Unless it’s evil to use clever ways to pay a bare minimum of tax in the US, where your company was born and enabled to prosper…
And yes; I’d do it too. Because I hate paying taxes, and besides, I’m evil.
I thought most of the first round were due to duplication of positions from when MS purchased Nokia.
Is this not the case?
To get access to the pool of talent you can hire only with H1B visas. If they have excellent person X, and want to hire her, they must certify there are no citizens who can do the job.
If you see job ads with really weird requirements, you know they are to justify an H1 visa. Microsoft is hardly alone in this. At the high level they do it to try to get more allowed.
“It’s not like we don’t want to hire more Americans, Senator, it is just that they are all so dumb.”
When my old company had to lay off people, because a project crashed, they had an extensive job fair where anyone at risk could apply for internal jobs and had priority. I actually got a very good guy that way. It was a lot of work for hiring managers and those going through the screening process, but it was the right thing to do.
Damn - forgot the point. If they tried to transfer the laid off people into the openings they are asking for H1B visas for, the need would be reduced. Did they make a real effort or just say that the laid off could apply for other jobs with no support? The latter is usually the case.
I think we should go over a few things. 1) I am not saying that Microsoft is evil 2)Evil is subjective
It seems as if you are saying that I am making the argument that Microsoft is evil because of the examples I stated. I do not know how you are coming to that conclusion. I am saying that Microsoft undertakes many actions and interacts with the public(obviously through the officers of Microsoft - I did not know I would need to clarify that in the discussion) that go beyond merely making a product and that is how Microsoft is different from an inanimate object.
Of course, I can see the validity in the view that these examples would be lame if used as a description of evil, but that was not the point.
Not evil, just… indifferent.
I started a new job almost six years ago, working on a huge game project. Six months after the game shipped, we had sudden layoffs- I was one of them.
We weren’t let go because we’d done a bad job. We weren’t let go because we were bad employees. We were let go because we were suddenly inconvenient. The company decided that it could make marginally more money without us than with us. Our live didn’t matter, the fact that many of us had moved our families all the way across the country to work on the project didn’t matter.
The company will continue to make money off of our work, for years to come. We, on the other hand, now have to suddenly uproot our families and desperately struggle to find new jobs. The company got what it wanted out of us, and so we’re now disposable.
Not evil. Just indifferent.
It will be interesting to see if Bill Gates continues to push for more immigration from China and India.
I mean, if Microsoft is so overstaffed that they have to fire 14,000 people, there shouldn’t be any need for more immigrants to do jobs that won’t exist any more.
Right?
It’s just a single page thread. It can’t be that difficult to read.
Right?
Right, because every employee is an interchangeable cog with the exact same skillset.
I would say that when you are managing large groups of people, the people tend to get abstracted as numbers on a spreadsheet. It appears as “indifference” because decisions must be made on a larger scale.
But companies really don’t care about their workers. Heck, have the companies I work for don’t even have workers anymore. They are all overseas. It’s just layers of managers and salespeople.
“It looks like you are posting on a message board. Can I help?”
Once I got through the initial learning curve I actually quite liked Windows 8 on my old Toshiba, never mind anything with a touch screen. I would still be running it if I hadn’t had to revert to an earlier version for technical reasons.
Indifference doesn’t make it less evil. Just more banal.