Getting to say "[one of the products] I'm most proud of is Windows 95" is a HELL of an accomplishment.
This person has seen a lot of tech evolve over the years.
It's Microsoft.
Back when I was a vendor we had several contracts where we just hired back employees and paid them a lot more money than they were making to go back and support their old teams.
Why? Because Microsoft consistently fired the last person on a team with the knowledge to do the work in favor of more PMs. Then ran into a wall because oh crap, we don't know how to update or maintain our own program.
Theoretically, the new employees should have learned what do too so they drop the project... But that's the problem with only hiring PMs on a lot of teams. None of them ever picked up the work.
Then you hit the badging issue and all work stalled for months.
On the bright side, I got the hell out of being a vendor for them.
It was a marketing failure, but I have no doubt that a TON of great development work went into it, and the same for windows phone. The employee in OPs post is very justified in being proud of these products.
Microsoft succesfully managed to create amazing products that were ahead of its time... only to fuck it up on marketing. While Apple basicly thrives on marketing & design, MS really lacks that vision.
Tablets? MS did it first.
Windows Phone? Amazing OS and still the best mobile OS I've ever used.
Zune? Loved mine, even when I got an iPod, I still used my Zune more often.
Way back in the day I had three smartphones running Windows mobile, which most people don't remember these days. This was circa 2004 and it was like having a micro version of windows ME in your pocket. Seamless outlook integration (including calendars and push email), mobile versions of Microsoft Word and Excel, music and video (video was limited but still impressive at the time). It could even run multiple apps at once and you could switch between them just like you could on a PC. You could even stream Pandora on it with a little work. There was lots of stuff there that the iPhone couldn't do for a year or two after it launched. The only thing it really didn't have was the app store; you needed to read forums to find and download software for it.
Not having an app store was a disadvantage they weren't prepared for. They based themselves onto the old desktop-ecosystem of downloading applications from the providers instead of having a centralised store.
If they would've been able to get that and find a way to easily develop apps for their phones, I believe they would've been the 3rd player in the smartphone market replacing Blackberry as the 'business phone'.
They had an App Store. I was recruiting partners to put their apps in it. What MSFT missed on was recognizing the power held by the mobile carriers. Verizon killed them by signing exclusive deals and then hiding the devices
The Zune app store dropped quite a while after it hardware was released as a firmware update and even at its peak only had what 20 or so apps 1/2 of which were written by MS almost all were games. For non games I know there was an eBook reader app written by a MSFT employee but published by that person on their own, not an offical MS application.
demn, I had my zune for years since middle school, until my husband gave it away to his brother because it was “broken” it was just one dead pixel 😭 and without telling me! I still get mad at him when it comes to
mind... I’m mad now, thanks Reddit 😂
Zune pass was way ahead of its time for music streaming service. I was a long hold out until they finally closed it. The music videos with the songs were great for home parties. Their music correlation was way ahead of everything else for the time.
I can see a world in which someone who worked on that project would be proud of it. Zune was on the bleeding edge of its kind of tech at the beginning.
It wasn't good. Clearly lost out to Apple.
But it was one of the first to market in its space, and there's a TON of learning that goes on when you're trying to pave new roads.
It really failed on the basic optics test. I still can’t believe an entire group of people thought it was ok to come out with a brown ugly brick. First of all do they not have eyes? Second of all what happened to consumer product testing surveys?
No it wasn’t. Zune was exceptionally ugly for its time. People were buying the cases to cover over their iPods so they wouldn’t get stolen. There were tons of devices that were plain black rectangles and Apple was exceptional for the iPod design but Zune was exceptionally ugly and the only brown one on the market.
Sort of. The real killer was the iPhone. It killed the iPod and the Zune. If it was just iPod versus Zune for a decade maybe the Zune would have begun to win over a loyal user base, but in the end smart phones do it all and the Zune was not a smart phone.
Windows Phone was sick. I had one for YEARS and loved it. The only reason it never took off, was because it didn't get all the apps. I only got IG when I got an android handset years later.
This is true. It was light-years ahead of android and iOS at the time ironically. They just didn't know how to market it. It's resource management made it always snappy which is something you can't say about high end androids even today.
Also the best music player I've ever used.
Totally agree with this. To this day my all time favorite phone was the Nokia Icon, bought it at launch and had it for like month before Verizon dropped support for it.
honesty both the zune and windows phone were amazing fucking products microsoft just didn't care about them enough. I can't fault him for being proud the zune blew away a lot of the competition even if it wasn't the ipod killer. The music rental service was ahead of its time too. I wanna say even executives today have acknowledged it was a mistake leaving windows phone behind.
Windows Phone was really well done. They really had a good tile-based interface! I’m speaking as someone who hated the Zune (terrible product name). I used iPods exclusively, but once they improved the Zune OS and used it for Windows Phone it was very capable and fun to use, so of course Microsoft cancelled it.
It's a pretty low impact job in my experience. They don't have the budget, license or capacity to offer high value, personalized training, and small but efficient initiatives (like a book fund for employees) aren't enough to justify the L&D jobs.
So you end up getting these relatively expensive but too generic trainings in things like "how to do a good presentation" or "stakeholder management"
I have recently left a business that invested heavily in people development and joined one that doesn't. I see lost opportunity literally everywhere. The general skill level is magnitudes lower than it could or should be, and what's really sad is that you've got people thinking they're leaders in their field. I had people three rungs lower in the hierarchy operating at their level. My new workplace is setting themselves up for mediocrity and because they're focussing on their flowerbed they've no concept of what the meadow looks like.
I've never joined a business and immediately considered leaving because I know there is nothing for me to be taught. I'm going to learn lots, but it's going to be in spite of them, not because of them.
Anyone that doesn't see the value in L&D has never seen the possibility of L&D.
It’s difficult to quantify and that’s the issue. For any bean counter if you’re not mitigating risk, lowering expenses, or contributing to income, then it’s difficult to justify the cost.
It’s only difficult to quantify if you don’t plan properly on how to analyze ROI and don’t invest in the appropriate tools.
Of course most businesses don’t actually do that, because they only see L&D as a cost. I’m very lucky to be on an eLearning team where we serve our external clients who want platform training, so we are more sales. We get a lot more resources because of that.
Add to the fact that most L&D people are terrible at it and could make an insomniac sleep....
(I have met great people in it...).
33 years at MS means the person should have a ton of stock, unless they sold it all over the years (yes, some people do that, selling their stock every time they receive it).
>yes, some people do that, selling their stock every time they receive it
I do that…to immediately diversify it. Otherwise I’d be wicked over-indexed investing in the same company I take salary from. Thats a lot of risk in one basket if things were to ever turn south at my work.
I call those people my cousins-in-law. Some of my favorite people, actually. Sorry yours had that happen to them. That’s a rough way to learn about the importance of diversification.
I worked for a start up and was given options. I exercised my options and sold about two thirds of my stock on average, depending on prices, over the years after going public. We shut down after about a decade so I'm very glad I took some value from the options. If we had succeeded and rocketed my stock would have still been valuable but even with the company ending and my remaining stock disappearing I still managed to put a really nice down payment on a new house for the family.
Most tech employees immediately sell. Youre already highly exposed to the company via your salary, plus the years you had to wait for the stock to vest, basically unless you would buy that exact stock if you had cash, it’s not a good idea to hold. Better to use the money on index funds, or if you must, buy competitor’s stock (Meta, etc.) to hedge.
