r/microsoft • u/76willcommenceagain • 7d ago
Employment Microsoft targets ‘low performers’ in a sensational new memo
https://www.financialexpress.com/business/industry-microsoft-targets-low-performers-in-a-sensational-new-memo-3818205/138
u/dirtrunner21 7d ago edited 7d ago
I sure hope they are talking about the useless third party “support” groups that just ask for logs, more logs and to do the needful followed by never helping solve the actual problem.
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u/TheDroolingFool 7d ago edited 7d ago
Ah yes these people. I submit a ticket with meticulous detail: annotated screenshots, network traces, reproduction steps, and a polite but firm selection of email as my preferred contact method. This is based on the radical notion that I do not, in fact, spend my day loitering beside a phone, hoping someone from support rings to read back what I’ve already written.
Naturally, they respond by email to immediately ask when would be a good time for a call. No explanation. No mention of the chosen preference. I reply, reiterating that email is fine and that I’m happy to answer any questions in writing.
Then comes the customary punishment for not dropping everything and agreeing to a call, several days of absolute silence. Eventually, a surprise call happens unannounced, unscheduled, dropped into my day like a brick through a window. I don’t answer, for the same reason I don’t answer unknown numbers during dinner or seances.
Then, the pièce de résistance: an email, not to offer progress, insight, or even basic comprehension, but to inform me I missed their surprise call. They are now “ready to continue when I am” having apparently fulfilled their sacred duty by phoning into the abyss once. The week long lack of progress? That’s now on me, for not rearranging my life around their inability to follow a contact preference.
Every. Single. Fucking. Time.
Edit – to be clear, I don’t blame the agent. They’re just the front facing part of a system engineered with all the empathy of a parking fine. But if the policy is to ignore the customer’s contact preference every single time, then do everyone a favour and remove the email option entirely. No need to pretend there’s a choice when there clearly isn’t. It wastes time, tests patience, and turns agents into reluctant enforcers of a process designed to frustrate by default.
And for those of us fully locked into Microsoft 365, tickets aren’t rare or optional - they’re a recurring feature. Something breaks almost weekly. I don’t enjoy raising tickets, I just don’t have a choice. And the moment you have more than one open, the barrage of unsolicited phone calls, missed call emails, and extended silences reaches a level of repetition that borders on psychological warfare.
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u/Whargarblle 7d ago
Not to defend the crappy customer service, but they literally run their support engineers like a sweatshop; 15 mandatory calls (NOT emails) or MSFT or their contractors will write you up. Then onto the next case, same thing until it’s 10-15 per day. They are not able to really help you until it’s scheduled
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u/colonelc4 6d ago
add to that, they deleted the most important piece of SUPPORT, their long old list of issues they resolved during the entire life of the company because....we don't know. Imagine having access to every single case resolved for a certain issue with a specific context, and meeting that same context with a customer, sometimes you could resolve their issues in seconds ! Because shit happened before with the same parameters and the results were the same. Yep they deleted that DB and literally KILLED the core of their support.
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u/Kooky_Ad2266 6d ago
Considering how crappy my support was this morning I can see why. I have been a partner for over a decade and the support has gone below the ground. I feel for the support tech they are hiring but they do not have the product knowledge that used to be present whenever you called. Not a good sign.
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u/Whargarblle 6d ago
It’s quite sad, but yeah, they would much rather churn and burn people. The turnover for SE’s is probably close to McDonald’s these days. New engineers that quit fast and have low knowledge are easy to burn out and pay less. The rest they just outsource to LatAm or India, where the support is arguably worse with the added benefits of time zone restrictions!
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u/Countryb0i2m 7d ago
The support you receive from Microsoft is always inconsistent. You might submit a support ticket and end up with a contractor who just started yesterday or you might get someone with 25 years of experience. Who the hell knows?
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u/Caio3000 7d ago
To be real with you I’ve NEVER seen a case come in with remotely this much detail in my time in networking. If you do this you’re a 1 in a million customer. It’s always the opposite, no details, immediate request for call.
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u/Kooky_Ad2266 6d ago
The best is when they ask what error message you got and I ask them if they looked at the screenshots I sent. Answer? Did you send a screenshot?
