Microsoft employee here: I took this exactly the opposite way. I know I'm valuable, I know many others aren't (sorry: being honest) and this is a good thing from my perspective because at Microsoft we are finally facing reality and getting the right people in place.
My only gripe is that the layoffs are not larger - we need about 20% of the marketing folks and 20% of the program managers that we currently have. I would cut deeply in those disciplines as well and then Page-style cut all of the deadwood non-strategic low-revenue projects (and there are a lot of them).
Laying off Terry Myerson (Windows) and Kevin Turner (chief hacker culture killer) would be a great improvement as well - they are both cancers.
In my experience with our last acquisition some of the best performers ended being cut just because they were in the wrong area. So if MS actually evaluates each employee I would be surprised. It usually just comes down to numbers. We need to save X and that means eliminate Y people. Here's a list.
For example. We got acquired. New companies decides we need to cut some of our staff. They get rid of a co-worker who is solely responsible for training companies to work with our product. His pay was way under market anyway so they didn't save much letting him go. Then he goes and gets a job making double with better benefits doing training. Then a few weeks later our group is scrambling to find someone, anyone, capable of delivering customer training....
MS employee here as well. They both aren't going anywhere, KT more-so; he's well respected among the leadership and SMSG has grown exponentially under his watch.
Was Terry responsible for the compartmentalisation of Exchange to permit it to spread across different machines, each with different roles? Good idea but I found 2010 bloated compared to 2003, I skipped 2008 (and NOBODY tested 2010 SP2 did they???? That bust everything for me, and on an Exchange instance on one machine only; I can only imagine how it was for spread installations).
Are there really that many little projects? How big is the Office team?
Windows needs better leadership and frankly someone from the outside at this point. Every time I hear Terry speak I have no idea what he is talking about (and I get the sense he doesn't either).
Kevin's management style is to give everyone a scorecard, Walmart Style, on metrics like "top apps achieved" or "total apps achieved" that drives all sorts of terrible behaviors in our field organizations working with developers. This is why we have a Kindle application on Windows Phone that is terrible quality. Nobody has any incentive to help Amazon make it great because its not on the scorecard.
In terms of PM - I think many PMs (the good ones at least) should actually be dev leads. So maybe the right way of saying this is that we should fold them into the dev org as leads where they have the skills to do that.
Didn't Ballmer's reorganisation mean that there was a triad of developer, project manager and tester working together? That would mean one project manager for each developer wouldn't it?
We don't have one PM/test per dev, no. My team is currently something like 8 devs, 3 testers, 3 PMs. There was an internal shift to change the test/dev ratio to something like 2/3 or 1/3 (I can't remember exactly) instead of matching it. I don't know of a team in my division that has a 1:1 for PM or test to dev.
Thanks for the info. Very informative, considering I work in a tiny company and we have 3 developers, with 1 (me) working on the bit that people actually use daily (the entire GUI bit on multiple platforms).
I used to work in a larger team in a different company but we only had 1 PM who frustrated us all, sadly. How do they balance 3 PMs? Do they argue between themselves?
I can only speak for my team obviously but our product has quite a bit of complexity from both within (features) and without (partner contracts). There is enough work that the PMs typically own different aspects of the project and don't have many chances to step on each other's toes.
The triads are at a higher level. Once you get down to individual contributors there is typically a high ratio of Dev and QA to PM (maybe 1-2 PMs per team of 15), and usually a couple more Devs than QA. I'm not sure how widely those ratios are enforced or how much it varies from team to team.
My only gripe is that the layoffs are not larger - we need about 20% of the marketing folks and 20% of the program managers that we currently have. I would cut deeply in those disciplines as well and then Page-style cut all of the deadwood non-strategic low-revenue projects (and there are a lot of them).
Laying off Terry Myerson (Windows) and Kevin Turner (chief hacker culture killer) would be a great improvement as well - they are both cancers.