Not all employees need to be the "best". But if you are a top tier company in a given field like Microsoft, you need the best minds to stay top tier, otherwise you will descend. But on the other hand you don't need the lower tier performers to stay top tier except for scaling reasons because the supply for top tier performers is a very small pool...
I might be wrong, but I doubt that these mass buyouts were also offered to those that are strategically relevant. Though I guess that can happen if that specific branch of the management tree is bad at their jobs
This also works as price discovery mechanism for both parties. Best employee can take a break and apply later for different job, profile, growth industry etc. Companies also find better to hire what they think best at market price instead of honorary best which are there for long time.
Even now with agentic work there are areas I am able to do well and some areas im not. It's definitely always changing.
Getting rid of your best means you'll also make sure that the rest of them slowly, but surely leave and never come back. Good people will not work with average people which results in long term failure to compete for the company.
There's a reason why all tech industry leaders have focused on getting a *consistent* and *even* pool of good workers to establish themselves there (against wisdom of the MBA crowd you're repeating here).
Or rather because they share observations about the world you might not like.
This is what a discussion is - and besides me not liking it, it's also flawed and dismissive of people.
Having checked your CV, I can see why you're probably doing it, but that's still.. not great. Maybe you should've also checked mine before running with these strong opinions.
The execs want to run the most profit to cost they can squeeze out, usually short term. The employees see the value in the senior and knowledge rich staff with higher costs long term.
Which hurts me to say. But engineers tend to make for terrible businessmen. (There are exceptions of course, and the opposite is _even worse_)
I think the efforts on cutting edge works has been reduced and redirected to more market-dominating trends like LLM optimizations. This is a bet. Cut off the finger for a stronger arm. And I think this bet will fail. But I thought the same about this new Gemini after Bard, and boy I was wrong.
That is true for monopolies. Once you get a monopoly, you do not need to compete anymore. Lower the salaries. Make products worse. Increase prices. Monopolies do not need to care. We used to break them because that. Nowadays, bots just will tell you that they are monopolies because they are "so good". So, here we are.
It is not true if you are determining the correct feature to add to microsoft's money making products. That requires deep knowledge of users and the industry and the existing product. It requires understanding the industry and users far in advance, the turnaround time for a feature in Windows or Azure is likely 6 months or longer, sometimes years. It requires acumen and an ability to think about customers and the market and sales. Microsoft doesn't have 5000 people who can do this. They probably don't have 1000. These people can go start their own business or consulting firm today. There are lots of people they worked with in the past who know how good they are so they can get another job.
The same is true for engineering. Out of 500 engineers, there are 10-20 that are doing the really important work that you can't just find someone else to do. They know everything about the system and everyone comes to them for advice or to get explanations about how things are put together and why. You can't just find some average engineer and put them in the same desk as these 10-20 and magically things are fine, the mid tier person doesn't have the years of experience nor the potential to fill this role even if they did have the experience.
I.. uh. I hate to break it to you, but that's not as deep of a moat as this reads like you would believe it is.
Engineers (like me, fwiw) would love to believe all these things about themselves, but they're not really true.
Of course, there is a difference, but the difference just doesn't matter all that much in the real world. Markets do not care.
Which isn't to say that people shouldn't know their worth. But it is to say that one can better defend their worth when armed with an accurate assessment of reality.
Or rather, it is an incredibly cheap way to shut down a whole range of dumb counters, so of course one throws it in.
But I do not love to break it to people. I am ambivalent about that. I just like true things.
So you're right on the "something isn't authentic here" but wrong on the assessment of the motivation.