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There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount, adjusted for business changes in that time. The exact adjustment is hard to know, but in general, if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue. Very generally speaking.

For example, Google had been growing somewhat quickly for decades prior to 2020, but in 2021 and 2022 it grew by over sixty-thousand people, and the crazy growth actually started in 2020, so even more than that. Sixty thousand!

Undoing that takes a very long time--they should have been much smarter about it. You need four rounds of twelve-thousand person RIFs (whether layoffs or buyouts) to get back to the earlier growth trajectory. Each round generates several stories that hit HN.

Is this MS still dropping back to pre-Covid? I would bet at least some of it is.

by fzeroracer13 hours ago|

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> There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount

This is an incorrect way of looking at it. Microsoft was growing at approximately 10-15% headcount year over year prior to COVID. If they reverted to the approximate 2020 headcount that would mean an overall decline in growth in comparison to a situation where COVID did not exist.

by compiler-guy11 hours ago|

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I didn't suggest that they revert to the approximate 2020 headcount. The question in the GGP was, "How much of the Covid headcount growth is there to revert?"

And the answer is, "Calculate what would have happened without Covid, assuming previous growth patterns, and compare that to current headcount."

So they would revert to the 2020 headcount plus a guess as to non-covid influenced headcount. A reasonable guess there is "about the same amount on average as pre-Covid growth."

by logicchains15 hours ago|

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>if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue

A company growing 10% per year would be around 7x larger 20 years later. There's a limit on how big companies can get.

by solyin15 hours ago|

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Is there? GE, back in the days, did everything, and looking at Samsung as a percentage of South Korea's economy, would say, absent any government regulation like anti-trust, there really isn't. Berkshire Hathaway is one such conglomerate in the US today.

by Barrin9210 hours ago|

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>absent any government regulation like anti-trust, there really isn't.

Yes, there is. Read Coase's seminal paper, The Nature of the Firm. Companies function by replacing market mechanisms with bureaucratic administration. That finds its end when internal coordination or misallocation of resources incurs more cost than it saves in transaction costs.

Conglomerates therefore have a ceiling in size, and it's the reason why unwinding them generally increases market value for the sum of its individual companies (in finance parlance: "conglomerate discount"). It's also why the Soviet Union didn't run very well, and very large conglomerates are usually the consequence of political/economic arrangements.

by 16 hours ago|

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by jambalaya816 hours ago|

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a lot of places, including Microsoft, drastically cut or are in the process of cutting down on WFH also means what, vast distances between teams, coworkers, buildings, cafeteria, etc (for campus based companies). How many of these places that are "going back to office" (or have already) are doing more in-person and less or no Zoom/Teams meetings now, anyway?