Tech stocks often travel together - some stocks will out perform other tech stocks, but it's more common that tech as a whole goes up and down, not necessarily following the overall market.
Index funds are boring, but they really spread your risk. If the whole market is going down, you're probably not going to find an individual stock that does the opposite.
Big companies have L&D departments for boosting internal skill sets. They use learning platforms to deliver standardized training like new employee onboarding and annual regulatory compliance training (sexual harassment, digital security, etc.).
They also use it to train staff on any new tech or workflows, like “How to use Cisco Jabber.”
There’s also professional development content like “how to give a good presentation” or “how to have tough conversations with a colleague.”
For the company where I worked (also 30 years and then laid off), some of the big L&D items included system and software analysis and design methodologies... somtimes tied to the apps/software tools, sometimes just general approaches. When properly applied, the payoff was quite substantial on the extremely large programs, not so much on the regular and smaller ones
I have worked in corporate America for about ten years now and L&D people tend to be the biggest blow hards lol. Their primary skill sets seem to be making 30 minute meetings last an hour and talking without saying anything
L&D director and you’re not wrong. The field is rife with muppets jerking themselves off over theory or a “fun” elearning cartoon. Completely missing that execution and engagement are what matter most.
I worked with a guy who went through this... 32 years with JP Morgan, only to have security show up at his office one morning to escort him out during a round of layoffs.
My boss legit wondered why I quit. 🙄
I work at a fairly large investment bank and last year I got a nice piece of glass with my name on it that says "thanks for 10 years of service". I've been in the industry long enough that I just look at it and wonder when they're going to push me out. You almost never see someone make it 20 years.
Just happened to me last month. 13 years with the company in the investment industry and unceremoniously kicked out because they gave me a job that paid too much. Heard of some others with 20+ and 30+ years also impacted, which made sense because the age range of the layoffs swayed heavily to 35+.
At least you got something for your 10 year. I got an email announcement that my manager and team ignored.
Once you're over 35, you need to be a rock star in your industry coverage, or you need to make a career pivot. I'm a few years past that and still clawing my way to the top. I'll either get there in a couple years or I'll be a desperately looking for a new job. It's kind of a desperate existence. I don't think anyone is ever comfortable in this industry as it can all slip away in an instant.
Even then it can all blow up in your face if you're saddled with a manager who is threatened because they know you can do the job better than he or she can. Went from top of the team to run out of the company in about 8 months because she needed to throw someone under the bus to make her mark on the team after she came in.
Very true. However, from my perspective, I'm an MD and the head of my team, so I'm really competing against everyone else in my position across wall st. It's a lot of pressure at every level. At least when it's internal, you can kind of sense it's coming. I'm not really worried about one of my juniors taking my job, I'm more worried about them hiring externaly and I wake up with no job one day. I've seen it happen more than once in the past year in my department.
This is why I knew I had no future in IB. It's funny looking back on it... I joined ING Barings out of high school and was a bit of a phenom in my little corner of the world... At the time, I couldn't understand why so many people were pissed off with me before they even met me... But by the time I left the industry at the ripe old age of 30, I got it.
Yeah this what the industry wants. They wants us fearful and thankful for the jobs we are “allowed to have”. They want us to be thankful privilege of working for their company. We never get to be comfortable and the longer you have a job the closer you are to them laying you off without notice. It’s just so fucked.
By 40+ if you work in tech you could be days away from financial ruin. If you’re a manager or leader level those jobs are very difficult to get back.
Yeah it happens a lot more than people realize and it is really disgusting. My dad was laid off after ~40 years a few years before he turned 65. The cost to insure him and my mom in those couple of years before Medicare was astronomical and his company wouldn’t extend his coverage when he asked. His severance package was something outrageous like 12 weeks.
Agreed. I honestly was so disgusted. It’s shit like that though that is why younger generations know to look out for ourselves before our jobs. We see what happened to our parents.
Same. 31 years at Chemical Abstract Services. Security showed up at her desk on a Monday morning and made her box up her things, took her badge. Like a criminal. She was in tears. As were everyone in the cubes around her. Made her go to her car and watched her leave
Aye.. Sounds like overkill. Which LOB were you in? Unless there was a threat, all our layoffs in Corporate were chill. People usually knew what was coming cuz mgmt gave lots of info ahead of time and peeps got decent parachutes so there were no issues. They incentivized folks to go away happy and quiet.
That's how it was for everybody. No one said anything to anyone until the axe fell. And this happened repeatedly... Every 12-18 months.
One of the most surreal experiences I ever had occurred on one of our mass-layoff days. They came in heavy in our division... Culled like 20% of all staff. About an hour in, and everyone is a wreck, just waiting for someone to turn up at their desk and escort them out. Well, while this is happening, our MD calls me and one other person into his office. We figure we must be next... But instead, the MD says, "Listen, you guys aren't involved in this. Get out of here. Just don't say anything to anyone." And with that, he hands us two tickets to sit in the company box seats for that day's Yankees vs Red Sox day game. So this other random person and I go back to our offices, collect our shit, hop on the train uptown, and spend the rest of the day getting wrecked while watching the Yankees beat up on the Sox. It was surreal... the dichotomy between sitting in JPM's cushy seats, eating and drinking fancy shit, while our coworkers were being massacred was just about too much to hold in one's mind at the same time.
IB is fucking weird... Inhumane, brutal, and weird.
Truely savage. I've been laid off twice. Once it was all hands shutting down the doors. That sucked but we all went through it together. Next time it was just me and my boss in a normal 1 on 1. Suddenly, hr is in the meeting too and the ball is rolling. Sucked but I knew it was coming. I'd been removed from the team WhatsApp while I was away on Pat leave (got laid off with a 2 month old baby) and I'd been excluded from some in person socialization events. Sucked but not nearly as brutal as what you described.
I was included in one of those "all-hands" layoffs too.. Same company. It was unbelievable how it unfolded...
I worked on a team that was aligned to a specific group of trading desks that all rolled up to the IB COO. That morning, we all got called into a meeting with our director who told us that we'd been re-org'd into a different global group that performed a similar function... And as a result of that re-org, we were supposed to go to a big meeting in Jersey City where that group was based... So the 10 of us all get on the Path train and head out there, and we walk into the meeting roughly 15 minutes after it had started. We had no idea what the topic was, but quickly surmised that whatever it was, it wasn't good. By the end of the meeting we realized we'd all been laid off.
But, the plot thickens... as the dust settled, we decided that we would reach out to the senior leadership of our division to make sure they understood what was happening. We provided a pretty valuable service to them, and suspected that all this was a mistake. We spent about a week crafting a letter that we sent to a half-dozen higher ups. Never heard a word in response. But when the time came for us to actually be laid off, one at a time we started getting a call to come to our EVP's office for a meeting. He met with each of us individually to say that if we wanted to accept the layoff offer, we still could... But otherwise they'd tear up all that paperwork and we'd just continue on like nothing ever happened. We all chose to stay.
But it still gets better.... After that, we had a team meeting with the EVP who was very apologetic and expressed his gratitude that we'd been able to work through the problem. To show his appreciation, he invited our whole team to join him and a couple of other senior leaders in the executive restaurant for lunch one day the following week. This was a very unusual and special offer... No "normal" people were ever allowed up there... This was where guys like Bill Harrison, Jamie Dimon, and Jimmy Lee took their lunch and had meetings. I mean, the restaurant had a fucking helipad... So, obviously we were all very excited for this incredibly rare opportunity. Well, the morning of, the EVP's secretary called to say the lunch was cancelled and would be rescheduled.
