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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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?
hackthemack|7 months ago
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.
armada651|7 months ago
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.
cactusfrog|7 months ago
sershe|7 months ago
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?
TiredOfLife|7 months ago
pjmlp|7 months ago
I enjoyed many years the agreements of IG Metal in the telecommunications and life sciences sectors, as software engineer.
rbanffy|7 months ago
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.
tuna74|7 months ago
mathiaspoint|7 months ago
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.
wenc|7 months ago
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.
sarchertech|7 months ago
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.
casper14|7 months ago
aitchnyu|7 months ago
ThrowawayB7|7 months ago
dshacker|7 months ago
int_19h|7 months ago
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).
Arainach|7 months ago
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.
xivzgrev|7 months ago
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.
Esophagus4|7 months ago
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.
cheschire|7 months ago
But hey I am judging off of basically one sentence you wrote so what do I really know about your situation?
cjbgkagh|7 months ago
saagarjha|7 months ago
JKCalhoun|7 months ago
Oggle|7 months ago
paxys|7 months ago
wbl|7 months ago
endemic|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
steveBK123|7 months ago
int_19h|7 months ago
kevingadd|7 months ago
dshacker|7 months ago
msteffen|7 months ago
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.
geodel|7 months ago
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.
vachina|7 months ago
Havoc|7 months ago
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…
int_19h|7 months ago
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.
hyfgfh|7 months ago
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
burnt-resistor|7 months ago
orochimaaru|7 months ago
charlie0|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
squatin64|7 months ago
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
nessguy|7 months ago
> 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.
khelavastr|7 months ago
This so