Can someone with experience in hiring and firing help me understand something? Microsoft has many open positions listed on their website[1]. Why would they lay off people they've already invested time and money into hiring and developing, instead of offering these employees the open positions within the company? Doesn't this seem counterproductive? Why are big tech companies so quick to fire employees?
It's the law regarding redundancies where I live (currently going through one now) that everyone should be evaluated against all open positions. Not just open, all remaining ones as well. So you can't just axe a specific team, those people could lay claim on the same role in different positions, and be evaluated against objective criteria (like experience, tenure etc).
So it's a huge thing we're going through in my company now. Last week lay offs were announced, and by end of this week everyone will have been evaluated against the remaining positions.
Funny, probably have no communication between these departments either, the people hiring them think they are excellent and then the ones firing them don't.
But the problem never gets solved because the hiring people just go "I don't know at all why this person got laid off, looks great on paper! Let's re-hire them."
It is really surprising how Pebble hit almost all the right spots [ form factor, multi-day battery, screen readability, standard watch strap, hardware buttons, SDK ]. Sure there is room for improvement but we've now seen three big tech companies ( Sony, Samsung and Qualcomm) bringing in smartwatches and none of them got close to Pebble.
[1] https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/search?rt=profe...