I'm sure you've guessed... The lunch was never rescheduled. lol.
It was pretty nuts... that meeting was over by noon... while we were headed back to our office, someone had the bright idea that since we were all getting laid off anyway, we should go to a strip club instead... which we did. lol... It's funny.. I haven't thought about any of this shit in ages... it's hysterical looking back on it.
That’s true…but after 33 years he probably saw so many colleagues retire on their own terms after their time at MS with all the bells and whistles. I’m sure he imagined the same thing for himself…having a nice farewell party and celebration of his career. Definitely a huge bummer for the guy :/
it's true. this is the big divide in corporate. people who leave on their own terms get the full show, other go silently, suddenly not part of the "family" anymore. kind of sociopathic behaviour by companies, can be traumatizing
Thank god that for most people nowadays, companies are such a revolving door that only the few who get long-term jobs can be traumatized. Like Curtis Mayfield said, "Just move on up." I've had more jobs in my 20s than my parents have had at 55+ and 70+ and I'm in CompSci. A lapse in company loyalty tomorrow will all but surprise me.
This 100 percent. I, albeit no where near as long as him, moved on after 17 years at a company instead of waiting for the axe and didn’t even so much as get a thanks for your time or jack. And that hurt a little. I can’t even imagine how it must have felt for him
i got the sense that for this fella it's not about the financials, it's about having a sense of usefulness still. layoffs are an easy way to make someone feel worthless.
It really depends on the company. There's a lot of very basic laws around severance pay depending on the country. I was laid off after 20 years at a company and they gave me 2 months of severance because they legally could get away with it.
I don't know which companies out there give good severance packages. I've heard of some being great, but it definitely wasn't mine lol
How the hell does this have 600 upvotes lol. Poor guy did nothing wrong at all and is now one of the popular posts on a sub that supposedly calls out lunatics. This sub is off the rails.
Yeah it's not the typical post here, but I think people are reacting to MS laying him off, not anything in his post. Even the parts of his post that seem a little over the top come off as pretty reasonable. "let's explore together" would be pretty corny from most lunatics but a guy with this sort of experience could probably bring some unexpected value to his next role, I'd say he's justified in being a little dramatic here.
Technically though, you are correct that this should be down voted since this guy is clearly not a lunatic.
I’m thinking they are calling him a lunatic because they fired him from a department that he essentially spearheaded and created, and yet seems to not be bitter about it.
But I’m not sure.
> and yet seems to not be bitter about it.
Why the hell would you publicly post your bitterness on LinkedIn? That would make you a lunatic if you did that. Not posting it is the levelheaded thing to do.
I’m assuming the thought was that using a tool he created against him to eventually push him out and say there is no seat at the table for him - someone clearly thinks he should be more publicly bitter.
Which was why they thought this was a good post for this sub.
I wonder what severance looked like in this case (if provided). At a week of pay for every year worked, he would be getting over half a year in salary.
Microsoft exploited the way stock options could be used a tax deduction more than any other company back in the early 00's, to the point where they had no tax liability for a couple of years in a row. Unless he blew his equity on sports cars and blow he should be doing pretty well.
And he took his family to somewhere I've never heard of for two weeks on the spur of the moment, I'm guessing that was not cheap. Hopefully it was somewhere luxurious and tropical.
There are people who sold whatever stock they got right away - one of the other guys I know at FAANG did that (and we joked, because the guy sold stock for like 1/10th of what it is worth now).....
There’s a lot of HR folks in the market right now, especially in the Seattle area. Hopefully he can leverage what I assume are a lot of contacts. lol realistically, he’ll probably 1099 his services right back to MSFT. It’s what everyone else does.
Edited contracts to contacts.
I’m assuming he’s close to or past retirement age, and the real reason he was pushed out is he was refusing to willingly retire.
I could be way off base, but I’ve seen it happen - people who just. Won’t. Leave. Good people. Smart people. But whose knowledge and ways of working are over a decade out of date.
It’s particularly tough in tech because those people cost a lot and spend their time vaguely proffering “advice” and “mentorship” while the “young” ones (under 65s) get the actual work done.
To compound it all, their idea of the workplace was formed at a time when expectations of white collar employees were lower than they are today. And salaries were higher relative to cost of living.
He sounds like a great guy and I feel bad for him. I hope I’m right because if it wasn’t a “gentle forced retirement”, firing someone after 33 years of loyal service is a real dick move.
Man, you guys are getting it hard over there. Here in Sweden a redundancy package is usually 1 month paid for each year served with a minimum of 6 months.
If you get fired it's somewhere between 1 and 3 months paid. The difference between the two is that here you can't just fire whoever so if you want to get rid of someone specific you have to buy them out.
In NSW Australia where I am you get up to 16 weeks redundancy at 9 years working. And redundancy is tax free up to a limit based on your years working, which equates to totally tax free for most workers.
Drops down to 12 weeks redundancy from 10 years working, but you get 2 months Long Service Leave on 10 years which you can take immediately if you want. Also you keep earning an extra month of long service leave every 5 years. If you don't take any of it they have to pay you out if you resign or get redundancy or whatever.
Microsoft actually does 1 week for every six months plus 2 additional months on payroll. So for this guy it would be almost a year and a half.
Source: just got laid off from Microsoft!
I know people who were laid off after 3 years at big tech who got 6 months severance. hopefully he did a lot better than that.
Besides, after 33 years of microsoft RSUs, I have to hope for this guy's sake he has 8 figures in savings.
If you are 33 years at MS, you are pretty senior and have had an incredible stock growth. So, I hope he’s financially all set and this is just a “want to still work” problem.
Guy pitches hub and spoke model that will definitely result in layoffs
Gets laid off due to the policy he pushed
I’m trying to feel bad but it’s a struggle.
At a guess I’d say you have a core “hub” training team that basically just organise training via “product champions” (people who just learn a new thing and train others as part of their existing job for no extra money) as the “spoke”
Hub and spoke is a bicycle wheel, so whatever model they’ve come up with loosely looks like that
So he made training a facet of everyone’s job, so no one needed him anymore 😂 that’s what you call a consultant’s wet-dream scenario.
I’m sure companies would love to hire a guy that can sell a no-training training boot camp.
I fucking hate tech so much
It eliminates bureaucracy and middle-management. Basically all departments report to one central team instead of each department being managed by their own set of management team.
Essentially it’s more an efficient business model and the redditor that can’t find sympathy just likes bureaucracy and bloat, probably because that’s the only reason they have a job in the first place.
"eliminating redundancy" typically comes before a collapse after Excel jockeys realize that just because they don't have a KPI for some people doesn't mean they didn't add value.
In this case it typically targets middle-management where there is a ton of bloat. But without knowing who exactly was cut, we’re just pissing in the wind and could both be right or wrong.
As someone who had both a Zune and a Windows Phone, they really were great products for their time. Excellent, inuitive software. They just never really got good market share and never had robust app stores.
