[GalenErso]

Reposting a comment from Reddit[1]:

Microsoft has been bleeding talent for the last 5-6 years due to low compensation. It's why the SLT authorized a "correction" in pay last year that saw many people get a significant pay bump. Lots of new college hires have even stated that Microsoft's offer was the lowest offer they received. Levels.fyi tells basically the same story as well if you compare Microsoft to many other tech companies.

One thing to note is that the bonus and stock award budget have been reduced from last year where it was inflated. So, it's back to normal. What is frustrating is that it's also likely "back to normal" for the executives when it should be minimal to non-existent. The pessimist in me says that this is nothing more than juicing the quarterly stats so that Satya and his directs hit their targets for their "normal" bonuses.

Honestly, this is the closest I've seen the company to unionization and I'm willing to bet that efforts are going to start soon. Especially if the Q4/annual results exceed expectations.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13dveyv/microso...

[jandrese]

Every time a company is one day telling the employees that they need to take a pay cut to keep the company "competitive" (and this pay freeze is actually a pay cut), and the next day they're doing a stock buyback and the C-Suite is giving themselves enormous performance bonuses they need to worry about unionization.

[mmcconnell1618]

Dividends should be a sign that a company has excess cash and can't find a good place to invest it. Paying a dividend while asking workers to take a pay freeze signals they don't believe the workers are returning enough value to justify paying them more.

[oblio]

What are stock buybacks, then? They're more employee hostile than dividends, that's for sure.

[UncleMeat]

Buybacks are actually better for employees with unvested grants. If you have 100k in unvested stock and a dividend is issued, you get nothing. But an equivalent buyback raises the price and now you vest a higher amount.

[JumpCrisscross]

> They're more employee hostile than dividends, that's for sure

Why are buybacks more employee hostile than dividends?

[oblio]

Because I have to sell the shares and I get a bunch of cash. Dividends could happen yearly and for significant amounts, considering how cash rich these companies are.

For the whales, sure, they're great, since they do the whole "borrow against the share price and extend forever".

[monksy]

Or they turn around and buy a company for a half a billion dollars.

oh Zebra.. never change.

https://chainstoreage.com/zebra-acquires-reflexis-575-millio...

[tombert]

Not to sound too much like a libertarian, and I'm not against unions, but isn't this something that can be more or less corrected by a lot of engineers finding work elsewhere? It's not like Microsoft has anywhere near a monopoly on the software engineering space anymore, and most of the engineers there can probably adjust to remote work without too much of an issue.

Then we get the cycle of Microsoft complaining that they can't hire enough people, and then they bump salaries up again to be competitive.

[jselysianeagle]

> but isn't this something that can be more or less corrected by a lot of engineers finding work elsewhere?

In this market? I'm skeptical. I'm sure some fraction of them can do so at equivalent or higher pay, but the tech market at the moment is quite soft and I wouldn't be surprised this was taken into account and served as another motivation for this move from MS.

[tombert]

That's fair, I was a victim of the layoffs of 2022 (well, sort of), and it took months to find a job paying well enough to cover my mortgage. I did find one, and I really like it, but it took a lot of time and effort to find...certainly harder than it was early last year.

[DubiousPusher]

> isn't this something that can be more or less corrected by a lot of engineers finding work elsewhere?

In the long run sure. But in the short run, employment is sticky. Especially in the professional world.

[DubiousPusher]

> Microsoft has been bleeding talent for the last 5-6 years due to low compensation.

I have been hearing this for awhile now. When I compare MS pay and benefits to what is on offer at other companies, almost the only jobs I see with better TC are at Meta and Google. And that will likely not be a thing of Meta's future.

[soulbadguy]

Things have probably changed in the last year or so since the pandemic, but due to a combination of stock appreciation and much smaller company size pretty much everyone was paying more than MSFT : Uber, lyft, airbnb, snowflakes etc... and a bunch of pre-ipo company depends on how much one believed their valuation.

The only company paying worst than MSFT were the hardware company such as AMD,Qualcomm and intel. But hardware companies are known for low wages