[int_19h]

The notion that layoffs are something new at Microsoft is weird. I joined it in 2009 in the middle of a large layoff, and I've seen several more over the 15 years I've spent working there. E.g. almost 8k people were gone back in 2015.

Nor is it something unique to them. As far as I know, the only large US tech company that didn't do layoffs in the past decade is NVIDIA (their last one was in 2008).

[Arainach]

>almost 8k people were gone back in 2015

That wasn't a traditional layoff - it was a reimagining of the development process and the elimination of SDET which was overwhelmingly a good thing - I also joined in 2009, and SDET was an utter disaster. All the good SDETs got out of that job - either to SDE at Microsoft or to SDE at another company. Those that were left were largely a waste of money, and the entire culture of "this person writes the code, this person writes the tests" meant that a lot of devs got high recognition and rewards for writing untestable unmaintainable garbage that someone else had to try to cover.

[ThrowawayB7]

Meanwhile, outside of the Redmond bubble, people keep hitting bugs in MS products that never would have gotten past the STEs and SDETs back in the day. Microsoft was forced to build its QA discipline in the '90s and early '00s because they were being torn to shreds by the press and public for the legendary bugginess of their products. Now we're seeing that bugginess creep back in thanks to Nadella.

Whenever it comes up among my co-workers as a Microsoft product falls on its face yet again, most recently MS Project Online screwing up something as simple as completion percentages during a meeting, I just sigh and quip "Maybe Microsoft ought to consider hiring a QA department."