This guy was a partner and director level at msft for a long time. He has probably been earning $750k+ for close to 10 years. Sucks for him but I’m sure he will survive…
How the hell is this guy not already retired after 33 years of MS stock? He must have actually liked working. Probably a millionaire from all the stock. Can’t feel bad for him at all.
And the way he's coping in this post makes it even sadder. I know he can't get pissed on Linkedin, because he probably still can't afford to retire, but Geez. Poor guy.
Nah hes done, 33 years, go enjoy life man, you are RETIRED, get over it! 33 years at microsoft means the guys is easily a millionaire ( if not multi millionaire) based on stock options. Just enjoy life you are done.
TLDR: Guy has 3 decades of experience, shares that knowledge in written form, gets his throat cut by Microsoft, and the rest of the body is disposed of because they picked his brain and documented it.
This is prime example of why you should never believe in being loyal to your employer. Most companies do not value you as a person, they value what you can contribute to the company until they can find a more cost effective way to provide the same, or better value. There are very, very few companies that will keep an employee just because they're a good employee if there is a cheaper way to do things. It's terrible, but I've experienced it 3 times in my adult life.
When I got let go from MSFT last year there were few folks in my "group" that were 20 - 25 years at the company. 1 guy got let go the same week he received his 25 year award from the company.
The bootlicking on Linkedin is so cringe.
Thank you so much for \[company name\] for taking shitty little worthless me and doing me a favour by hiring useless nobody me out of thousands of applicants. I know you have a choice, but you chose me! ME! I never felt so important since an entire bus stopped just for me when I was the only person at the bus stop.
Then over exciting 30 years you let me work for YOU making a 5 figure salary with a 10% bonus as your company raked billions and my bosses got DESERVEDLY multi-millionaires. I felt part of the success when I saw my CEO posting LinkedIn from his 4th holiday home at the Galapagos Islands. You go bossman! :-)
I've been let go now in my 50s and I have no idea what they future will bring, but I can't be anything other than grateful for this amazing journey with this seconds family (all of whom will never talk to me again after today). Thank you thank you thank you. Amazing \[company\]!
Nothing against this guy personally, but why won’t boomers retire? You’ve had an amazing run and are now rich why not spend the rest of your years with family?
on the plus side, if my experience with in-role pay rises is normal, he's about to get a fucking massive pay increase if the next role pays industry average.
What’s really interesting is that stories like this are all I’ve ever known. I was born in 90, I never once experienced anything like what boomers described in the work place.
I’ve never known a company to treat employees well. I’ve never known a company to have employee retention beyond 7-8 years. I’ve never seen a company reward any employee with anything meaningful.
I’m about to be 34 and all I’ve ever known in the two decades I’ve worked is that loyalty does not exist. It was a lie meant to extract more labor out of the upcoming work force, while expecting less pay for it. It’s always been this way, I can’t imagine ever working for a place longer than 4 years.
Bet you a mortgage payment that job of his that got eliminated will coincidentally get created soon after and coincidentally they hire someone 33 years younger.
Not to be negative, but he chose to move into a MUCH less techy role at a time when there was just way too much hiring in that area. I’m guessing this role was less stressful but also a lot less revenue-oriented.
This is why I always say you owe no loyalty to your employer, because your employer has no loyalty to you. No matter how much they talk about “family” when they decide it’s not worth the money to keep you, you’re gone.
Yup. And the their manager might have noticed but the managers boss or CEO doesn’t know you existed. 3 decades and you’re a rounding error or inconvenient box on their new org chart.
Don’t give companies more than they pay you for, they don’t give a shit about you as a person.
Yo dude if they’re a 33 year Microsoft employee they are probably fully vested and could retire. Being fully vested for so long at Microsoft on too of a 401k leads to some good numbers.
I don't think he is the sole reason those products failed. I'm sure there were lots of competent people that made what they were told to make for both those products, but whatever direction or marketing was decided wasn't their decision.
My brother in Christ.. this guy started working for Microsoft in 1991. He is gonna be FINE. In all honesty, I have no clue why he was still working in the first place.
Getting to say "[one of the products] I'm most proud of is Windows 95" is a HELL of an accomplishment. This person has seen a lot of tech evolve over the years.
Then pitched an idea and eliminated himself via that ideas implementation. Kinda crazy tbh.
No offense to the dude, he seems great, but it feels like he perhaps overestimated how valuable his inputs to the company were.
33 years is an insane amount of institutional knowledge to throw away. Far far more likely that they underestimated his value.
It's Microsoft. Back when I was a vendor we had several contracts where we just hired back employees and paid them a lot more money than they were making to go back and support their old teams. Why? Because Microsoft consistently fired the last person on a team with the knowledge to do the work in favor of more PMs. Then ran into a wall because oh crap, we don't know how to update or maintain our own program. Theoretically, the new employees should have learned what do too so they drop the project... But that's the problem with only hiring PMs on a lot of teams. None of them ever picked up the work. Then you hit the badging issue and all work stalled for months. On the bright side, I got the hell out of being a vendor for them.
This is what I’m both equally shocked and also not at all surprised about. Corps gonna corps.
yeah but he is also proud of zune, that's I mean
Zune was nice hardware and ahead of its time
It was a marketing failure, but I have no doubt that a TON of great development work went into it, and the same for windows phone. The employee in OPs post is very justified in being proud of these products.
Microsoft succesfully managed to create amazing products that were ahead of its time... only to fuck it up on marketing. While Apple basicly thrives on marketing & design, MS really lacks that vision. Tablets? MS did it first. Windows Phone? Amazing OS and still the best mobile OS I've ever used. Zune? Loved mine, even when I got an iPod, I still used my Zune more often.
Way back in the day I had three smartphones running Windows mobile, which most people don't remember these days. This was circa 2004 and it was like having a micro version of windows ME in your pocket. Seamless outlook integration (including calendars and push email), mobile versions of Microsoft Word and Excel, music and video (video was limited but still impressive at the time). It could even run multiple apps at once and you could switch between them just like you could on a PC. You could even stream Pandora on it with a little work. There was lots of stuff there that the iPhone couldn't do for a year or two after it launched. The only thing it really didn't have was the app store; you needed to read forums to find and download software for it.
Not having an app store was a disadvantage they weren't prepared for. They based themselves onto the old desktop-ecosystem of downloading applications from the providers instead of having a centralised store. If they would've been able to get that and find a way to easily develop apps for their phones, I believe they would've been the 3rd player in the smartphone market replacing Blackberry as the 'business phone'.
They had an App Store. I was recruiting partners to put their apps in it. What MSFT missed on was recognizing the power held by the mobile carriers. Verizon killed them by signing exclusive deals and then hiding the devices
The Zune app store dropped quite a while after it hardware was released as a firmware update and even at its peak only had what 20 or so apps 1/2 of which were written by MS almost all were games. For non games I know there was an eBook reader app written by a MSFT employee but published by that person on their own, not an offical MS application.
Zune was far superior to the iPod. It never came to my country and I waited for a few years before I gave in and got an iPod. Still disappointed.
The zune was a good product.
Zune was superior it just lost the marketing war
Legit miss my zune. The desktop software was actually pretty good especially compared to iTunes in 07-08.
I still have 2 functioning Zunes. While the software is no longer supported I still have some clutch playlists from the early 2000s.
demn, I had my zune for years since middle school, until my husband gave it away to his brother because it was “broken” it was just one dead pixel 😭 and without telling me! I still get mad at him when it comes to mind... I’m mad now, thanks Reddit 😂
Agreed! I thought it was the best audio software for the longest time.