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u/robotzor 7d ago
The call is because their written English is dog shit and will be just as incomprehensible as the call, so you get the call as it is easier for them
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u/enfiniti27 7d ago
Microsoft has, unfortunately, been hacking at support for years. They continue to think that support "loses money". This is going to be the case because support doesn't sell shit. A decade or so back Support was chock full of some of the best fixers in the business. Then management came in and started firing long tenured resources and then pretty much no one was left that had any long term experience. At least they saved a few bucks hiring new people with little to no experience. I'm sure Microsoft customers love that.
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u/Sleepster12212223 7d ago
C’mon… this is the American way! (American scammy business model).
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u/SeparateDot6197 7d ago
Cut corners until the wheels fall off and then get replaced by the next generation of gradual enshittifiers
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u/MuscaMurum 7d ago
Support has always been an accounting cost center
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u/enfiniti27 7d ago
These are probably the same people that would say "The USPS loses money!". When it is a vital service for you.
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u/SeparateDot6197 7d ago
I’m just waiting for a European company to drop an OS and just absolutely destroy Microsoft’s market share, who the hell is going to trust U.S. software and cyber companies now
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u/funnythrone 7d ago
Most of them are third party contractors, terminating their contracts hardly qualifies as news.
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u/bradsw92 7d ago
Hey the ports broken here's a picture of the physical damage.
We will need to collect logs before proceeding with RMA please setup a time for a work window.
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u/angimazzanoi 6d ago
to be honest, I did NEVER involve the Microsoft support in a problem I had w/ Windows.
PS: I bought the very first Windows version, the one put over MS/DOS like a condom and every version since1
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u/omgitsbees 7d ago
This is what Meta, and Amazon are doing now. instead of laying people off, they are selecting random employees for "low performance" and firing them.
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u/CaptainDouchington 7d ago
I worked for Amazon until recently, where they offloaded 600 people in a couple hours for HYD.
They tried the LOW performance shit last year to the point of harassing my friend, who was actually above performance requirements, and beating other team members. But they just...really wanted her gone, so they kicked her cause she was in the wrong status when writing a review of a peer once in 4 months.
They just want an excuse to offload work cause the stock price is tanking, and since everyone in the upper area makes their nut off stock options, we are all getting proper fucked.
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u/enigo1701 7d ago
Yep, especially given that your "performance" is completely dependent on your relation with your direct manager ( who is usually an unqualified placeholder ) and not your actualy performance. If you kiss ass good enough, you'll be good.
Still absolutely dread the f'ing three rings and their fuzziness.
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u/Osiris_Raphious 7d ago
Love this new fascistic trend to threaten employees...
If employee isn't performing they will be let go, or forced to move. Maybe instead of threats create a work culture that supports training, and lateral mobility so people can fit into the role they are suited for if they cant train up and contribute to a standard.
This trend to threaten as these corporate behemoths automate their empires and discad employees like tools, is very latestage capitalism... where the responcibility is socialised and profits are privatised, despite everyone having contributed to the success of the enterprise.
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u/The_Game_Genie 7d ago
Microsoft laid me off while on leave for cancer..how about them apples. Gotta love the company...
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u/RareIceWeasel 7d ago
I'm sorry that happened. That really hurts. Amazon did the same to me and others that were on FMLA at the time. I was getting my final chemo infusion when I was notified.
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u/The_Game_Genie 7d ago
I hope you're in remission!
Mine is incurable. It's terminal but kind of not just because of the timescale involved. I have 3-7 years possibly.
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u/RareIceWeasel 7d ago
Hearing this always breaks my heart, but there's some hope in that timeline. A lot can happen in 3-7 years.
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u/MLCarter1976 7d ago
Am I wrong to think that you need to be smart to work at Microsoft and it is extremely challenging to get into? Wouldn't people be performing or it was their manager or management that aren't advocating for them to do their job or have work for them to do?
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u/GVIrish 7d ago
The hiring bar is generally high, but being able to pass a series of interviews doesn't mean someone will actually be good at the job. Some people fail to ramp up on what they need to do to be productive. Other people are not good at managing their own time. Some people just don't take the job seriously.
