Comment by jjaksic

How about you nationalize your healthcare, so people like that are not depended on their work to get the care they need?

Legally, Microsoft, or any company, cannot use any personal factors in determining who to lay off. If they do, they risk a very real lawsuit. All one needs to do is show some evidence of discrimination, and the EEOC doesn't charge a dime, the worst they will do is deny to pursue. If that happens, most private lawyers will take the case on contingency.

This is the reason you see sweeping cuts without regard to age, sex, etc.

There have also been lawsuits in the past that have settled out of court where a company's layoffs appear to overly inflict damage on one class vs. another, even if the intent was not to do that.

I am not defending these companies at ALL btw. I just have a bit of experience in this area due to the legalities, and I wanted to share it.

I am also not saying that companies don't do this, but the smart ones don't, and the smart ones at least try to at least avoid making it look obvious.

> Is that something we require from companies?

In Germany, yes. For mass layoffs, this absolutely has to be considered. In general, the older the employee is, or if the employee has dependents, the more difficult it gets to both fire them or lay them off.

It is, but more generally. In many other countries, it is not so easy to lay off employees as it is in the US. It is also not necessary that your access to healthcare be contingent to your employer's whims.

Not at all - it's legal, but it doesn't garner goodwill either.

Yes

Companies don’t have agency. People do. Compassion is a cross cultural value. Including amongst those that run companies.

For the most part none of us has any “required” obligation to anyone else.

Is it something we require of companies? No. But being a responsible, compassionate human being that considers the totality of circumstance is something I expect of that company’s leaders. Especially a company that has the money and need for technical skills elsewhere in the org.

The golden rule does not stop being true just because you are at work.

Preemptively: duty to shareholders is broader than short term profit maximizing. Avoiding bad PR like this is also in the service of MS shareholders.

As a side note: Nadella moved his home to Canada, while working at MS, so his special needs kid could go to a specialist school. That is absolutely the right choice. The argument that MS should not consider the health of their employees children is horseshit when they allow the CEO to set up house hours away in a different country for that exact reason.

At the end of the day, a kid suffered unnecessarily through no fault of his parents or his own.

Yes I’d say that such people should get extra protections

In case of some recent Windows parts, that would need to be compounded by the mistaken belief to have top-tier engineers working for them.

It's always the departments that are closest to the customer that pay the price in my experience. At one company, after killing QA, the support team created their own internal QA process. They were going to deal with the issues anyways, so they wanted to catch as many as they could first.

They have long adopted the mindset to get users as free beta testers. Long gone the tradition that quality matters.

> Jerry Berg is the person you're probably thinking of. His YouTube channel is Barnacules Nerdgasm.

Ty, that is him.

Yes, because it’s easy to afford $2000 or $3000 a month when you just got laid off.

>One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.

No kidding, the totally threw it all away. It used to be that Windows was already the place for gaming. And the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation. But that was a long time ago. Has any Microsoft gaming release exceeded expectations lately? Call of Duty will always sell like hotcakes, but the latest Black Ops is a hot expensive mess that underperformed last year's title.

Do you think they'll continue to win in enterprise? As a casual office user, who's had to do some PowerPoint and word docs recently, I found the experience of using office 365 truly miserable. All of them are laggy and horrible to use.

I think by moving onto the cloud they've left themselves open to being disrupted, and when it comes it'll be like Lotus Notes, an extremely quick downfall.

Microsoft has never been an end-user-focused company. Almost every successful product they've ever made was to sell to a business for their employees to use. Everything else they seem to either half ass or screw up or lose their passion for at some point.

I think I first came to that realization with windows phone 7/8? The UI was cool looking, but functionality was half-baked and third party app availability was dismal. HOWEVER! You could sign a windows phone into an active directory/365 account and manage the bloody daylights out of it via group policy and the tools to do that were SUPER WELL MADE.

Same is/was true of Microsoft Teams - an utter abomination of a chat client, the search is garbage, the emoji and sticker variety sometimes weird, the client itself randomly uses up 100% CPU for no reason and is just generally buggy... but gosh darnit, MS made sure sysadmins could ban memes and use of certain emoji via policy and gave insane amounts of detail to auditing and record keeping. So sure it's a pile of shit to use, but awesome if you wanna spy on your employees and restrict their every move.

Windows is fun because with the enterprise version, they give all that control to the employers, but with the consumer version they give all that control to advertisers, developers, and themselves.

I think this is also why every consumer-focused product they make either fails instantly, or ends up rotting on the vine and failing after whoever evangelized that product leaves the company (possibly being forced out for not being a "culture fit"). Do I have to go on about zune/windows phone/xbox? Or surface? Or the way they randomly dumped their peripherals product line on another company? lol.

Windows 7 was about the best Windows ever got, like 2K and XP. Vista and 8 (and now 11) are the bad ones.

> You'd swear it had became worse than Windows 7 at this point.

Do you mean Windows Vista instead? Because Windows 7 was probably the last (half-)decent windows (no UI though for tablet, no ads in the OS, no ubiquitous telemetry, no account BS).

> But they've backslidden. They've ceded Windows and gaming to their cloud and AI infra ambitions. They're not being friendly anymore.

Forget being “friendly”. GitHub has enormous mindshare and has frankly quite reasonably pricing (far cheaper than GitLab, for example), but the product just sucks lately. The website, while quite capable (impressively so at times) is so slow and buggy that it’s hard to benefit from any of its capabilities.

It’s gotten to the point where, every time I try a newish capability, I ask myself “how bad can this possibly be,” and it invariably exceeds expectations.

GitHub needs to take a step back and focus on fixing things. Existing features should work, be coherent, and be fast. If it takes longer to load a diff in the web viewer than it takes to pull the entire branch and view the diff locally, something is wrong.

If a coworker reviews my code, I should not sitting right next to them, literally looking at the same website they’re on, and wondering why they see the correct context for their review comment but I don’t.

Meanwhile nowadays everyone at Windows is a Web developer.

At least Windows development wasn't done with Chrome.