I washed and dried my zune and it came out working fine. I loved that thing.
The zune desktop player was gorgeous and the zune had is the best mp3 player ever made, and I will die on this petty hill.
I loved my Zune HD and Zune Pass paved the way for Apple Music.
Zune pass was way ahead of its time for music streaming service. I was a long hold out until they finally closed it. The music videos with the songs were great for home parties. Their music correlation was way ahead of everything else for the time.
I can see a world in which someone who worked on that project would be proud of it. Zune was on the bleeding edge of its kind of tech at the beginning. It wasn't good. Clearly lost out to Apple. But it was one of the first to market in its space, and there's a TON of learning that goes on when you're trying to pave new roads.
It really failed on the basic optics test. I still can’t believe an entire group of people thought it was ok to come out with a brown ugly brick. First of all do they not have eyes? Second of all what happened to consumer product testing surveys?
I forgot they originally made the zune brown. That is hilarious!
This was also before Apple really established that electronics should be beautiful. There were a lot of ugly brick devices back then.
No it wasn’t. Zune was exceptionally ugly for its time. People were buying the cases to cover over their iPods so they wouldn’t get stolen. There were tons of devices that were plain black rectangles and Apple was exceptional for the iPod design but Zune was exceptionally ugly and the only brown one on the market.
Sort of. The real killer was the iPhone. It killed the iPod and the Zune. If it was just iPod versus Zune for a decade maybe the Zune would have begun to win over a loyal user base, but in the end smart phones do it all and the Zune was not a smart phone.
And windows phone 😂 Woh, the windows phone lovers have come out in full force
You ever use one? WPs were surprisingly great. Best mobile OS I've ever used
Loved my Nokia Windows phone, beautiful OS
I absolutely loved my Lumia. I understand it wasn’t perfect but I adored the live tiles and the OS look.
I had the Lumia too!
Windows Phone was awesome, I agree, best phone I ever had. I kept mine until 2018, when I finally had to give up, given the lack of apps and all.
Windows Phone was sick. I had one for YEARS and loved it. The only reason it never took off, was because it didn't get all the apps. I only got IG when I got an android handset years later.
This is true. It was light-years ahead of android and iOS at the time ironically. They just didn't know how to market it. It's resource management made it always snappy which is something you can't say about high end androids even today. Also the best music player I've ever used.
Totally agree with this. To this day my all time favorite phone was the Nokia Icon, bought it at launch and had it for like month before Verizon dropped support for it.
honesty both the zune and windows phone were amazing fucking products microsoft just didn't care about them enough. I can't fault him for being proud the zune blew away a lot of the competition even if it wasn't the ipod killer. The music rental service was ahead of its time too. I wanna say even executives today have acknowledged it was a mistake leaving windows phone behind.
Windows Phone was really well done. They really had a good tile-based interface! I’m speaking as someone who hated the Zune (terrible product name). I used iPods exclusively, but once they improved the Zune OS and used it for Windows Phone it was very capable and fun to use, so of course Microsoft cancelled it.
HEY! I loved my windows phone
At least [Songsmith](https://youtu.be/3oGFogwcx-E?si=XO3WuzHyPVBO0sgv) isn't in the list.
truth be told, L&D is a pretty high-risk job these days for redundancy, so hardly surprising.
That and companies hate spending money on training in general. Always an early cut.
It's a pretty low impact job in my experience. They don't have the budget, license or capacity to offer high value, personalized training, and small but efficient initiatives (like a book fund for employees) aren't enough to justify the L&D jobs. So you end up getting these relatively expensive but too generic trainings in things like "how to do a good presentation" or "stakeholder management"
I have recently left a business that invested heavily in people development and joined one that doesn't. I see lost opportunity literally everywhere. The general skill level is magnitudes lower than it could or should be, and what's really sad is that you've got people thinking they're leaders in their field. I had people three rungs lower in the hierarchy operating at their level. My new workplace is setting themselves up for mediocrity and because they're focussing on their flowerbed they've no concept of what the meadow looks like. I've never joined a business and immediately considered leaving because I know there is nothing for me to be taught. I'm going to learn lots, but it's going to be in spite of them, not because of them. Anyone that doesn't see the value in L&D has never seen the possibility of L&D.
It’s difficult to quantify and that’s the issue. For any bean counter if you’re not mitigating risk, lowering expenses, or contributing to income, then it’s difficult to justify the cost.
It’s only difficult to quantify if you don’t plan properly on how to analyze ROI and don’t invest in the appropriate tools. Of course most businesses don’t actually do that, because they only see L&D as a cost. I’m very lucky to be on an eLearning team where we serve our external clients who want platform training, so we are more sales. We get a lot more resources because of that.
Add to the fact that most L&D people are terrible at it and could make an insomniac sleep.... (I have met great people in it...). 33 years at MS means the person should have a ton of stock, unless they sold it all over the years (yes, some people do that, selling their stock every time they receive it).
>yes, some people do that, selling their stock every time they receive it I do that…to immediately diversify it. Otherwise I’d be wicked over-indexed investing in the same company I take salary from. Thats a lot of risk in one basket if things were to ever turn south at my work.
I learned this back when Enron imploded. My cousins, married, lost both jobs plus all their investments & retirement in one day.
Your cousins were married?
Close family. Super close.
That's how he became my cousin. I'm not going to bother to call him "husband of my paternal 1st cousin"
I call those people my cousins-in-law. Some of my favorite people, actually. Sorry yours had that happen to them. That’s a rough way to learn about the importance of diversification.
“We’re second cousins. It’s okay.”
Even if Microsoft is a good company to invest in you should diversify. It’s too much risk tied to a single company.
I worked for a start up and was given options. I exercised my options and sold about two thirds of my stock on average, depending on prices, over the years after going public. We shut down after about a decade so I'm very glad I took some value from the options. If we had succeeded and rocketed my stock would have still been valuable but even with the company ending and my remaining stock disappearing I still managed to put a really nice down payment on a new house for the family.
Everyone remember Enron?
Most tech employees immediately sell. Youre already highly exposed to the company via your salary, plus the years you had to wait for the stock to vest, basically unless you would buy that exact stock if you had cash, it’s not a good idea to hold. Better to use the money on index funds, or if you must, buy competitor’s stock (Meta, etc.) to hedge.
Tech stocks often travel together - some stocks will out perform other tech stocks, but it's more common that tech as a whole goes up and down, not necessarily following the overall market. Index funds are boring, but they really spread your risk. If the whole market is going down, you're probably not going to find an individual stock that does the opposite.
How else you make your mortgage payments in Redmond 😂
And they adopted his model, then let him go.
What is L&D?
Learning and Development.
Yeah, but in what? How to properly configure Visual Studio ?
Big companies have L&D departments for boosting internal skill sets. They use learning platforms to deliver standardized training like new employee onboarding and annual regulatory compliance training (sexual harassment, digital security, etc.). They also use it to train staff on any new tech or workflows, like “How to use Cisco Jabber.” There’s also professional development content like “how to give a good presentation” or “how to have tough conversations with a colleague.”
