[csdreamer7]

Nadella was the one who fired Microsoft's QA team for Windows. It took a while but those chickens finally came home to roost.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1626871/microsoft-to-b...

This one youtuber, I forget his name, was fired as part of that layoff. He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.

[frde_me]

> He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.

This really sucks for him. Through should Microsoft _not_ layoff specific people due to health conditions? Is that something we require from companies?

[project2501a]

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

[eek2121]

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.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[wahnfrieden]

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.

[chrishare]

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

[mxkopy]

Yes

[dghlsakjg]

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.

[bowsamic]

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

[bsimpson]

There's a long-circulating mind virus that makes executives believe top-tier engineers don't need their software tested.

Google's QA is pitiful too.

[ahartmetz]

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.

[Seattle3503]

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.

[hnthrowaway0328]

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

[AstroNutt]

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

He's a super smart programmer, but seems to be suffering from depression since Microsoft laid him off. He often talks about his issues when he livestreams Tech Talk on Saturdays.

[csdreamer7]

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

Ty, that is him.

[GuB-42]

Well, you have two distinct problems here.

One is Microsoft releasing shitty software.

The other is a deeper societal problem with healthcare and loyalty between companies and their employees.

For me, they are unrelated problems. In a welfare state, the QA team may have been reaffected to some other tasks within the company and have the health benefits provided by the state, but it wouldn't have made the software less shitty.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

Was he the reason shift-left hit mainstream? Recently, smaller non-faang companies followed suit and fired all the qa people. DevOps/SRE people are likely next.

[WalterBright]

COBRA enables one to continue with the employer's insurance for up to 18 months after a layoff.

[trollbridge]

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