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If Microsoft start 17% then we should expect more from smaller companies and the Job Loss is going to be a biggest issue than Housing now in US.

Not exactly. Bigger companies usually employ more redundancy and have much more fat to trim than smaller companies.

It's not exactly that microsoft has invented anything beyond garbage lately... Vista? Please...

I've heard that they won't do a straight layoff because they'd have to let the cheap labor go first (H1B visa folks). They don't want to do that. So they're going to reorg in a musical chairs fashion, and if you don't have a job when the music stops, you're out.

H1B visa's are to hire "skilled workers" who can't be found among current residents. In theory, you have a hard time justifying hiring H1B folks if you're laying off citizens and permanent residents with the same job title.

As someone who works for an employer that hires a LOT of H1B visa programmers and is outsourcing to India like crazy, I see the logic to Microsoft's plan - if this is true. My work group is currently about 25% H1B visa status employees.

So, rather than do a full layoff - they'll force the issue with reorgs. Cheaper labor in-house candidates will be grabbed up in the re-orgs. More expensive engineers/programmers will be looking around when the music stops.

It's not just microsoft. All big companies are doing that these days. Actually, the bulk of the position eliminations are in the middle management who are no longer hands-on.

Being hands-on appears to be still more or less employable (as long as you don't have some ancient skillset like fortran).

The other thing (like what yahoo do). Is they are simultaneously eliminating some positions while hiring for others....
My friends just got offers from both microsoft and yahoo, even the latter just did some layoffs and the former supposedly will be doing it.

Personally, I wouldn't go to either these days. Both seem like sinking ships, one which is the titanic (yahoo), and the other one microsoft is more like a slow leak. But then again when you're looking for a job these days, beggars can't be choosers.

Outsourcing is overrated. Normally, I haven't seen work that I personally would like to do that is outsourced (yet). Insourcing is a completely different thing, which in these days make a lot more sense.

I am considered more of a team lead or platform lead for a commercial software package which I am hoping is not "middle management" enough as most technical decisions come directly through me. I kind of get to wear the architect hat, but direct a the tasks of a few others both here and in India. Still it's a bit scary out there.

I'll bet this is Microsoft's effort to move more deeply into offshoring towards India. This is likely a shift of US jobs to other countries. If true, its not a good sign for us here in the US. And, its more incentive for us to look at competing/public domain offerings like linux, mysql, etc.

Am I ranting here?

I don't know anyone who uses MS stuff anymore. All the big players are already on open source Linux, MySQL, etc.. I've administered and programmed on both MS and open source platforms, and I'm never taking on another MS-based project. When I think of MS and MS-based projects, I think of Office Space. Cubicles and billions of lines of code and an army of monkeys that write and maintain it. And staplers. MS is a slowly dying dinosaur.

As for India, I've had to work with a few teams in India on projects and it was nothing but headache and sub-par results. From my experiences, the outsourcing of programming is overrated and a lot of companies are going to be disappointed when trying to save a few bucks

It sounds like outsourcing has been a mixed bag.

Just to add some balance to the comments trashing outsourcing: The two companies I've worked for recently have used Indian programmers on a small scale and have been pleasantly surprised at the good quality and rapid learning. In the long run, more is planned, but in the current environment they will be amongst the first to suffer if expenses need to be reduced. (I work in the first purely private-sector industry to use computers on a large scale, so I suspect what we do is a leading indicator outside the software industry itself.)

I have worked for Microsoft as a contractor. At a certain level they are a well run company. Some of their products suck. Their best days are behind them. They will evolve like IBM.

IBM is hardily a dinasour. It is an average technology company with steady stream of revenues in software, services and semiconductors. It is a ghost of its past.

India has a large population with some smart people. Too many companies moved their operations to India too fast creating a shortage of skilled workers in India. That is a short sweet explanation for uneven results of work in India.

I believe this "rumor" could be for real. Scary and signs of things to come in 2009.

At least MS has the class to wait until AFTER the holidays, unlike companies like Motorola which gave ALL its employees a nasty pre-Christmas 17-Dec letter (horrible timing) where they halted all raises/cost-of-living increases, suspended all company matching contributions to the Motorola 401(k) Plan, and permanently FROZE all future pension plan benefit accruals, and rather intimated at future layoffs to come. That's a nice Merry Christmas.

Layoffs, shmayoffs...

From today's New York Post:

Look what taxpayers' Wall Street rescue helped buy one former honcho!

Peter Kraus -- a former top executive at Merrill Lynch who received a $25-million golden parachute after only three months' work -- has landed himself a $37-million Park Avenue pad.

Kraus, 55, doled out the staggering sum for the five-bedroom co-op at 720 Park Ave. near East 70th Street after taking $25 million from Merrill after the company was sold to Bank of America in September.

Chalk it up to brilliant negotiation skills, and being in the right place at the right time: The Post says that Merrill hired Kraus as an executive vice president in summer, and agreed to a $50-million total pay package for him -- including the customary giant golden parachute.

"Although he did not officially start work until September, Kraus hit the jackpot after just a couple of days, when Merrill CEO John Thain sold the company to Bank of America," the Post notes. "The sale automatically triggered the $25 million payout under Kraus' contract. He left Merrill this month."

His parachute is equivalent to 0.1% of the $25 billion cash infusion that Bank of America and Merrill together got under the government’s bailout plan for the financial system.

Kraus now is CEO of money manager AllianceBernstein.

Damn it feels good to be a bankster....

Insourcing is hiring a bunch of contractors from lower cost areas (midwest for example) and/or hiring a bunch of 1-4 year experience folks to do grunt work, after specifications/designs/etc have been flushed such that all i's and t's are crossed such that hiring a "senior programmer" is unneccesary. These days, it's almost as cost effective outsourcing from india. It ain't cheap to hire good talent in india these days.

I sort of laugh at companies who can't get the difference between a "programmer" versus "software engineer". If a company can't distinguish between the two, find another company, or you will be outsourced.

Actually, some of the big players no longer write "that much code" anymore. Some of the work is using hardware based versions of previous known software packages, a lot work is being done on enterprise software packages that follow standards, or integration technologies. Hence, why you don't want to stay a "programmer" unless you're embedded.

Tech is so commoditized these days, it's cheap to put things together..though opensource is overrated. Without proper documentation/support, it costs an arm and a leg in time.

I disagree. The beauty of open source is that more times than not, the only "documentation" you need is Teh Googles.

My experiences with open source are mixed. Open source worked for me - Apache. Emebedded Linux was another story.

I utterly dislike OpenOffice. With all its defects Office 2003 is way superior to it.

Microsoft to cut 5,000:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Microsoft-...

Rumor has it that even larger layoffs were discussed but they decided against it.

not a major layoff imho for microsoft. It's about time.

Off topic............. for interest

IT insourcer Satyam got rid of a chunk of their workforce in a different way.
-------------------------------------------------

Details of alleged Satyam fraud emerge
By Joe Leahy in Mumbai and Varun Sood in Hyderabad
Published: January 22 2009 09:25 | Last updated: January 22 2009 09:25
The former chairman of Satyam Computer Services, B Ramalinga Raju, invented more than one quarter of the Indian company’s workforce and siphoned off the salaries of these fictitious employees for his own use, the government prosecutor alleged on Thursday.

In the first public comments by investigators on the fraud at India’s fourth-largest IT outsourcing group, the public prosecutor of India’s southern Andhra Pradesh state, Gangaraj Prasad, told the Financial Times that police believed the true size of Satyam’s workforce was 40,000 – not 53,000 as the company claims.

i hear that microsoft cut some employees