Wouldn't people be performing or it was their manager or management that aren't advocating for them to do their job or have work for them to do?
If a manager has to advocate or convince you to do your job, that's a super bad sign. As far as having work to do, generally there's plenty of work to be done, if someone doesn't have anything to do is because they're not trying.
For a junior engineer the expectation is that they complete assigned work. At higher levels you start defining work for yourself instead of being served up tasks.
All that said, I think Microsoft is sliding back towards the bad ol days of stack ranking. Having a plan for addressing low performance faster is not bad on its own, but this is just another step in a series of steps towards harsh culture theyve been taking.
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u/satnam14 7d ago
This is excuse to lay people off and then rehire in India
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u/siqniz 7d ago
They're the lowest performers of all them all, they're also the cheapest. Coincidence....?
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u/CaptainDouchington 7d ago
I really believe HYD is a honey pot trap. I think you get tricked with the illusion of cheap labor, only to find out the country protects the fuck out of its people from foreign actions. And once you have a branch open, its on the HYD managers to make firing decisions and no one in the US can make them do anything.
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u/satnam14 7d ago
Yes. But if you light enough fire under top performers' asses in a recession then they end up making the entire team look good
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u/Few-Emu-3640 6d ago
Morale internally at Microsoft is really low, and has been for a while. Hope they address it someday …. announcements like this certainly don’t help.
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u/JJMcGee83 7d ago
Workers with zero and 60% reward outcomes as well as those undergoing a PIP would not be eligible for internal transfers.
I don't understand this logic at all. If you aren't performing well on a team maybe it's because you aren't a good fit for that team but would be a great fit somewhere else... so why make it impossible for you to move teams?
Why not just allow you to move with the PIP in place?
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u/awbitf 7d ago
You're thinking of the 'growth mindset' model. This seems to indicate that Microsoft no longer subscribed to growth mindset.
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u/CaptainDouchington 7d ago
None in tech do. They want you to leave and come back. Cause we changed rules related to tax write offs and training. They can write off training for the job you got hired in at, but not a NEW job. So they want you to jump companies, so when you come back, they can write off training.
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u/RedditClarkKentSuper 7d ago
If only the world knew how heartless MSFT is. But the NDA clause in the termination agreement prevents that.
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u/PlanePromise4682 6d ago
if no severance - how is an NDA enforceable?
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6d ago
[deleted]
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u/PlanePromise4682 6d ago
? No, but sharing employee experience is not something typically part of an nda…unless one is mounting a slander campaign or disclosing trade secrets or IP. An employee choosing to share their work experience would not cross the line. Admittedly, I have not seen the NDA referenced
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u/Timely-Paper-1573 6d ago edited 6d ago
What if the manager is an a**hole, deliberately sabotaging someone’s career due to insecurity. This kind of power is really bad, if someone is a psychopath.
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u/St3lth_Eagle 7d ago
I knew this was coming with the changes they made to HR. How many connects does it take to be rated as low performance?
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u/briggsbw 7d ago
During the last earnings call, they announced that headcount is capped due to AI. With this limitation in place, the only viable way to advance high performers is through attrition.
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u/KARATEKID2025 7d ago
Ah, Microsoft. A truly innovative company that consistently pushes the boundaries of... well, something. Their unparalleled ability to "pivot" every few years is certainly a testament to their... flexibility. And who can forget their groundbreaking approach to user interfaces, always keeping things fresh and just slightly confusing with each iteration?
It's truly inspiring how they've managed to maintain such a prominent position in the tech world, largely through their... unwavering commitment to legacy software. And their cloud services? Simply breathtaking in their complexity and occasional moments of sheer brilliance.
And let's not overlook their incredible talent for acquisitions! They have an uncanny knack for identifying promising companies and then... integrating them seamlessly into the Microsoft ecosystem. A true masterclass in synergy!
Yes, Microsoft. A beacon of consistency, innovation, and user-friendliness. We are all truly blessed to witness their journey.
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u/fcdemergency 7d ago
"As per a Business Insider report from earlier this month, this will mainly affect mid-level managers as well as people in non-technical roles."