40% of Microsofts layoffs were engineering ICs

Okay lets break it down: >"Company is hiring and highly profitable." >I don't think many people comprehend the waste and organizational complexity that grows out of control in larger companies. The quote you are replying to is followed up by >These weren't performance based. make it make sense. Therefore I judge your response in that context please don't change the context to a new proposition like the one you suggest here: >I am suggesting that the solution to terminal levels of management dishonesty an fiefdom mentality in preserving headcount at all costs to appear busy and important is firing I agree with you that a solution, not the **only** solution but a reasonable one, to unnecessary headcount is firing. I don't think there is anything crazy about that. However this does not in any way help explain the problem you are initially responding to (in the quote you include mentioned above) which is that for a company who is "hiring and highly profitable" meaning has plenty of money to invest in existing improvements, new ventures, management optimizations and reorganization, it is a logical and reasonable solution to layoff a significant amount of employees. This is what is crazy because this is not a one off problem but a cycle of layoffs that happens every year multiple times throughout the years (Source you asked for: \[https://www.trueup.io/co/microsoft\](https://www.trueup.io/co/microsoft)) So yes when you take it in the context of your response then it is crazy to justify it by suggesting these layoff are the result of **a mentality of preserving headcount**. Even Microsoft doesn't provide this as an explanation and has shown no evidence of this for the number of employees that are being fired. Please provide a source if you have. My source is the existence of cycles themselves. If this is management mistake then it wouldn't happen multiple time every year unless management was intentionally doing it. Microsoft executives are educated highly intelligent people if this **fiefdom mentality** was such a frequently recurring problem why not address it and solve it? How does firing people help solve the problem and how come the number of fired people seem to show no change in trend. So all mitigations for a problem that you clearly identified have failed to the point that is unresolvable with anything but firing? This is the crazy part. I have nothing to say about your other points because firing itself is not the problem but it is the firing round we are talking about here. This is Microsoft who has had these layoff cycles for years and continues to have them with no visible change in behavior.