On top of the 18,000 workers who lost their job last year, Microsoft announced more job losses this year. [ News Story ]

The odd thing is - while the company is firing American workers, they are applying for more H1-B visas to hire foreign workers.

Almost all the newly laid-off workers are former Nokia employees, mostly in Finland and almost all in the phone division. Their new hires are almost all in other divisions.

Also, Microsoft is already a multinational and employs many foreigners all over the world, even outside of America.

The odd thing is - while the company is firing American workers, they are applying for more H1-B visas to hire foreign workers.

Keep in mind that for a large software corporation, hiring and layoffs are not strongly related to one another.

Hiring is largely a constant affair. Your successful divisions always have more openings for skilled engineers than exist in the job market. Layoffs are about cutting loose ineffective and underperforming divisions (in this case mostly the Nokia phone organisation) - you can rest assured that the quote-unquote "valuable" employees will have been quietly offered transfers or re-hiring into other divisions wherever possible.

And while you will of course lose a few good people in this process, a pretty high percentage of the remainder is the chaff: a large body of engineers acquired from Nokia without interviews, many of whom may not be a good fit for the company. A smattering of veteran engineers who have grown complacent and failed to keep up with the times. And a bunch of college hires who never quite lived up to that shiny potential they demonstrated as interns...

TL;DR: firing people is part and parcel of maintaining a competent and effective engineering organisation. You don't have to use massive layoffs (as Microsoft has done lately), but it's an effective, albeit brutal, tactic.

The odd thing is - while the company is firing American workers, they are applying for more H1-B visas to hire foreign workers.

To put it another way, workers are not fungible. The fired American workers have different skills and fulfill different functions than the retained American workers (it's not like Microsoft fired all of its US workforce) or the hired H1-B visa workers.

You also can't assume that all these workers the Microsoft are laying off are even engineers or skilled workers. If Microsoft has a large workforce in Finland then you can guarantee it has a team of middle management, program managers etc.. managing them from the US. Once it lets the skilled workforce go there is no point in continuing to have semi / unskilled workers hanging around in the US with nothing to manage.
The H1-B visas on the other hand are completely different. They are for highly skilled workers that Microsoft really has trouble finding in the US or any other country.

A bit off topic but is the site linked to by the OP actually considered to be a news site. Holy Crap there seems to be a specific slant to every story and they even have a section called "opinion" as if they are trying to claim the rest of the site isn't just opinion. Its almost as funny as reading The Onion.

 

A bit off topic but is the site linked to by the OP actually considered to be a news site.  Holy Crap there seems to be a specific slant to every story and they even have a section called "opinion" as if they are trying to claim the rest of the site isn't just opinion.  Its almost as funny as reading The Onion.

Oh no a news site that is not a big business mouthpiece. Reading the comments here is more like reading the onion, to me.

Especially the ones about highly skilled workers, when they hire most people from overseas simply because they are much cheaper. Some industries have been shipped overseas but the rest of the country doesn't have to see its industry disappear as a useful job path even while it flourishes (though this will be the wave of the future). My brother and sister make so much money it sickens me, they are not the smart ones of the family though, or the hardest working. They are simply doing jobs where they are not being replaced wholesale by special government program designed to give their positions away to foreigners who don't have to go through the normal channels to get in the country. They just get a free ride all the way to citizenship simply for having a basic college degree from any university on earth (almost all of which are much cheaper than those here).

But the average tech salary is just 80k, and places you can make much more than that require much more than that to live in comfortably. For me it's not really an issue but I feel sorry for all the guys graduating with CS degrees who will never get a job. Wages went up and up over time, then flatlined forever due to this program. I would never have bothered with this career path if I'd known what things would come to. There's a million other things I could have done, all of which would be easier and most of them better paying.

It just shows what's happened to the industry that pointing it out is silenced. There's hardly any americans in the american tech industry any more. In defense it's gone from 100% to basically 0% in just a couple decades. Even the defense industry hires random foreigners to do its work, then suffers a great deal when it comes to security breachs and insecure software. Right now all the most vital code that is the real world analog of WHOOPER ie controlling WW III scenario, is full of insecure open source code. A hundred million PER PROGRAM to fix it will put things in order though, all of it performed by lowest bidder contracts with 0% american citizens involved of course, which is what caused the problem in the first place. I would cry but I am too busy laughing.

Even on a gaming site, it's obviously the case.

...

[citation needed]

But the average tech salary is just 80k

So the average tech salary is above the average salary of a MD. You're complaining about...?

I would never have bothered with this career path if I'd known what things would come to. There's a million other things I could have done, all of which would be easier and most of them better paying.

You know, with a MSc in computer science, you can always start working as sales director at a company like IBM, Cap Gemini, Accenture, or PWC. All you need to do is talk (no problem, I'd say) and get some contracts signed -- for hiring foreigners to replace your brother and sister in their jobs or for outsourcing their jobs alltogether, as it happens, but alas... you're getting paid. You'll start well above that tech salary and if you're any good at your job, you will be able to gain 5-10 times as much within a couple of years.