Some Microsoft employees fume over the company’s open offer to hire hundreds of OpenAI staff::Current employees point to layoffs and a salary freeze this year at Microsoft and wonder why it’s promising to match the pay of OpenAI staff.
The answer is always money
I get why they’d be pissed. If they cut staff in their old AI team for ‘strategic reasons’ or whatever they told employees, they should stick to that reasoning and say it doesn’t make sense to bring on a different AI team. Otherwise it does send the wrong message to existing employees that they will just be replaced by an acquisition. I can’t imagine working at Microsoft and trusting anything that leadership team says regardless, but even the fact that they made that offer with all the cost cutting they’ve been doing just says that they aren’t being truthful about why they are doing it.
Wait, a giant corpo didn’t actually do cost-cutting because they ‘had’ to and instead lied to all of their employees about pocketing money?!
… … oh god, wait, I’ve misplaced my surprise Pikachu face… one moment…
In Finland this would be illegal. Firing employees requires reason, and if the reason for firing was “cost cutting”, the old employee must be hired back first before new can be hired. There are of course some time limits.
This is what unions do for you.
I mean, I get why people would not like this but it is a value proposition. They think a random OpenAI employee is much more valuable than a some Microsoft employees. Hence, they’d rather boot specific Microsoft employees and hire OpenAI people instead.
I mean articles like this are kind of bullshit propaganda anyways. Microsoft is such a big company that there is going to be a huge range of opinions. The author is just selecting one opinion for their own reasons
The OpenAI people built ChatGPT, the Microsoft folks worked on Clippy.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In February, even some staff working on cloud and AI — Microsoft’s priority growth areas — were cut.
In May, CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft was freezing salaries and reducing its bonus and stock award budget for the year.
In July, Microsoft was still conducting layoffs, beyond the original 10,000, BI reported at the time.
Microsoft also shuttered projects and laid off staff in its “industrial metaverse,” its previous major AI initiative.
And then, after Microsoft’s AI partner OpenAI fired its CEO Sam Altman, Nadella announced on Monday that he’d hired Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman to run a new cutting edge AI research group.
Some believe that the new OpenAI unit could be good for employees, especially if Microsoft’s stock rises.
The original article contains 353 words, the summary contains 123 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
So they need to leave M$ and join OpenAI first. Then they can return with their nice new salary from OpenAI.
/s
No sarcasm necessary. This is literally how tech industry employment works.
Satire, not sarcasm.
In reality most of them do not work in an AI related area and therefore they do not have a chance to pull such a stunt. That’s why they are complaining now.
/s is commonly known as sarcasm