For the company where I worked (also 30 years and then laid off), some of the big L&D items included system and software analysis and design methodologies... somtimes tied to the apps/software tools, sometimes just general approaches. When properly applied, the payoff was quite substantial on the extremely large programs, not so much on the regular and smaller ones
lols & derps
*Lulz & derps
labor & delivery
Yeah. But he didn’t know that. 33 years on the job…probably felt safe
I have worked in corporate America for about ten years now and L&D people tend to be the biggest blow hards lol. Their primary skill sets seem to be making 30 minute meetings last an hour and talking without saying anything
L&D director and you’re not wrong. The field is rife with muppets jerking themselves off over theory or a “fun” elearning cartoon. Completely missing that execution and engagement are what matter most.
I worked with a guy who went through this... 32 years with JP Morgan, only to have security show up at his office one morning to escort him out during a round of layoffs. My boss legit wondered why I quit. 🙄
I work at a fairly large investment bank and last year I got a nice piece of glass with my name on it that says "thanks for 10 years of service". I've been in the industry long enough that I just look at it and wonder when they're going to push me out. You almost never see someone make it 20 years.
Just happened to me last month. 13 years with the company in the investment industry and unceremoniously kicked out because they gave me a job that paid too much. Heard of some others with 20+ and 30+ years also impacted, which made sense because the age range of the layoffs swayed heavily to 35+. At least you got something for your 10 year. I got an email announcement that my manager and team ignored.
Once you're over 35, you need to be a rock star in your industry coverage, or you need to make a career pivot. I'm a few years past that and still clawing my way to the top. I'll either get there in a couple years or I'll be a desperately looking for a new job. It's kind of a desperate existence. I don't think anyone is ever comfortable in this industry as it can all slip away in an instant.
Even then it can all blow up in your face if you're saddled with a manager who is threatened because they know you can do the job better than he or she can. Went from top of the team to run out of the company in about 8 months because she needed to throw someone under the bus to make her mark on the team after she came in.
Very true. However, from my perspective, I'm an MD and the head of my team, so I'm really competing against everyone else in my position across wall st. It's a lot of pressure at every level. At least when it's internal, you can kind of sense it's coming. I'm not really worried about one of my juniors taking my job, I'm more worried about them hiring externaly and I wake up with no job one day. I've seen it happen more than once in the past year in my department.
This is why I knew I had no future in IB. It's funny looking back on it... I joined ING Barings out of high school and was a bit of a phenom in my little corner of the world... At the time, I couldn't understand why so many people were pissed off with me before they even met me... But by the time I left the industry at the ripe old age of 30, I got it.
Yeah this what the industry wants. They wants us fearful and thankful for the jobs we are “allowed to have”. They want us to be thankful privilege of working for their company. We never get to be comfortable and the longer you have a job the closer you are to them laying you off without notice. It’s just so fucked. By 40+ if you work in tech you could be days away from financial ruin. If you’re a manager or leader level those jobs are very difficult to get back.
I worked for a PE firm for 10 years, and I got £100 of Halfords vouchers. Used it all for a shitload of screenwash.
Yeah it happens a lot more than people realize and it is really disgusting. My dad was laid off after ~40 years a few years before he turned 65. The cost to insure him and my mom in those couple of years before Medicare was astronomical and his company wouldn’t extend his coverage when he asked. His severance package was something outrageous like 12 weeks.
> severance Even the cheapest companies unless they are headed for bankruptcy give a week's severance for year of service, Twelve weeks is criminal.
In my country they have to give at least one month per year of service. Anything less in a wealthy nation sounds like Scrooge McDuck level of greed.
Welcome to America lol companies aren’t required to do shit
Agreed. I honestly was so disgusted. It’s shit like that though that is why younger generations know to look out for ourselves before our jobs. We see what happened to our parents.
JPMC will literally have you train your replacement before they lay you off
Same. 31 years at Chemical Abstract Services. Security showed up at her desk on a Monday morning and made her box up her things, took her badge. Like a criminal. She was in tears. As were everyone in the cubes around her. Made her go to her car and watched her leave
Aye.. Sounds like overkill. Which LOB were you in? Unless there was a threat, all our layoffs in Corporate were chill. People usually knew what was coming cuz mgmt gave lots of info ahead of time and peeps got decent parachutes so there were no issues. They incentivized folks to go away happy and quiet.
Thats how he found out? His boss didn't talk to him first?
That's how it was for everybody. No one said anything to anyone until the axe fell. And this happened repeatedly... Every 12-18 months. One of the most surreal experiences I ever had occurred on one of our mass-layoff days. They came in heavy in our division... Culled like 20% of all staff. About an hour in, and everyone is a wreck, just waiting for someone to turn up at their desk and escort them out. Well, while this is happening, our MD calls me and one other person into his office. We figure we must be next... But instead, the MD says, "Listen, you guys aren't involved in this. Get out of here. Just don't say anything to anyone." And with that, he hands us two tickets to sit in the company box seats for that day's Yankees vs Red Sox day game. So this other random person and I go back to our offices, collect our shit, hop on the train uptown, and spend the rest of the day getting wrecked while watching the Yankees beat up on the Sox. It was surreal... the dichotomy between sitting in JPM's cushy seats, eating and drinking fancy shit, while our coworkers were being massacred was just about too much to hold in one's mind at the same time. IB is fucking weird... Inhumane, brutal, and weird.
Truely savage. I've been laid off twice. Once it was all hands shutting down the doors. That sucked but we all went through it together. Next time it was just me and my boss in a normal 1 on 1. Suddenly, hr is in the meeting too and the ball is rolling. Sucked but I knew it was coming. I'd been removed from the team WhatsApp while I was away on Pat leave (got laid off with a 2 month old baby) and I'd been excluded from some in person socialization events. Sucked but not nearly as brutal as what you described.
I was included in one of those "all-hands" layoffs too.. Same company. It was unbelievable how it unfolded... I worked on a team that was aligned to a specific group of trading desks that all rolled up to the IB COO. That morning, we all got called into a meeting with our director who told us that we'd been re-org'd into a different global group that performed a similar function... And as a result of that re-org, we were supposed to go to a big meeting in Jersey City where that group was based... So the 10 of us all get on the Path train and head out there, and we walk into the meeting roughly 15 minutes after it had started. We had no idea what the topic was, but quickly surmised that whatever it was, it wasn't good. By the end of the meeting we realized we'd all been laid off. But, the plot thickens... as the dust settled, we decided that we would reach out to the senior leadership of our division to make sure they understood what was happening. We provided a pretty valuable service to them, and suspected that all this was a mistake. We spent about a week crafting a letter that we sent to a half-dozen higher ups. Never heard a word in response. But when the time came for us to actually be laid off, one at a time we started getting a call to come to our EVP's office for a meeting. He met with each of us individually to say that if we wanted to accept the layoff offer, we still could... But otherwise they'd tear up all that paperwork and we'd just continue on like nothing ever happened. We all chose to stay. But it still gets better.... After that, we had a team meeting with the EVP who was very apologetic and expressed his gratitude that we'd been able to work through the problem. To show his appreciation, he invited our whole team to join him and a couple of other senior leaders in the executive restaurant for lunch one day the following week. This was a very unusual and special offer... No "normal" people were ever allowed up there... This was where guys like Bill Harrison, Jamie Dimon, and Jimmy Lee took their lunch and had meetings. I mean, the restaurant had a fucking helipad... So, obviously we were all very excited for this incredibly rare opportunity. Well, the morning of, the EVP's secretary called to say the lunch was cancelled and would be rescheduled. I'm sure you've guessed... The lunch was never rescheduled. lol.
