Record high Microsoft revenue and 15,000 layoffs this year – common business sense and horrible output for individuals.
⚠️ Not a single person in the world wants to be labeled as USELESS.
FTEs, executives, managers, contractors, freelancers – not ONE of us wants to get a kick because we are no longer needed.
But justifying whether we contribute to the bottom line is often subjective.
Executives are wrong sometimes, and we’ve seen similar cases.
Also, subjectively looking into short-term quarterly results vs. long-term vision.
Maybe R&D and innovation is a worthwhile investment?
More headcount would result to better work conditions?
Fewer hours in meetings?
More L&D budgets?
Microsoft still employs 250,000+ people. The company isn’t going under. Open jobs are available.
Satya Nadella brought up: ⤵️
“Microsoft is thriving – our market performance, strategic positioning, and growth all point up and to the right.”
Reaching a quarterly revenue of $76.4 billion, steady growth, and $75 billion for the year in Azure, up 34%.
This doesn’t mean that every single person has contributed steadily to this progress, or is projected to do so in the next 12 months.
Ultimately, we talk about employee NPS and company-wide revenue and EBITDA. There’s little public know-how over “employee ROI”, other than “revenue per employee” being a blended metric. And certain roles are not even in the revenue-generating bucket in themselves.
🎯 But it’s very, very, very rare for a profitable company to fire its top talent. Unless there’s toxic culture in place (which impacts dozens or hundreds of others and can KILL an entire company), firing top performers is lunacy.
If you’re impacted, that sucks. But the best thing you can do is target a role where your contributions directly contribute to the bottom line. And pull your weight to stay in the top 5% – 10% at all times.
And if you’re not ready to do this because of work-life balance, remote requirements, or other priorities, the luck factor is the key reason payroll is being transferred month to month.
