can vary a lot from org to org, but there's still a median, and "they pay less but it's more chill" described Microsoft pretty accurately until a few years ago.
Can't generalize based on one data point but it really was historically low-stress and low-toxicity in every part of the company I've interacted with in the past 8+ years. If it had been combative and high-stress like some of the past places I've worked I wouldn't have considered the inferior compensation acceptable.
Yeah, I was afraid of generalizing throughout the company. I think compared to other companies it seems to have a benefit of being more "nice". Maybe it's mostly targeted towards tech roles at that?
I think everyone should dissuade themselves of the concept that such a thing as a "nice" company really truly exists. I've worked at close to 10 companies in my career both public and private.
Some of the companies I've worked the big "family" culture and "our people are our greatest asset" company principles were the ones to do the deepest and swiftest cuts. Meanwhile their supposedly comparatively ruthless shark infested competitors keep on keeping on.
The people I saw most impacted by this were the ones that took the culture both literally and seriously, staying in the big happy family companies long enough to develop far too much company-specific rather than industry specific expertise, just in time to get laid off at 50.
> big happy family companies long enough to develop far too much company-specific rather than industry specific expertise, just in time to get laid off at 50.
I think this is a great point. Lately this is number one thing I feel concerned about. Though paradoxically they are coming from different direction as pushing buzzword driven development too fast in process making stable products unstable, calling them out of date. And then getting rid of products along the people who worked on them as dead weight.
You thought MS was "nice"? WTF were you smoking?
Comparatively to other companies, (amazon meta) I feel like Microsoft is "nicer"
> This creates a system where companies find it easier to fire good employees in bulk than to fire bad employees individually. The legal protections meant to prevent arbitrary termination end up enabling exactly that
I have some passing familiarity with how (California) law firms approach firing, which this article gave me cause to consider:
- they do fire unproductive people aggressively (law firms bill by the hour and attorneys are very expensive to employ, so it’s very obvious and financially meaningful to the business when someone isn’t contributing)
- when they fire someone, they’re very secretive about it. The person stays on the firm’s website for months, and if you call HR, they’ll say that the person still works there (they probably do, in some narrow technical sense). This makes it somewhat easier for the person to get a new job.
Also this a nit but the legal protections aren’t meant to prevent arbitrary termination, which is pretty explicitly legal. They’re meant to prevent discrimination.
> For decades, Microsoft operated under an unspoken agreement with its employees—what I call “the pact.” The deal was simple: We’ll pay you 20-50% below market rate, but in exchange, you get stability, reasonable work-life balance, and most importantly, no layoffs.
This seems more of employee's made up rule rather than Microsoft's. I worked in a company in early 2000s' and old timer's told me similar rule "that here pay is less but little work and lifetime job guarantee". It was of course bullshit made up rule. As economy changed not only did they tighten the screws but also had many layoffs since then.
Right? I’ve never seen any company have a “pact” to not do layoffs. The more they try to sell this the more wary I’m going to be, especially if it’s an American company.
> But something shifted.
The powers that be realized an anxiety riddle fearful workforce can get stuff done too just fine as long as they don’t have a better option and you dangle the occasional carrot.
So as long as all corporations move roughly in lockstep you can drastically change conditions without much consequences
It’s a bit like the first big news website implementing a paywall was outrageous and deemed suicide. But if everyone does it…
There will be consequences, they'll just take some time to set in. But morale is in the gutter across the company now, and a lot of people who would previously go above and beyond to maintain some level of software quality have thrown in the towel now, since this last round of layoffs, by virtue of who was targeted, very clearly demonstrated that the company doesn't actually care about any of that one bit, and the sole reason to perform is to ensure that you stay above the cut (and even that's hardly a guarantee when whole teams get laid off).
Aside from that, there's also the matter of fewer people tasked with the same amount of things. The official line on that is that AI makes the remaining employees more productive. The reality is that it's nowhere near good enough for many products, so it just means overworked people making more mistakes and burning out faster.
There were already too few people for the tasks before this round of layoffs. The working order has been "do more with less, use AI" for over a year.
Every MS FTE whom I knew enough to have that kind of conversation with was stretched thin to the breaking point. Now half their team is gone, and the show must go on apparently. It does not seem viable to me, not even with AI.
Yeah, now they have AI, Artificial Insecurity
just another tool to push us to work more for less
It don't work, but you better learn it and use it, because it will replace you and also now you got to delivery 30% more
This was always a con for suckers. The only ways out are unions and employee-owned co-ops by changing the interests to ensure stability rather than merely being fooled by corporate masters who can always change the deal at any time.
Unions don’t prevent layoffs. You’re bound by a union contract which will include conditions for layoffs. Unions can prevent overwork and burn out. They cannot prevent layoffs.
Unions can't (always) make an unprofitable company profitable, but they can prevent fake layoffs that aren't actually warranted by the company's economic condition, like the kind the article is talking about.
> Unions can't (always) make an unprofitable company profitable
Indeed, I think their major trick (in America, anyway) is to make a profitable company unprofitable. Much like the bad forms of private equity from above, they bleed a business dry from below.
Like every other stakeholder, workers and their representatives have their own interests, and sometimes those are in tension with other stakeholders. But while it's very easy for workers and management to end up blaming each other in the aftermath of a failed company, in my experience the failure is usually for more fundamental reasons. When the business is sustainable and growing, the pie is growing for everyone and the conflicts are manageable, and when it's shrinking you're probably doomed anyway. But then I tend to feel the same about most cases of private equity.
Rent, don't buy. Maintaining optionality is the thing to do when things are unpredictable.
why does this not mention ai? these layoffs are essentially only because of ai both indirectly and directly, perhaps not because of current impactful productivity gains but realignment of strategic resources to invest in ai infrastructure (capital vs labor) and then also likely preparation for the continued exponential improvement of models and coding agents which will require humans to get out of the loop
essentially imo all 'pacts' between employers and companies is going to change because basically the entire category of economic work we are doing as a society will become not necessary over the next decade due to this
its just that software development is going to come earlier due to its critical nature to the roadmap of model improvement and increasing lab research speed. also due to the fact that RL works quite well for software development, including the more advanced applications like model research
also as a preemptive rebuttal for anyone saying i have no idea how swe/ai research works i am a swe who also does ai research work
There was a paragraph about AI somewhere in the middle.
> The AI efficiency narrative provides the perfect cover for these layoffs. Companies can frame headcount reduction as “leveraging AI to increase productivity” or “optimizing for the future of work.” It sounds forward-thinking and strategic rather than admitting they failed to manage performance or simply want to cut costs. Whether AI actually replaces the laid-off workers’ productivity is rarely measured or proven, but the narrative sells well to investors and the media.
This is a butthurt Microsoft employee. They've laid off/performance-pushed 20% or so of employees a year. Concentrated in certain departments more than others. Do Google, Apple Netflie and others not have layoffs?
This so