[indrora]

I too was at MSFT until the July layoffs.

Hang around old Microsofties and you'll encounter a phrase: "The Deal." The Deal is this informal agreement: Microsoft doesn't pay amazingly but you're given the time to have work-life balance, you can be relatively assured that upper leadership gives a shit about the ICs, there's space for "... So I was thinking..." to become real "... and that's our next product" discussions and that it's okay to fall so long as you can get back up and keep walking afterwards.

The Deal is dead.

People fired for performance after a bad review their manager didn't give them. The constant slimming of orgs and the relentless gnawing at budgets. I watched as a team went from reasonable to gutted because it got the short straw in "unregretted attrition quotas"

AI is driving this, and I want to see the chat logs between executives and copilot. What sycophantic shit is it producing that is driving them to make horrible decisions?

[roncesvalles]

The Deal died when Microsoft got on the layoff bandwagon in Q1 2023 for no good reason and became very aggressive with perf after that. If Microsoft is just as toxic and unstable as Meta, why not just work at Meta for double the money?

Funnily, Apple also has an unspoken "deal" (pay a bit low but treat really well) and they stuck to it even through the layoff era.

[taurath]

AI is busy quietly convincing every executive that uses it that they have no use for people to work out the details of their ideas anymore. It’s so frustrating to have these drive by executives come into a space you’re working in, drop in a 15 page deep think report they got from a 2 sentence prompt and call that contributing. Bonus points if the report is from an AI platform your company doesn’t have approved so you as a line employee can get written up for.

[HacklesRaised]

Is it AI, or is it being run by people entirely divorced from the founder's vision?

[balamatom]

I think it's being compliant with the founder's vision entirely.

[pjmlp]

From the outside this is clearly visible how Project Reunion crashed, C++/WinRT went into maintenance, VC++ losing steam to ISO compliance after bosting about C++20 and C11/17, .NET focus on Aspire/Blazor all AI in detriment of the rest,....

Thankfully I am technology mercenary, polyglot, and use whatever the clients need, regardless of my point of view, but it is sad to see the human part behind those decisions being affected.

[joshwa]

URA quotas—I see the Amazon infection has spread from Seattle to Redmond.