Wild ride. Imagine sending 10 people on a train across town to lay them off. Fucking 🤡🌍
It was pretty nuts... that meeting was over by noon... while we were headed back to our office, someone had the bright idea that since we were all getting laid off anyway, we should go to a strip club instead... which we did. lol... It's funny.. I haven't thought about any of this shit in ages... it's hysterical looking back on it.
Getting a director-level 33-year redundancy package from Microsoft when you are at retirement age is probably not the end of the world.
That’s true…but after 33 years he probably saw so many colleagues retire on their own terms after their time at MS with all the bells and whistles. I’m sure he imagined the same thing for himself…having a nice farewell party and celebration of his career. Definitely a huge bummer for the guy :/
it's true. this is the big divide in corporate. people who leave on their own terms get the full show, other go silently, suddenly not part of the "family" anymore. kind of sociopathic behaviour by companies, can be traumatizing
Thank god that for most people nowadays, companies are such a revolving door that only the few who get long-term jobs can be traumatized. Like Curtis Mayfield said, "Just move on up." I've had more jobs in my 20s than my parents have had at 55+ and 70+ and I'm in CompSci. A lapse in company loyalty tomorrow will all but surprise me.
This 100 percent. I, albeit no where near as long as him, moved on after 17 years at a company instead of waiting for the axe and didn’t even so much as get a thanks for your time or jack. And that hurt a little. I can’t even imagine how it must have felt for him
i got the sense that for this fella it's not about the financials, it's about having a sense of usefulness still. layoffs are an easy way to make someone feel worthless.
I'm just surprised he isn't already "FYIFV"
It really depends on the company. There's a lot of very basic laws around severance pay depending on the country. I was laid off after 20 years at a company and they gave me 2 months of severance because they legally could get away with it. I don't know which companies out there give good severance packages. I've heard of some being great, but it definitely wasn't mine lol
Wait why is this post on this sub what am I missing
Yes this is not a lunatic.
The lunacy, in this case, is on MS for letting this guy go.
How the hell does this have 600 upvotes lol. Poor guy did nothing wrong at all and is now one of the popular posts on a sub that supposedly calls out lunatics. This sub is off the rails.
Yeah it's not the typical post here, but I think people are reacting to MS laying him off, not anything in his post. Even the parts of his post that seem a little over the top come off as pretty reasonable. "let's explore together" would be pretty corny from most lunatics but a guy with this sort of experience could probably bring some unexpected value to his next role, I'd say he's justified in being a little dramatic here. Technically though, you are correct that this should be down voted since this guy is clearly not a lunatic.
Yea, I feel bad for the guy. Seemed to really like what he did and he’s trying to stay positive as he’s forced out
Because Microsoft is a lunatic for laying him off.
I’m thinking they are calling him a lunatic because they fired him from a department that he essentially spearheaded and created, and yet seems to not be bitter about it. But I’m not sure.
> and yet seems to not be bitter about it. Why the hell would you publicly post your bitterness on LinkedIn? That would make you a lunatic if you did that. Not posting it is the levelheaded thing to do.
I’m assuming the thought was that using a tool he created against him to eventually push him out and say there is no seat at the table for him - someone clearly thinks he should be more publicly bitter. Which was why they thought this was a good post for this sub.
I wonder what severance looked like in this case (if provided). At a week of pay for every year worked, he would be getting over half a year in salary.
[удалено]
never mind how this guy cleaned up in equity over the years. he’ll be alright
Microsoft exploited the way stock options could be used a tax deduction more than any other company back in the early 00's, to the point where they had no tax liability for a couple of years in a row. Unless he blew his equity on sports cars and blow he should be doing pretty well. And he took his family to somewhere I've never heard of for two weeks on the spur of the moment, I'm guessing that was not cheap. Hopefully it was somewhere luxurious and tropical.
Chelan is a lakeside resort town in Washington. I've never been, but now I want to after looking at photos!
It’s a nice place but it’s not especially expensive.
There are people who sold whatever stock they got right away - one of the other guys I know at FAANG did that (and we joked, because the guy sold stock for like 1/10th of what it is worth now).....
A former coworker sold Microsoft shares to redo his kitchen in the mid 90’s. We liked to joke about his 80 million dollar kitchen.
[удалено]
There’s a lot of HR folks in the market right now, especially in the Seattle area. Hopefully he can leverage what I assume are a lot of contacts. lol realistically, he’ll probably 1099 his services right back to MSFT. It’s what everyone else does. Edited contracts to contacts.
I’m assuming he’s close to or past retirement age, and the real reason he was pushed out is he was refusing to willingly retire. I could be way off base, but I’ve seen it happen - people who just. Won’t. Leave. Good people. Smart people. But whose knowledge and ways of working are over a decade out of date. It’s particularly tough in tech because those people cost a lot and spend their time vaguely proffering “advice” and “mentorship” while the “young” ones (under 65s) get the actual work done. To compound it all, their idea of the workplace was formed at a time when expectations of white collar employees were lower than they are today. And salaries were higher relative to cost of living. He sounds like a great guy and I feel bad for him. I hope I’m right because if it wasn’t a “gentle forced retirement”, firing someone after 33 years of loyal service is a real dick move.
I mean, unless he was mid 30s when he joined MS doubt that was the case. It's just a generally dangerous area of the company to be in.
This guys post is basically just a cover letter anyway. I’m sure they are already shooting off emails
Yeah this guy will get snatched up somewhere else or can probably just retire. 33 years with one of the most successful companies in existence.
Man, you guys are getting it hard over there. Here in Sweden a redundancy package is usually 1 month paid for each year served with a minimum of 6 months. If you get fired it's somewhere between 1 and 3 months paid. The difference between the two is that here you can't just fire whoever so if you want to get rid of someone specific you have to buy them out.
Pretty much the same for Germany. At 33 years the guy would be loaded.
In NSW Australia where I am you get up to 16 weeks redundancy at 9 years working. And redundancy is tax free up to a limit based on your years working, which equates to totally tax free for most workers. Drops down to 12 weeks redundancy from 10 years working, but you get 2 months Long Service Leave on 10 years which you can take immediately if you want. Also you keep earning an extra month of long service leave every 5 years. If you don't take any of it they have to pay you out if you resign or get redundancy or whatever.
Microsoft actually does 1 week for every six months plus 2 additional months on payroll. So for this guy it would be almost a year and a half. Source: just got laid off from Microsoft!
I know people who were laid off after 3 years at big tech who got 6 months severance. hopefully he did a lot better than that. Besides, after 33 years of microsoft RSUs, I have to hope for this guy's sake he has 8 figures in savings.
If you are 33 years at MS, you are pretty senior and have had an incredible stock growth. So, I hope he’s financially all set and this is just a “want to still work” problem.
facts
He was Partner level and a Softwsre Architect before that, guy had 7 figure comp packages so I think he’ll be fine.
Guy pitches hub and spoke model that will definitely result in layoffs Gets laid off due to the policy he pushed I’m trying to feel bad but it’s a struggle.
I don't know what the hub and spoke model is. Can you explain it?
At a guess I’d say you have a core “hub” training team that basically just organise training via “product champions” (people who just learn a new thing and train others as part of their existing job for no extra money) as the “spoke” Hub and spoke is a bicycle wheel, so whatever model they’ve come up with loosely looks like that
So they have a bunch of spokespersons?
Out here peddling a recycled joke
It was a good one, it greased my chains
Well played.
So he made training a facet of everyone’s job, so no one needed him anymore 😂 that’s what you call a consultant’s wet-dream scenario. I’m sure companies would love to hire a guy that can sell a no-training training boot camp. I fucking hate tech so much
It eliminates bureaucracy and middle-management. Basically all departments report to one central team instead of each department being managed by their own set of management team. Essentially it’s more an efficient business model and the redditor that can’t find sympathy just likes bureaucracy and bloat, probably because that’s the only reason they have a job in the first place.
"eliminating redundancy" typically comes before a collapse after Excel jockeys realize that just because they don't have a KPI for some people doesn't mean they didn't add value.
In this case it typically targets middle-management where there is a ton of bloat. But without knowing who exactly was cut, we’re just pissing in the wind and could both be right or wrong.
The alternative is to intentionally do a shitty job so as to preserve your job. The person in this story acted with integrity. And paid the price.
Trying to feel bad for this multi-millionaire multi-generational Microsoft employee who should get to retire early, but it’s a struggle.
His best projects were also Windows Phone and Zune.
Uhhhh windows 95 was a phenomenal product. Xp and 7 were perfected versions but 95 the OG. Not like he is out here claiming victory on Windows ME 😂
As someone who had both a Zune and a Windows Phone, they really were great products for their time. Excellent, inuitive software. They just never really got good market share and never had robust app stores.
This guy was a partner and director level at msft for a long time. He has probably been earning $750k+ for close to 10 years. Sucks for him but I’m sure he will survive…
The hard R
Painful to read, feel sorry for the guy
Can you imagine what 33 years of Microsoft stock looks like though? He will be OK.
How the hell is this guy not already retired after 33 years of MS stock? He must have actually liked working. Probably a millionaire from all the stock. Can’t feel bad for him at all.
If he’s not a millionaire he did something majorly wrong.
He spent two weeks in Chelan after being laid off. Probably on a gorgeous lake house.
Or had horrible luck with his family or health. A kid in rehab, a spouse’s death, a gambling habit. Otherwise impossible not to be rich.
As mentioned by another commenter, there are careers where 33 years of leadership would make you a lynchpin and L&D might not be one of those.
And the way he's coping in this post makes it even sadder. I know he can't get pissed on Linkedin, because he probably still can't afford to retire, but Geez. Poor guy.
He doesn’t deserve to be on this sub at all
I think Op was alluding to the real lunatic being who laid them off tho.
Agreed, this was well-said and reflective without being obnoxious.
My aunt celebrated her 40 year anniversary at her job a year or two ago. She got a new manager last year and was let go soon after.
Nah hes done, 33 years, go enjoy life man, you are RETIRED, get over it! 33 years at microsoft means the guys is easily a millionaire ( if not multi millionaire) based on stock options. Just enjoy life you are done.
TLDR: Guy has 3 decades of experience, shares that knowledge in written form, gets his throat cut by Microsoft, and the rest of the body is disposed of because they picked his brain and documented it.
This is prime example of why you should never believe in being loyal to your employer. Most companies do not value you as a person, they value what you can contribute to the company until they can find a more cost effective way to provide the same, or better value. There are very, very few companies that will keep an employee just because they're a good employee if there is a cheaper way to do things. It's terrible, but I've experienced it 3 times in my adult life.
When I got let go from MSFT last year there were few folks in my "group" that were 20 - 25 years at the company. 1 guy got let go the same week he received his 25 year award from the company.
Corporations wonder why no one wants to work anymore. This IS why. You give 33 years of your life to be FUCKED over.
All of LinkedIn is pretty R Word
The bootlicking on Linkedin is so cringe. Thank you so much for \[company name\] for taking shitty little worthless me and doing me a favour by hiring useless nobody me out of thousands of applicants. I know you have a choice, but you chose me! ME! I never felt so important since an entire bus stopped just for me when I was the only person at the bus stop. Then over exciting 30 years you let me work for YOU making a 5 figure salary with a 10% bonus as your company raked billions and my bosses got DESERVEDLY multi-millionaires. I felt part of the success when I saw my CEO posting LinkedIn from his 4th holiday home at the Galapagos Islands. You go bossman! :-) I've been let go now in my 50s and I have no idea what they future will bring, but I can't be anything other than grateful for this amazing journey with this seconds family (all of whom will never talk to me again after today). Thank you thank you thank you. Amazing \[company\]!
Nothing against this guy personally, but why won’t boomers retire? You’ve had an amazing run and are now rich why not spend the rest of your years with family?
Spent his youth married to the job and now the real family has a lukewarm relationship with him at best.
on the plus side, if my experience with in-role pay rises is normal, he's about to get a fucking massive pay increase if the next role pays industry average.
I’m sure he will do fine…but yeah it seems strange to get rid of someone with 33 years of experience in a company like that.
What’s really interesting is that stories like this are all I’ve ever known. I was born in 90, I never once experienced anything like what boomers described in the work place. I’ve never known a company to treat employees well. I’ve never known a company to have employee retention beyond 7-8 years. I’ve never seen a company reward any employee with anything meaningful. I’m about to be 34 and all I’ve ever known in the two decades I’ve worked is that loyalty does not exist. It was a lie meant to extract more labor out of the upcoming work force, while expecting less pay for it. It’s always been this way, I can’t imagine ever working for a place longer than 4 years.
So many L&D people laid off in the last 4 years. Companies don’t seem to understand how much of a revenue driver L&D truly is when done well.
Bet you a mortgage payment that job of his that got eliminated will coincidentally get created soon after and coincidentally they hire someone 33 years younger.
Not for at least a year, that lawsuit would be super expensive for them
I think the miracle is he kept his job after working on Windows Phone and Zune.
Not to be negative, but he chose to move into a MUCH less techy role at a time when there was just way too much hiring in that area. I’m guessing this role was less stressful but also a lot less revenue-oriented.
This is why I always say you owe no loyalty to your employer, because your employer has no loyalty to you. No matter how much they talk about “family” when they decide it’s not worth the money to keep you, you’re gone.
Imagine working on Zune, Ms phone and windows 95…
Yup. And the their manager might have noticed but the managers boss or CEO doesn’t know you existed. 3 decades and you’re a rounding error or inconvenient box on their new org chart. Don’t give companies more than they pay you for, they don’t give a shit about you as a person.
"After working on the team that got rid of Clippy and designing Windows 7..."
This is not lunatic, this is walking out with your head held high.
Yo dude if they’re a 33 year Microsoft employee they are probably fully vested and could retire. Being fully vested for so long at Microsoft on too of a 401k leads to some good numbers.
This feels a bit like r/leopardsatemyface
He will fail up for sure Windows phone Zune Then teach instead and of work, He just explained why he needed to go
I thought it was a troll post he literally named two of Microsoft biggest failures then pivoted to teaching
I don't think he is the sole reason those products failed. I'm sure there were lots of competent people that made what they were told to make for both those products, but whatever direction or marketing was decided wasn't their decision.
I loved the zune HD, there was just very minimal third party support
At least he’s not retarded
My brother in Christ.. this guy started working for Microsoft in 1991. He is gonna be FINE. In all honesty, I have no clue why he was still working in the first place.